Drive through Townes Van Zandt's Raton Pass

Raton Pass is a mountain crossing on Interstate 25 that straddles the border between southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, climbing to around 7,800 feet. It's a dramatic stretch of road — the plains suddenly giving way to steep, pine-covered slopes — and for travellers heading south from Trinidad, Colorado into Raton, New Mexico, it's the moment the landscape shifts entirely. Townes Van Zandt knew this road well, and it lodged itself in his songwriting.

"Snowin' on Raton" is the song he wrote about it — a quiet, aching piece that uses the pass as a metaphor for the wanderer who can never stay put, no matter how much it costs him to leave. Van Zandt spent parts of his childhood in Boulder, Colorado, and returned to the state often as an adult. The geography of the high plains and the Rockies runs through a thread of his work, and Raton Pass is one of its most vivid expressions.

The pass itself is still there, still driven by thousands of people each week on I-25, most of them unaware of the song. There's no marker for Van Zandt — just the road, the elevation, and the same snow that inspired the song still falling in winter across the same switchbacks he once described.