Nambé Is Mile Zero on the High Road Art Tour, Not the Tour Itself

The parking lot at the Nambé Trading Post is still empty at 10:15 on a late-September Saturday morning, fifteen minutes before the log building opens for the day. A few miles south, tourists are just leaving Santa Fe for what their map calls the High Road to Taos. They will pass this exact spot within the hour, treat it as their first stop, spend the recommended hour inside looking at Cathy Smith's Western movie costumes and the wall of Navajo weavings, and then keep driving north for another forty-five minutes before the tour actually gets going.

If you live in the Nambé area, you have probably absorbed the same assumption everyone else does: the High Road Art Tour is your neighborhood's autumn art event. It isn't, not really. Nambé is where the tour starts. The tour itself lives up the road.

Milepost Zero Isn't the Same as the Tour

The High Road Art Tour runs over the last two full weekends of September, which this year lands on September 19 and 20, then September 26 and 27. The route strings together more than forty stops between Nambé, Chimayó, Truchas, Peñasco, and Sipapu, following the High Road to Taos Scenic Byway through the Sangre de Cristo foothills.

Exactly one of those stops sits in Nambé: the Trading Post itself. Everything else, the working studios in Truchas, the community center exhibits in Peñasco, the leatherwork and tinwork and pottery that make up the bulk of the tour map, sits a solid forty-minute drive north through Chimayó. The tour's own materials call the Trading Post the trip's first iconic stop, and that phrasing is accurate in a way that matters for logistics: it is the entry point, not the destination.

That distinction changes how a resident should actually spend a September Saturday. Treating the tour as a Nambé event means driving up expecting a full day of gallery-hopping in your own backyard. Treating it accurately means recognizing the Trading Post is a quick, worthwhile detour, about twenty minutes north of the Plaza, and that the real tour experience, the one with dozens of open studios and a full afternoon of browsing, requires committing to the drive up through Chimayó and beyond.

There is a second calendar worth knowing about too, because it uses similar language and confuses people every year. The Dixon Studio Tour, established in 1982 and still the longest continuously running artists' tour in the state, happens the first weekend of November, roughly forty-five minutes north of Nambé along NM-75. It is a separate event from the September High Road tour, with its own rhythm: Vivac Winery pours as a regular stop, and the local school hosts the Mercado, where home-grown and homemade products from the community fill the public school grounds alongside the artwork. If your calendar has "High Road art tour" written once in September and you show up in November expecting the same thing, you'll find a genuinely different weekend, just as worth the drive.

A Quiet Season Next Door

There's a third arts calendar in the immediate area, and by late September it has already closed for the year. The Poeh Cultural Center in Pojoaque, the tribally operated institution that preserves Tewa culture for Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, San Juan, Santa Clara, Tesuque, and Nambé, runs its own major event, the Pathways Indigenous Arts Festival, at Buffalo Thunder Resort in mid-August. That festival is finished by the time the High Road tour opens its studio doors. So if you're expecting arts energy at Poeh Center to build alongside the September tour weekends, it won't. Its season peaked a month earlier and the next major public draw, the Poeh Winter Market, doesn't arrive until later in the year. Knowing this saves you a wasted stop.

What's Actually Open This Weekend

Tour weekends also happen to overlap with the operating window for Nambé Falls and Lake Recreation Area, which is worth building into the day if you want to cool off between stops. The recreation area, managed by Nambé Pueblo, runs Thursday through Sunday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., closed Monday through Wednesday. Entry is cash only, and reported fees vary by visitor, anywhere from $10 to $20 per vehicle depending on the day and what you're there to do.

Once inside, two short trails lead from the ramada area to the falls. The upper trail is dry and rocky, climbing to an overlook above the falls. The lower trail follows the creek through a narrow canyon to the lowest pool, and it will get you wet, sometimes knee-deep, so water shoes help more than they sound like they should.

A few practical notes worth keeping in your back pocket for tour weekends:

• The recreation area's Thursday-through-Sunday schedule means a Monday or Tuesday drive up the High Road will not include a stop at the falls, regardless of what the tour calendar says.
• Bring cash. The entrance fee is not set up for cards.
• The lower trail requires a stream crossing. If you're bringing kids or don't want wet shoes for the rest of the day, the upper overlook trail is the better call.

If you only have one hour this weekend, spend it at the Trading Post before ten, not after. The lot fills in fast once the day-trippers from Santa Fe arrive.

The Dinner Landing Spot

However you spend the afternoon, Chimayó itself becomes the natural stopping point by evening, and Rancho de Chimayó has been the anchor for longer than most other businesses on the route have existed. Florence and Arturo Jaramillo opened the restaurant in 1965 in a restored family adobe, and 2026 marks the Jaramillo family's 61st year running it. The restaurant holds a James Beard America's Classics recognition, the kind of honor that doesn't get handed out for novelty. The dining rooms sit inside a century-old hacienda with whitewashed walls and hand-stripped vigas, and in warmer months the terraced patio, shaded by catalpa trees, is the better seat. Breakfast is served weekends only, which matters if you're timing a Saturday morning start before heading up to the tour.

One timing advantage locals have that out-of-town visitors don't: Nambé residents can approach Chimayó from the south on a lighter stretch of the byway, while most tour traffic backs up coming from the Santa Fe side earlier in the day. Arriving for a mid-afternoon or early-evening table often means a shorter wait than the guidebooks suggest.

Reading the Road Correctly

None of this changes what makes living in the Nambé area worthwhile day to day. It just means the September calendar deserves a more accurate read than "the art tour is happening near me." It's happening near you in the sense that your address is the first line on the map. The substance of it, the fifty-mile stretch of open studios and family-run galleries, lives north, and the smart move is to decide up front whether you're making the quick Trading Post stop on your way to somewhere else or committing to the full day trip through Chimayó and Truchas.

Either way, the falls are open Thursday through Sunday if you want to cool off, the Mercado and Vivac Winery are worth circling in November instead of September, and Rancho de Chimayó will be there when you're ready for dinner, the way it has been for 61 years.

If you're weighing what it actually means to live somewhere the High Road starts, rather than passes through, Bunny Terry knows this stretch of Santa Fe's north country the way a neighbor does. Start your Santa Fe story with a conversation about the Nambé area, the High Road corridor, or wherever your own map begins.