Sometimes we may lose sight of what we are attempting to do collectively on our public lands. Why did hundreds of people work so hard to establish the Valles Caldera National Preserve and then have it managed by the National Park Service? What was the point? And what is the promise of this place? Why is it different from lands across the boundary fences?
The National Park Service manages many of America’s most important and ecologically valuable places. It is the agency that people turn to when a place or a building needs to be protected for generations. Congress gave management of the Valles Caldera to the NPS because we didn’t want it managed like the national forest land surrounding the Preserve where “multiple use” has degraded the biology, hydrology, and wildlife potential of the land.
What We Want
In the big picture, based on many public meetings held since the federal government bought the Valles Caldera for the American people in 2000, the public has a clear vision of what they want the National Park Service to do at the VCNP. We are also clear on what we don’t want, and the public has made clear, with little dissent, what it does want.
We don’t want trash on the landscape, or vehicles driving wherever they want. We don’t want snowmobiles polluting the streams and we don’t want the land flooded with cows ruining the streams, destroying plant communities, and covering the land with manure. We don’t want free-for-all camping in every nook and cranny of the landscape.
We do want public access, with cars having some roads, plenty of trails for skiing, walking, horse riding, and bicycles. Quiet is the key here.
We told the government we wanted a quality education program for kids and adults and interesting panels that explain the wide range of fascinating facts about this landscape. From Native history, to volcanos, elk, fire and grass, this place offers park staff, tour guides, teachers, and scientists many lifetimes of topics to explore.
We do want an island of land rich with wildlife – a whole range of wildlife from elk and deer to tiny mice and insects need forests and meadows untrampled and grazed only by native animals. We want a place where predators can be part of the web of life without being killed by commercial operators. Coyotes and bears, mountain lions, bobcat, badger and maybe someday wolves need a place to be free and to be part of the animal world.
All wildlife depends on healthy meadows and forests. The National Park Service has a mixed record on plant community health at the Caldera so far. On one hand they are working hard to restore conditions where old growth forests can return after being logged when the land was private. Thinning and prescribed fire are setting the stage for a return of the forests of pre-colonial times, but it will take time for this process to stabilize and nurture the Caldera’s forests. The NPS is committed to seeing this process through over the long run.
Grasslands
The meadows and grasslands of the Valles Caldera are where the challenges lie. The NPS, along with the Trust organization that preceded it, along with various nonprofit partners, has been working to arrest the deterioration of grasslands caused by severe overgrazing when the land was the Baca Ranch. Erosion has mostly been stopped, wetlands have been restored, streams have begun to come back from damage caused by sheep and cattle grazing in the past.
The National Park Service staff understands exactly what needs to be done to restore the grasslands of the Valles Caldera. They and the Trust before them have done extensive research on this ecosystem and the resource managers understand what it will take to get the grasslands fully functioning again to nurture the watersheds and wildlife and plant diversity. But their work is being thwarted by politics.
Cattle trespassing from adjacent national forest lands are flooding the Valles Caldera every summer with illegal cattle which are damaging the grasslands and the streams in the Preserve. The NPS closed the Valles Caldera to all cattle grazing except in specific fenced pastures in one area of the Preserve. Yet the US Forest Service has allowed their permittees’ cattle to trespass inside the Preserve and has done nothing to stop this activity.
For its part, the National Park Service has only taken ineffective action against the cattle trespass. They have tolerated the cows, probably thinking that they problem will end in the future when boundary fence management changes. Maybe it will but in the meantime, the ranchers have the message from both the US Forest Service and the NPS that trespass grazing in the Preserve is okay.
The agencies seem unwilling to take strong action to protect the Preserve from trespass cattle for political reasons.
Burned Lands in the Preserve
The Valles Caldera was a land of green forests with relatively low-intensity forest fires up until 2000. That was the year that big, high severity fires began to burn in the Jemez Mountains with increasing frequency.
The Las Conchas Fire of 2011 was the big one. Started by damage to an electrical line, the fire burned a significant portion of the mountains surrounding the Valles Caldera on the east and south side of the Preserve. This was a hot, fast-moving fire that killed tens of thousands of acres of trees inside the Preserve an on Bandelier National Monument and Santa Fe National Forest lands.
Post-fire flooding filled the East Fork of the Jemez River with soil and ash in 2011 and caused large gullies to form in the Preserve. Over time the burned slopes have stabilized, sporting new grass and aspen forests. The Cerro Pelado Fire burned some of the Las Conchas fire scar this summer (2022).
The Thompson Ridge fire of 2013 burned more of the Preserve’s mountains, some at high severity.
These high severity fires are climate change driven events. Now the Park Service faces a challenge of helping the burn scars recover. And their thinning and prescribed fire efforts are aimed at preventing wildfires from burning at high severity in older forests in the future throughout the Preserve.
The Goal
Overall, our goal for the Preserve must be to create and sustain an island of land where natural process dominate the landscape and commercial and human uses have minimal impact. This means letting low severity fire burn frequently over large areas. It means eliminated cattle grazing from most of the Preserve and restoring native wildlife like beaver, prairie dogs, and various predators including perhaps wolves that move down from Colorado someday.
The Preserve is an island in the heavily exploited and degraded Santa Fe National Forest around it. Let’s make sure the Preserve is a refugia for many species that need more places to live on public lands in New Mexico.
The Preserve needs to be a place where the public can experience a wild landscape in recovery, where we can see the land the way it was before the arrival of industrial uses and exotic livestock. It can be a gene pool, and a place where Native people can reestablish their relationship with the land with respect from managers and the public alike.
Taking care of the Preserve is an intergenerational challenge. We need to be nurturing new generations of professional and volunteer conservationists to take over when the generation of people who imagined the VCNP age out. This is a key challenge.
