It Is the second week of December, and my husband, Brooke, and I are lying in bed at Encantado, the year-old Auberge resort just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, feeling like children getting an early Christmas present. 
During the night, a fine layer of fluffy snow has blanketed the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez mountains, adding a magical sparkle to the fifty-seven acre former ranch in the upscale suburb of Tesuque. Not that snow is unheard of here, particularly around the holidays, when temperatures average a crisp forty-five degrees. It’s just that in the thirty years I have been visiting this New Mexican high desert, I’ve rarely seen powder on the swaths of brown sagebrush, nor have I spied a dark cloud hampering those endless turquoise skies…