National Parks Traveler

Growing pains have slowed the evolution of Valles Caldera National Preserve as a national park/NPS

Valles Caldera: A Diamond In The Rough

By Kurt Repanshek

Valles Caldera is a mountainous, forested landscape broken by sweeps of grasslands and which in places rises more than 11,000 feet in northern New Mexico. It is also, figuratively, a not quite 90,000-acre blank canvas upon which the National Park Service is working to create what it envisions will be a masterpiece.

The components to accomplish that vision are there. Human history dates back 10,000 years, to a time when Paleoindians would travel to the caldera to collect obsidian for spearpoints and arrowheads. Through the centuries, numerous tribes passed through and utilized the landscape. The use of obsidian, a hard volcanic glass shaped into arrowheads and spearpoints, from Valles Caldera actually spread across the country, according to the National Park Service, and still today artifacts tied to obsidian can be found across the preserve.

Eight-hundred years ago, ancestral Puebloans settled in the region and grew crops, while Spanish settlers arrived in the 1500s with their sheep herds. Ranching took hold in 1860, when a land grant given to the descendants of Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca gave rise to Baca Location No. 1, a sprawling ranch that decades later was returned to the public landscape.

The land's geologic history dates back much farther than the human history, some 1.25 million years to when a volcanic eruption said to be at least 300 times larger than that of Mount Saint Helens's eruption in 1980 reconfigured the landscape by creating the large caldera the preserve protects.

Travel to the preserve's southwest corner and you'll find yourself in a gurgling and fuming landscape the exposes Valles Caldera's volcanic underpinning. There are seven named sulfuric acid springs there known colorfully as Kidney and Stomach Trouble Spring, Footbath Spring, Ladies' Bathhouse Spring, Laxitive [sic] Spring, Turkey Spring, Lemonade Spring, and Electric Spring. No other sulfate-based acidic hot springs occur in the State of New Mexico, and they are rare throughout the rest of the United States, according to the Park Service.

Elsewhere in the preserve you can find old-growth stands of 400-year-old Ponderosa pine that the loggers missed. Among the bird species flitting about these towering pines are Western bluebirds, mountain chickadees, and Steller's jays. Overall, nearly 200 bird species have been spotted in the preserve, which the National Audubon Society has labeled an Important Bird Area. New Mexico's largest elk herd calls the preserve home, as do mountain lions, black bears, and mule deer. The meandering East Fork of the Jemez River and San Antonio Creek harbor Rio Grande cutthroat trout, the preserve holds critical habitat for the endangered Jemez salamander, and the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse, also endangered, is another resident.

Stands of Ponderosa pine and open grassy valleys draw wildlife to the preserve/Patrick Cone

It has been a process, though, slowed by planning, by staffing issues (lack of housing is a problem at the preserve, as it is at many other units of the National Park System), and even by trespassing cattle, a process that has frustrated some who wonder why the public doesn't have more access to Valles Caldera National Preserve seven years into the National Park Service's ownership of it.

Hard against the western edge of Bandelier National Monument, Valles Caldera came into public ownership in 2000 when Congress created the Valles Caldera Trust to manage the land. It was, as the National Park Service explains in the preserve's Foundation Document, a national experiment "to evaluate the efficiency, economy, and effectiveness of decentralized public land management and ecosystem restoration."

The experiment ended in December 2014 when the preserve was transferred to the Park Service. Moving from the Trust, where he was executive director, to the national preserve, where he is superintendent, is Jorge Silva-Bañuelos. He came to the job with strong references and a background both as a staffer on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and with the Interior Department, where he was special assistant to the assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks to help provide policy guidance on operations, management, and budgets of the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

From his office in Jemez Springs just south of the preserve, the superintendent is anxious to raise the operational capacity of Valles Caldera in terms of visitation, interpretation, research, and preservation.

"We have an opportunity, now that it has the National Park Service backing, to really showcase this as a unit of the National Park System and share that with both the national and international community, and that's certainly my goal," Silva-Bañuelos said recently during a lengthy phone call. "More specifically, we've just recently completed a five-year strategic plan internally, and what we want to do is to make Valles Caldera a national model for sustainability, restoration, and tribal partnerships that offers a welcoming and engaging landscape for all."

How Soon?

But the process seems bogged down to some onlookers, including Tom Ribe, executive director of Caldera Action, a nonprofit organization focused on the public lands of the Jemez Mountains, with a special emphasis on Valles Caldera and Bandelier. Part of the problem, Ribe maintains, is that management of the national preserve, as directed by its enabling legislation, is to generally follow the approach taken by the Trust until the Park Service adopts a management plan for the preserve. Seven years into the Park Service's oversight of the preserve, a general management plan for Valles Caldera has been drafted but not yet adopted.

"The problem is they remember this place was run by that trust for a long time, and during that period, which was 2000 to 2014, they developed some bad habits up there," Ribe said during a phone call. "They could do what they wanted, they didn't have anybody setting policy for them because they were a sort of an independent freelance organization with no precedent or regional office or anything like that. So they were able to just do whatever they wanted."

Until the general management plan is adopted, "they can basically operate under Trust rules," he said. "So that means that all kinds of freelance, seat-of-the-pants stuff that has been going on ever since 2014. And legally, there hasn't been a whole lot we can do about it."

At the National Parks Conservation Association, Emily Wolf, the group's senior program coordinator in New Mexico, agrees that "it would be good to see things moving more quickly."

"But," she added, "we also really appreciate how complex the process is. Instead of just being a brand new NPS site, they came with an existing management structure as the Trust. Different agency, different departments."

