REVITALIZING RATON
Moss Adventures – Raton, NM
Raton Adventure Centre – Raton, NM
Bartlett Mesa rises nearly 2,000 feet above the northern New Mexico town of Raton, hard-edged against the harrowing pass that shares the name and separates the state from Colorado. A pleasant, wide-open meadow gives way to cracked basalt with gaping chasms wide enough to swallow unwary animals. The view stretches across a vast floor studded with volcanic plugs, prominent among them sits the Capulin Volcano, a cinder cone that blew some 60,000 years ago. High atop this mesa that sits 8,888 feet above sea level, Jeff Moss and Shayne Young ruminate about the possibilities it offers.
The two men, along with Young’s wife, Sandra Young, own and operate Moss Adventures and the Raton Adventure Centre. Moss – whose father, Bill Moss, created the first pop-up tents that helped make camping out an any-family pastime – has turned over the operation to the Youngs while he focuses his energies on Moss and other enterprises overseas. They still share a vision, however, of a bustling expedition business headquartered in Raton that introduces visitors to not only the vast and empty spaces within the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field, but also the incredible adventures that await intrepid explorers willing to delve into the rugged backwoods of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Bartlett Mesa is a mere stepping stone in the plans, but an important one, Shayne says. Here, the company sees the potential for quick, overnight excursions featuring a down-home meal cooked over an open campfire, camping atop the company’s trademark dayglo-orange Land Rovers complete with rooftop tents and comfy sleeping pads, and a night examining the starlight vistas above in a celestial extravaganza.
“We’re currently working with the Nature Conservancy to see about having dark sky weekends on the top part and that makes it really cool,” he says. “So what we’ll be doing is supplying the vehicles and sleeping quarters and everything for them up there as well as providing telescopes and a dark skies expert on every trip.”
SWITCHING GEARS
The original business plan called for using Raton as a hub for expeditions across the country, and even the world, Shayne says. But upon getting a chance to really delve into the local area, the partners realized that wasn’t necessary, at least not right away.
“We saw that there are so many possibilities and so much in this immediate area that we started to focus a little bit more on the nucleus of Colfax County, northern New Mexico, southern Colorado area,” he says. “So we put the national side on the backburner a little bit while we developed the platform and the locations here in New Mexico.”
There are actually so many different recreational opportunities nearby, one could spend a lifetime simply trying to experience all that the area offers, Shayne says. “We want to have expeditions where we go out fly fishing. That way you can get up and at the break of dawn, hit your favorite spot,” he says. “And because you’re camping there already, you’ve already got everything set up and you catch fish and cook it for breakfast or in the afternoon cook it for dinner.”
As far as guides, “depending on the amount of customers on the trip, for the most part it is going to be one guide or employee per three to four clients, whether that be a professional driver or a fly fishing guide. Every expedition or every trip will be different or will have a different need for guides or drivers depending on what it is that we’re mainly focusing on. Naturally, something like fly fishing, we’ll have a couple of fly fishing guides and not too many off-road drivers because most of these places will be about being at the location comfortably overnight or multi-night, and we’ll have fly fishing guides and teachers for the whole experience.”
Shutterbugs will have their opportunity to not only improve their craft but score the shots of a lifetime through specially designed outings.
“Same with wildlife photography, we’re going to have trips just for photography,” Shayne says. “So we’ll have a professional photographer along and those will be small groups. So everybody gets the individual classes, focus, with a real small client ratio. And we’re going to have gourmet cooking on the trail; not by me. I do regular cooking on the trail that is not terrible, but we even have professional campfire cooks that will come on the trips. That’s the whole point. If you’re going to be a backcountry cook, you got to be in the back country to do it.”
There are even easy day trips that can be beautiful mini-adventures, he says, that will spotlight the terrain of northern New Mexico.
“We have such unique topography with the high mesas and the high desert,” he says. “We recently discovered a local area called Mills Canyon (south of Raton). I do want to run a couple of trips out there. That’s an untapped resource. Absolutely beautiful. And we will be running some trips down around Cimarron, the dry lake bed, Capulin Volcano. We’re also waiting for the final paperwork on the Bartlett Mesa thing to be done, as well.”
CREATING SOMETHING FROM NOTHING
Raton is a hard-scrabble town that was originally a local mining and ranch center serviced by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. It remains a stop on the Chicago-Los Angeles rail line, with a spur that connects it more than 200 miles south to Albuquerque. That makes it uniquely suited to travel on a budget, Shayne says, as Raton becomes accessible for a fraction of the cost via train than plane.
“If they haven’t been on a train before, that adds to the whole adventure experience,” he says. “They come up here. We can have them up to Sugarite Canyon State Park, where we’re actually in the last throes of doing a concessionaire agreement for up there. I have kayaks, fishing kayaks, canoes, all of the camping equipment if they wanted to rent a tent. We have sleeping bags available. Camp cots, pretty much everything so you can jump off the train here and go camp.”
One of the services Moss Adventures also will provide is transportation to and from local trailheads so backpackers or even day hikers do not have to worry about their vehicles. The Youngs also will lend their growing local knowledge of the area for adventurers wanting some advice on where to head and what might be waiting out there.
And that also dovetails with plans for the versatile Raton Adventure Centre. The main, 2,000-square-foot retail space already houses a variety of essential outdoor gear for folks who might have forgotten that special something, be it food, first aid items, or even socks.
