For a century, Taos has been an art center. In 1898, the artists Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips embarked on a sketching trip from Denver, with a tip from a fellow artist — Joseph Henry Sharp — about the Taos magic. When a wagon wheel broke 30 miles north of town, Blumenschein lost the coin toss to head in on horseback and have it repaired. He thus took his first view of Taos valley, rapt with the otherworldly light, later co-founding the Taos Society of Artists. The town’s since been a draw for the cultural elite (Georgia O’Keefe, DH Lawrence, Ansel Adams, etc.).

In the 1960s and ‘70s, the hippies arrived. If you’ve seen Easy Rider, then you might remember that the film’s commune was inspired by the New Buffalo “Back to the Land” Commune in Arroyo Hondo, seven miles north of town (and in the same canyon housing Taos’ venerable John’s Wall and the newer Foley areas The Solar Asylum and The New Buff Wall.) A few Taos landmarks — hot springs, the pueblo, and the jail’s interior — appear in the flick. Founded in 1967, New Buffalo was New Mexico’s first hippie commune and endured through the 1980s, its members surviving on organic agriculture, free love, Peyote ceremonies, and handcrafts, though also raising the locals’ ire as “freak people.” From 1992 to 2004, one of New Buffalo’s founders, Rick Klein, and his wife ran a bed and breakfast here. (“This place is historic,” Klein said in the book Taos: landmarks & legends. “It’s where the hippies met the Indians.”) Klein’s son Joaquin was once a first-ascent, climbing, and guiding partner of Foley’s, and a close friend of the family.

So that’s the Taos blend — Native Americans, Anglos, Hispanics, hippies, artists, freaks, dropouts — all in a little city surrounded by world-class mountain biking, skiing, river running, fishing, and rock climbing. Taos is said to be one of the world’s “energy centers”: like Sedona, Arizona, or Machu Picchu, Peru, possessing a spiritual pulse. There’s even the “Taos Hum,” a low-frequency (30-80 Hz) sound of unknown origin that’s been likened to the idling of a distant diesel engine. (A mid-1990s study of 1,400 Taoseños revealed that 161 heard the hum, translating to roughly two percent of the population.)

And in the mix, climbers — really on a handful — but a tight-knit, open, hard-working, and understated group of New Mexicans who’ve quietly turned the area into one of the Four Corners’ major destinations.

Taos you either love or hate. It’s one of those rough-around-the edges New Mexico towns that either grabs your heart or sends you screaming for the exit, away from the raw desert, the oddball people, the silent peaks, the blinding sun. It’s a place you’re either born into or stumble upon. Folks who come here hoping to reinvent themselves in a utopian artist’s vision often bail — it’s as if, as the locals say, “The mountain asks you to leave.”

Like many a transplant, the “Mad Bolter” (more later) Bruce Holthouse — now 61 and probably the name most associated with the bullet-hard granite domes of Tres Piedras — came by accident. A So Cal native, Holthouse in 1970 was finishing college at Western State College, in Gunnison, Colorado. En route back to school from California, he picked up two Taos-bound hitchhikers. Driving State Road 68, Holthouse and his passengers crested the final rise west of the city and took in the expansive view of town, the Sangres, and the gorge.

“I really felt the curvature of the Earth,” says Holthouse. “And I realized coming from a city, from Southern California, ‘Oh, we’re on a planet.’”

In 1973, Holthouse two years out of college and uncertain what to do with his life, headed solo into California’s Mojave Desert, plunked down his tent, drew a circle in the sand, and forced himself not to breach it until he had an answer. “It was hard to sit there … and not do anything but just sit and stare,” says Holthouse. But after three days, it came to him: he’d move to a mountain town and get a job ski patrolling — why not Taos?

Hippied-out, with a “long beard and long, shaggy hair,” Holthouse rolled in, walked up to Ernie Blake, the founder of Taos Ski Valley, and asked for a job — “I want to work here,” said Holthouse. “I might be here for my whole life. I can ski the mountain. I’m sure I can ski it as good as anyone…I’ll work for a week for nothing.” Blake, a no-bullshit Geman expat who’d assisted General George Patton’s Third Army during WWII, tracking down and interrogating Third Reich officers in alpine Bavaria, looked Holthouse over and said, “You don’t look very good but you sound pretty good. I think I’ll give you a job.” Holthouse patrolled the valley for 10 years before working as an outdoor educator, and then as a contractor another 25. Along the way, he met and learned to climb from the reclusive Mike Roybal, New Mexico’s top dog in the 1970s. (In 1974, Roybal climbed the state’s first 5.12, The Nose, at The Y near White Rock.) The two worked together from 1983 until 2008, mostly in construction. It was with Roybal and Peter Prandoni that Holthouse first visited Tres Piedras.