Here are the unforgettable adventures you can experience. There are activities you can pursue for a day, a week, or a month. Whatever your inclination may be, the pay-off is in the remarkable regenerative power of a classic river trip, a cattle drive, an Indian ceremony, or an archaeological dig. New Mexico offers thousands of miles of maintained trails for you to hike, bike, and ride on horseback. If you're a water-lover, a river trip might lure you into a canoe, kayak, or whitewater raft. You can fly-fish for trout or troll for stripers. There are evocative back roads for you to explore by jeep and mammoth vistas to gaze upon from a glider or the gondola of a hot-air balloon. You can visit historic and modern Indian and cowboy sites. You can ski in the winter, photograph wild flowers in springtime, climb cool mountains in summer, and explore canyons and high desert in fall, when mornings and evenings are cool, days warm, and changing leaves enhance the countryside with a radiant glow.

New Mexico is as much a cultural experience as it is a great place to hike, bike, ski or fish. New Mexico has a higher percentage of Indian and Hispanic residents than any other state - roughly 45% - and the influence of both groups is strikingly evident in terms of place names, art and architecture, foods and customs. One could make a pretty good case for New Mexico being the most “foreign” of all states. The state's tri-culturalism is quite simply older than in the rest of the country. The Spanish explorer Coronado was combing New Mexico in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola in 1540 - 192 years before the birth of George Washington and nearly seven decades before the English laid the foundations of Jamestown in 1607. This guide focusses on the North-Central part of New Mexico, which is the region of the Rocky Mountains. Cimarron, Angel Fire, Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Taos, Albuquerque -these are some of the areas covered here.