“There are so many versions of how people adventure,” says Sandra, who is running the shop. “I want this to be a very tactile, fun experience when you come into the store. Whether you buy something or not is irrelevant. It’s not to my bottom line. But I just want this to be an amazing place to have fun and go shopping. When I was a little kid, I had a favorite store that we all snuck over to and it was for penny candy. The candy was all displayed in these big old farm troughs and you stood there with your little bag and you picked whatever your favorites were. That’s basically the concept I’m going for here. So if I have a first aid section, you’ve got your first aid bags, and then everything you could want to put in for whatever your travel or adventure lifestyle is. You’re picking your little pieces of penny candy and building your own kit. I want to do the same thing for spices, coffees, and teas and provisioning when you’re out having an adventure. So just really make it a fun experience, not just grabbing something all prepackaged off the shelf.”
But that’s just the start of the plans for the building, which was built in 1906 as a Coors Brewery warehouse, distribution center, and cold storage building. The three-story space has had a colorful history over the years, including as a bar and road house, dance hall, and, with nine bedrooms upstairs, a brothel, boarding house, and even employee housing. Santa Claus may even have stopped in somewhere along the line.
“For several years, the city had a local Christmas display in here. So it was a completely huge, homemade, miniature Christmas Village,” Sandra says with a twinkle in her eye. “And every year during the Christmas parade, this opened up as a museum and some local volunteer staff did it all. And it was all lit up and cute. And you could walk around it. And it was a big attraction that was called Winter Wonderland.”
Moss Adventures took it over in 2023 as a Metropolitan Redevelopment Project with an extremely favorable lease under a program designed toward rehabilitation and development of vacant or abandoned sites. When the Youngs took it over, the city of Raton was using it as a storehouse and it was packed full of all manner of items ranging from overhead projectors to old museum displays.
“We don’t have a big overhead on the lease, which allows me to put that money directly into the building itself and to actually establish the business so I can build out my inventory and my adventure store,”
Sandra says, “I can build our hostel-style bunkhouse upstairs; we’re having hostel accommodations upstairs. And I can actually spend the money on developing the businesses instead of rent, which is fabulous. Yeah, great partnership.” But wait, there’s more.
“We’re going to have something called the Kangaroo Café in the very back of the store,” she explains. “We’re going to have grab-and-go style food, and it’s gonna be a lot of different international things. Australian meat pie, South African, a little bit like Cornish pasties, a little bit of British food in there. We also love Cuban empanadas and pastries and croquettes and Jamaican patties, and some soups and stews that we can do in a lower-level kitchen. So, very much street foods that we would find as we traveled and that we fell in love with is what our goal is for our little kitchen in the back.”
And in a town with relatively few dining options, this already has residents buzzing. “The locals are actually very excited about that. There have been several people that love the camping stuff, but for the locals, that’s going to be key,” Sandra says of the café.
BOOSTING THE LOCAL ECONOMY
While Raton has seen far better days, as the population has shriveled to about 6,000 residents, down 16 percent since 2000, city officials are aggressively trying to reverse the trend. Still, boarded-up storefronts nearly equal the open businesses in the rustic downtown. Vacant schools simply do not have enough students to remain open. The Raton Range newspaper printed its last edition more than a decade ago.
Yet, the Youngs – who are decided outsiders as Shayne hails from Australia and Sandra from New England – see Raton and its surrounding countryside as an untapped area with potential as large as the nearby mountains.
“We feel like the ‘Field of Dreams,’ if you build it, they will come,” Sandra says. “It’s true. We opened our doors and on the slowest day in town, I get several people from out of town at least window shopping. They’re excited to see something open. It’s a good stopping place.”
But awareness is building, and with that comes growth, she says, growth that will benefit all the businesses in town, and hopefully encourage more enterprises to follow suit. The city already is in the process of converting one of the vacant schools into a post-production site to serve the state’s booming film industry. And the Youngs plan to call on their vast network of contacts to visit the area.
“My husband and I have been involved in the overland community for decades. And we have a lot of people looking forward to stopping over here. And they don’t know at this point what’s available here for our trail systems and outdoor recreation,” Sandra says. “It’s one of those places people pass through because we don’t have a big presence of either a national forest, and our state park has very limited advertising. Even our highway sign you can’t even read. So you would drive right through this area and not even know that we have lakes and canyons and trails and all sorts of wonderful things here. It’s amazing. The Whittington Center (the National Rifle Association’s massive shooting range and facility southwest of Raton) is a boon to us. Vermejo (one of Ted Turner’s Reserves, also southwest of Raton) puts us on the map. And of course, Philmont Scout Ranch. I’m going to be relying heavily on Philmont for the exodus traffic when the kids leave town, and they’re waiting for the train. Luckily, I’ll have 6,000 to 8,000 built-in customers.”
MANAGING THE RESOURCES
While the Youngs look to use the bounty of the local area to help be an economic driver, it is also prudent to educate visitors about how to be responsible in the wild and impress upon them the importance of maintaining the land properly.
“For me, it’s being so comfortable in a place that you thought was going to be uncomfortable or you didn’t feel safe in; it’s when they all of a sudden realize that they’re part of a bigger ecosystem or environment that they never thought they’d be happy in,” Sandra says. “And those people, if they formed that connection, then in my mind they permanently become a steward of the land. So they now have an interest and an understanding of why it’s so important to maintain and make sure that future generations are able to join in and enjoy that same hunk of forest and kind of spread those ripples.
“I mean, you don’t realize how much open land and non-populated land that we have. It’s tremendous. And it’s sad that a lot of people don’t feel comfortable in that environment. Once they do, hopefully, they have the same passion to explore more places, and to see that those places are preserved.”
Photos by Roberto E. Rosales Photography Editorial by Glen Rosales
Moss Adventures – Raton, NM
Raton Adventure Centre – Raton, NM