“What about going to the top!”

“I’m no zealot,” he replied. We laughed at him, then stepped into our skis and dove into a couloir called K2. The run was firm and chalky — and busy. Snowboarders stranded in the hourglass couloirs plugged the tight spots like corks. The new summit lift had opened a few days previous, and was already such a hit that the peak’s mogul-covered face looked as though it had the mumps. Matt and John sighed but seemed resigned. John tried to see the bright side. Now there was even more terrain for experts like him, he said.

We took the new lift and stood on the mountaintop. There, Matt checked off the names of mountains I had never heard of: Truchas, Jemez, Culebras, 14,000-foot Blanca Peak in Colorado, Spanish Peaks (also in Colorado). And everywhere, Matt shouted greetings to people he knew. Everybody knows everybody here. He said hi to Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico who is a die-hard skier and who has a house in the area. “I joke and say that it’s not a season pass, it’s a membership card,” Matt told me on the lift. “It’s like a working-class country club. It’s not snooty. The locals are here, working hard, because they love to ski.”

It doesn’t take long to feel the pull of this place, a Southwestern mellowness that balances the adrenal-squeeze of its skiing. Another writer once called it the Tao of Taos. This place feels like a throwback to an earlier, simpler time, when overeducated ski devotees searched for just the right place in the mountains, until they found themselves surrounded by like-minded people at the end of a snowy, dead-end canyon, and put their Ph.D. degrees to work washing dishes. And they never left. Today more than 125 employees have worked at Taos Ski Valley for at least 20 years. Later, on the lift, when I asked a guy if he’d been here a long time, he replied, “Eighteen years. So some would say yes, some would say no. …”

From the mountaintop, somebody smelled a barbecue. We barreled to the valley and skied right into a classic Taos scene: the sunny half-acre of the St. Bernard lodge’s big deck, packed with skiers eating what everybody there always eats — the green chile cheeseburger, covered with blue cheese and pickles. Call it Prilosec on a bun. (If you’re looking for a lunch that comes with an arugula garnish, skier, pass by.) Behind the spatula is another Taos notable, Jean Mayer, 80 and chestnut brown from his decades in the sun. He started both the St. Bernard and Taos’s ski school, which has often been called the country’s best.

This isn’t to say that Taos doesn’t need some help. While some of Blake’s contrarian impulses made this place special, others didn’t necessarily serve the resort well in the 21st century. Blake, and his family, who took over after his death, were debt averse. Their primary investment was in the mountain, not the base area. The family never built lodging. They also banned snowboarding from the slopes until 2008. “With the highest regard to the Blake family and the previous ownership, we’d stalled out a bit,” said Gordon Briner, the chief executive. “We hadn’t put in a major ski lift in more than 20 years. We haven’t built a major building in the base area in over 20 years.” As a result, he said, “We’ve lost people. I don’t think we’ve driven them away, but I think other resorts have done a good job of making themselves attractive.”