Every year, thousands of tourists with open pocketbooks flock to Santa Fe for its multiple culture festivals, opera shows and art galleries.

The City Different consistently tops lists as one of the country’s best destinations for food, wine and culture. In 2011, Condé Nast named Santa Fe the third best place to visit in the United States. This year, the city was chosen over Lake Tahoe and others to host the International Mountain Biking World Summit, a highlight Mayor David Coss emphasized in his annual State of the City address this past fall.

“This is a great place for active, outdoor vacations,” Coss said in the October speech, “for nature and environmentally friendly travel; for food, wine, spas, wellness, art, culture and history.”

On a late June afternoon, 18 mile-per-hour winds whistle across an open meadow on a small piece of private land in the Jemez Mountains. In the saddle between two pine-covered ridges at the edge of the property, an aspen tree teeters over onto the bare wire of an electrical pole, causing a spark. Over the next 14 hours, the resulting fire burns 43,000 acres, or one acre every 1.17 seconds. It devours areas the size of a football field in (literally) two seconds. In a little over a month, it has spread through 156,000 acres and incinerated 63 homes.

It’s not easy to summarize an entire year in 10 abbreviated news stories.


Or is it?

If a tree falls in the woods, is it a catastrophe? On June 26, it was.

As the possible groundbreaking for construction on Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium pit manufacturing facility draws nearer, the past year has seen countless threats to the controversial project.

It’s been a turbulent 2011 for Santa Fe Public Schools, between the controversial extension of the superintendent’s contract and poor student achievement results. Here’s a look at the numbers that point to the need for reform and an update on related issues.

Jerome Block Jr. packed the headlines all summer and fall before his work as a Public Regulation commissioner came to a highly scrutinized end.

Journalists sometimes find it difficult to talk about Occupy. And yet Occupy, for many of us, demands our attention. On Sept. 17, a swarm of protesters descended on New York City’s Zuccotti Park. There they stayed.

Count on a renewed debate over driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants this January. Gov. Susana Martinez has vowed to bring up the issue a third time, despite facing the same Legislature that didn’t alter the law during her last two attempts.

In New Mexico, the once-a-decade exercise of redistricting—redrawing the boundaries of the state’s political districts—is giving lawmakers and political junkies a dose of déjà vu.