A ‘milagro’: The Blake Hotel and plaza at Taos Ski Valley
Bravo to all who had anything to do with the new Blake Hotel and plaza in Taos Ski Valley. I believe that Ernie [Blake] would be hugely proud.
The mountain is proud and happy with all the new changes, and one can sense it and feel it in their souls when they stand in the plaza. The happy, comfortable feelings The Blake and the whole plaza give off will penetrate and permeate all that take it in. Like the smell of a pinion fire, there is something special and different and exciting happening here. The Blake itself is exquisitely done. Such care was given to details and to the environment that it would be an honor to have it anywhere in the world. I have had the great good fortune to live and ski in some of the nicest ski towns in Europe and in America, and The Blake Hotel is equal or better in quality, design, innovations and environmental caring.
Taos Ski Valley is going green. The building is heated with geothermal water and the rooms have sensors that will save on heating. The plaza, most walkways and some roads are heated with geothermal means for snow removal. The Blake is doing everything it can to conserve water and there is much more that Taos Ski Valley is doing to be verde.
I’m told The Blake will have an art collection that will add prestige to the status of Taos’ long and proud history as an outstanding art community. I ask all of you who have been here all your lives to come and feel the feel. There is a real specialness and an honest feeling of comfort in the way the the Blake Hotel and plaza feel peaceful. It’s truly a milagro that it all has settled so unobtrusively and comfortably in the Twining Valley. It makes TSV feel like a first class ski resort without losing what it is.
It’s a daunting task to make something that big, that dramatic fit into a small valley like Twining. It takes an incredible designer and masterful architects and builders with vision and guts and an owner who has a dream and can make dreams happen. To have the whole thing come off so well is “great spiritual luck.” The plaza is so welcoming and all inclusive, it honestly feels as though the mountain has been waiting for this for a long time. After all, Ernie dreamed of this type of a resort but there was only so much he could do.
Having grown up in Taos, I have had the good luck to watch TSV grow from its beginnings. I have seen all the changes over the years and had the great honor to sit many times at Ernie and Rhoda’s dining room table and look out the picture window up Snake Dance and Al’s Run. It’s where I recorded Ernie’s thoughts, his life story, and then put it all into a book called “Ski Pioneers.” It was one of the highest honors and one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve done. It’s also why I know pretty much the feelings and experience that Ernie hoped people would have when they visited TSV. I know that he is smiling big.
Recently the new CEO of TSV, Dave Norden, was giving my wife Teri and I a tour of the new hotel. He wanted to show us one more area and opened a door. When we walked through, I was dumbstruck. The picture window was there, the space for the table where we all used to sit was there. The living room was there, Ernie and Rhoda’s bedroom, the kitchen area where Walter Whidmer cooked most meals. The same space where former president Jimmy Carter sat with Ernie so many years ago was there. It was mind blowing. It is nearly identical to Ernie and Rhoda’s old apartment.
We went out on the balcony and Ernie’s ghost was there. I could hear and feel him coming up the stairs and around the corner, standing right next to me on the balcony, yelling in his Swiss/German accent, “Get the skies off the fences,” “Who is cluttering my mountain?” Then he brushed by me and went in and sat at the table, looked up past the St. Bernard, at Snake Dance and Al’s Run and smiled big. He looked so proud and happy and satisfied with the new feeling his ski area has.
Richards is the author of “Ski Pioneers: Ernie Blake, his Friends and the Making of Taos Ski Valley.”
