The Valles Caldera National Preserve in the Jemez Mountains is one of America’s newest national park units. Managed by the National Park Service since 2015, the VCNP is meant to be a highly protected landscape dedicated to watershed and wildlife protection, scientific research and public enjoyment. Aside from a small legal livestock grazing program in a limited fenced pasture, the Valles Caldera is meant to be a cattle-free so that it can recover from extreme past overgrazing. By law, the Caldera is meant to be a rare livestock-free landscape in a largely overgrazed West.
Yet for the last 3 years, the Valles Caldera has been overrun with increasing numbers of illegal trespass cattle. The cows are trampling the streams, polluting the waters with waste, damaging wetlands created by expensive restoration projects. They are mowing meadows still recovering from cattle and sheep abuse when the property was private. Livestock, native to the tropics, decimate high altitude arid landscapes and their waterways. Rare and endangered species like the western jumping mouse and numerous plant species lose habitat as cattle cluster near and in streams.
The National Park Service is America’s premier land management agency with a strong tradition of land protection and law enforcement. Yet the NPS at the Valles Caldera seems to be turning a blind eye toward the trespass cattle. Despite complaints from the public and their own staff, cattle spend months in the Preserve every summer on pastures that are closed to grazing.
Trespass cattle come into the Valles Caldera from National Forest land north of the Preserve. They enter the Preserve through a 44-mile-long damaged fence along the north boundary of the Preserve. On the other side of the fence, cattle legally graze the Santa Fe National Forest. Cows from those allotments cross into the Preserve across an old fence that has been crushed by falling trees and clipped by people.
In 2015, Park Service rangers photographed a rancher cutting a fence and driving cattle through the gap he created. He was fined $5000. Illegally grazing livestock on National Park lands is a violation of 36 CFR 2.61.
Since then, the Park Service has had extensive discussions with the Forest Service about keeping cows out of the Preserve. It is unclear what the upshot of those discussions has been.
The National Park Service is paying to have the north fence replaced even though it is part of the infrastructure for the national forest grazing program. Miles of new fence are in place, but it may take 2 more years to finish the new fence which will be subject to vandalism and treefalls. The US Forest Service requires ranchers who use their allotments to maintain fences but that doesn’t always seem to be happening on the Preserve boundary.
Officials from the NPS Regional Office counted more than 100 cows in the Valle San Antonio in 2019 and 75 cows were there this September when Sierra Club members traversed the Preserve. The Valle San Antonio is officially closed to grazing.
This year, trespass cattle were common throughout the Preserve, especially in the Valle Toledo, Hidden Valley (Jemez River Canyon), and the Valle San Antonio, all places with streams that violate federal clean water standards because of erosion and cattle waste.
Jemez Pueblo has been the winning bidder on the legal fenced cattle pasture grazing program in the Valles de los Posas for the last few summers. They pay the National Park Service more than 15 times the going rate for public land grazing permits outside the Preserve. Yet owners of the trespass cattle graze in the Preserve for free, often for months on end.
We have all become used to seeing cattle on national forest lands and we assume that national park lands will be free of livestock. We are also used to seeing land damaged by long term grazing. New Mexico has been profoundly changed by livestock, especially the sheep that grazed here by the millions between 1880 and 1935. We can only imagine the richness and variety of plants and the wildlife that thrived before livestock dominated the region. Erosion, plant extinction, forests out of balance, and severe wildfires are all wholly or partly a consequence of livestock grazing.
It is important that the Valles Caldera be allowed to return to its pre-grazing state of plant and animal diversity and clean healthy streams.
What you can do: Write Senator Martin Heinrich and Senator Elect Ben Ray Lujan and ask them to insist that the Park Service and US Forest Service take effective steps to permanently remove trespass cattle from the Valles Caldera National Preserve.
Tom Ribe
