Facts are facts and fact is Lester Lewis was president of the Chamber of Commerce in 1980. Lester had heard that the Gold Wing motorcycle rally down in Ruidoso was a real nice profitable event for the town and decided to look into it.
To this day there are people who dislike the rally and blame Lester for starting it. He not only doesn't deny starting the rally, but revels in shaking the town up. He also claims credit for the now extinct but much loved mud-bogs...

First, Lester got in touch with the local authorities in Ruidoso to see if the bikers were any trouble. The answer was that the police had never had an incident above a misdemeanor and the bikers spent money...loads of it. Next, he got in touch with the local chapter of Wingers to see if they’d like to have a get together in Red River.

The records show that he talked the town council into having the first official rally in Red River in the spring of 1981. Approximately forty Gold Wingers showed up that first year. Main Street was blocked off in front of Texas Red's for motorcycle games like jousting at washers with pool cues for $1, the Weenie bite for $1, or the plank and slow races for a buck each. They ate, drank and enjoyed the mountain air.

The first year came and went without incident and the same could be said about the next two years that Lester was involved with it. The second year, 1982, about seventy Gold Wingers showed up for games camping and riding. Wholesome enough…

The third year, 1983, was the last year Lester was in charge and the town council decided to move it over to High Street. Problem was there was nothing back on High street then. It was a hike for food, drink, restrooms...anything. Also that year Vinny Taranova, owner of Rocky Mountain Harley-Davidson in Colorado, showed up on a Harley with some riding buddies….
Problem was the Wingers were feeling kind of un-appreciated and pushed out to the edge of town, while the Harley riders just went straight to Kate & Gary’s bar and hung out for the weekend getting drunk and loud…

In 1984 fewer Gold Wingers showed up than the year before for events off Main Street, but Harley riders and Outlaw clubs, or 1%ers, heard that there was little law enforcement and lots of fun to be had in Red and they came to party by the hundreds... Many locals have interesting and colorful stories of the wild days from 1985 to about 1995 when the bikers themselves started changing.

The most notorious of the stories about the old days was the story of some bad-bikers beating up some Questa locals, only to have the locals retaliate later at the biker’s campground with pick-up trucks and guns, running the bikers out of town. The bikers shouted and swore to come back and burn Questa to the ground…

Then there was the year they decided to put up cattle panels from the corner of Kate & Gary’s and The Motherlode to the end of town in hopes of controlling bikers, but instead created a deadly Main Street drag-strip…

In 1997 Easyriders magazine sent biker/photographer/writer, Stan Miles, to cover the rally with a story that appeared in the April 1998 issue #298. That article let the motorcycling world know that Northern New Mexico had beautiful weather, world class riding and a cozy little motorcycle rally of 2000-3000 close friends partying and riding in the mountains on Memorial Day Weekend…

1998 brought Easyriders, Stan and about twice as many bikers as the previous year back for another dose of partying and riding in and around Red River, NM. This year the rally would have articles in Easyriders, V-twin and BIKER magazines with additional photos appearing in In The Wind magazine.

1999 saw the rally grow again with estimates as high as 7000-8000 people. Stan Miles showed up again with the Easyriders video and magazine team and BIKER Magazine cover girl “Natasha Blake”, looking for more biker misadventure to report on...
The Mother Lode Bar, Jack Daniels and Budweiser sponsored the first Red River Rally ride-in bike show, held curbside in front of The Lodge and Motherlode bar.

Blues sensation Otis Watkins was brought in from Oklahoma City by Steve Heglund and Mark Drummond to headline at The Motherlode, marking a milestone in the Rally’s history, the importation of entertainment from out of state. This was the third consecutive year of international press coverage and this year the rally made it into an Easyriders video...

The year 2000 brought Stan Miles & the lovely redhead back. The magazines were back. The Otis Watkins Band was back and Bikers, Bikers, Bikers… Thousands of them. Some say more than ten-fuckin'-thousand and they brought thunder to the mountains….

2001 saw more growth...sidesplitting growth, more articles in more magazines and the traveling Camel Roadhouse tour. The rally swelled to an estimated fifteen thousand bikers, selling out all of Red River’s rooms and campgrounds. Some bikers had chosen to stay in Eagle Nest, Angel Fire, Taos or Questa before for one reason or another, but this was the first time people were forced to seek accommodations outside of Red River.

The town government, realizing that not everyone was going to fit into the bars over the weekend and wanting to spread the rally more evenly around town, started organizing events in Brandenburg Park to give the bikers something to do mid-town that involved more than just drinking. Games, raffles, vendors, music and motorcycle demos were added to daytime activities…

2002 brought the largest crowds to date to the rally. Guestimated at over 25,000 beer drinkin', food eatin', souvenir buyin’, gasoline burnin’, room and campground rentin’, upper-middle income consumin' everything in their path swarm of biker types and everything that comes with them… The Main Street Bike Show drew some incredible iron out of the mountains and Otis Watkins and "The Damn Band" rocked us all weekend long.

Taos and Eagle Nest had planned activities for the overflow and were near capacity. Restaurants, gas stations and motels around the Enchanted Circle were nearly full the whole weekend.

2003 brought with it cooler temperatures, scattered showers and a muted crowd of fifteen to nineteen thousand die-hard motorcycle fans doing what bikers do best. They hunkered down and partied, indoors whenever possible…except for the first organized Wet-T-shirt contest at the rally in years, it was nice and nipply out...
Hey, the bars were packed, it was a great party and all the bro's were there…