Wolf also noted that as the preserve has been working to craft its general management plan it has also been working to examine wilderness issues and evaluate stream sections for possible inclusion under the Wild and Scenic River Act. On top of those issues, there's also the problem with "trespass cattle," cattle that enter the preserve through downed fences to reach its grasslands. 

"The cattle trespass issue is a big deal," Ribe said. "The cows are coming in off the north side, where there's a fence between the Sante Fe National Forest's Coyote District and the caldera. There are four or five different grazing allotments that abut the park up there. And it's a very difficult area to get to because it's very remote."

The cattle have damaged wetlands and created erosion problems in areas where the Park Service has spent a lot of money on restoration work, he added. What's been viewed as a lack of action by the Park Service led Caldera Act, the Western Watersheds Project, and Wildlife Guardians to threaten to sue the agency.

Past cattle operations on the landscape created nearly 200 "cattle tanks" — impoundments for watering livestock — that Park Service staff says "interrupt spring runoff and water flow during summer rains from reaching further down the system, thus changing the hydrology of downstream channel reaches and floodplains."

"The trespass cattle are a huge threat to the ecosystem and to the elk by taking food sources away from them as well as some of the other species that the park is looking to reintroduce, or just improve the habitat for," added NPCA's Wolf. "So we recognize it's a really complex issue. We're looking into ways to help NPS with doing some fence repairs."

At the preserve, the superintendent acknowledged the struggles with the cattle.

"Since 2019, the NPS has allocated about $350,000 to replace sections of the boundary fence between the Santa Fe National Forest and Valles Caldera National Preserve. So far, this has translated into six miles of wildlife-friendly fence being replaced by partners such as the Pueblo of Santa Clara, Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, and Rio Grande Return," said Silva-Bañuelos. "However, given the rugged forested terrain along the 51-mile park boundary and the fact that a wire fence can be easily defeated by a $5 pair of wire cutters or a falling tree, the current approach does at times feel like a Sisyphean task. Instead, the park is pursuing funding to install a virtual fence system that would cost substantially less and may result in a more effective method of excluding trespass cattle from the landscape. Either way, the NPS will continue to collaborate with the USDA Forest Service to mitigate this issue that has been a long-standing challenge well before the NPS took over management of the park unit. 

"As a side note, " he said, "I do not believe it is appropriate to necessarily assign blame to the grazing permittees for the fence being damaged as there are other public land users who may be cutting the fence. Beyond human vandalism, falling trees killed or weakened by wildfire and insects also routinely damage the fence." 

In his October 2021 confirmation hearing, Park Service Director Chuck Sams promised U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico, that he is “committed to figuring a way to ensure that there are no trespass issues.”

Public Access

Another sore point for Ribe and others is the restricted public access to the preserve. The gates are only open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and when they are, just 35 vehicles a day are allowed to go beyond a temporary entrance station and drive across the preserve on its a dirt road that bisects the unit. That access, said Ribe, is "significantly different from the way things are done in other national park units."

"We generally want the place to be managed as a normal national park," he said.

"We'd love to see expansion of those operating hours," agreed Wolf. "Improving access in that way."

But she also pointed to the National Park Service Organic Act, which places preservation of resources above recreational access, and so having an approved visitor use management plan to guide access is critical.

"We want to increase access, public and recreational access. But we want to do it in a way that protects and preserves all the other values that we have out here, the vast landscapes, the solitude, the refugia for plant and wildlife species, the cultural significance, the sacredness of the landscape," Silva-Bañuelos said. "These are things that we don't want to inadvertently impair because of the demand for recreational access."

The National Park Service is studying its streams for possible protection under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act/NPS

To protect those aspects, the preserve is developing a zone management system that would identify areas "where we would want to concentrate visitor activities, services and infrastructure, thereby leaving the vast majority of the park in a more primitive state where the most infrastructure we would see in other parts of the park would be trails and trailheads," said the superintendent.

Progress with that approach is expected later this year, when Silva-Bañuelos hopes to extend the "front country" area of the preserve to the historic cabin district. Staff has proposed making the district more accessible to people with disabilities and facilitate visitors accessing this area without the need for a backcountry vehicle permit as is currently the case.

The preserve also has been considering the creation of two parking areas near the district, improvements to buildings to make them accessible to people with disabilities, the addition of new trails for public and administrative use in and around the Cabin District, an automatic gate that does not require visitors to get out of their vehicle to open and close, subsurface utility installation to existing historic and non-historic buildings, and trailhead kiosks at existing trails which would provide better information to visitors.

"We're getting close," the superintendent replied when asked when that work would begin. "We're still working through the compliance process, and we're hoping to get through that later this year."

Regarding those who want more access to the preserve sooner than has occurred, Silva-Bañuelos pointed to staffing limitations for maintenance, the existence of just one toilet, and the narrow and winding dirt road that crosses the preserve.

"Some of those limitations are what affect, I think, public perceptions of access right now," he said. "My hope is that through some of these front-country infrastructure improvements we will add some additional parking in that Cabin District that will open up more vehicle access without a backcountry vehicle permit."

Going forward, staff will work on "zoning management" of the preserve to determine levels of vehicle access, and where there might be pullouts to access trails.

"I think it's going to be a balance between both what our infrastructure can sustain, but also what are those future desired conditions for the backcountry that we want to preserve," the superintendent said.

A wild card tossed into the Park Service's management challenges was a recent court ruling that gave the Jemez Pueblo aboriginal rights to the Banco Bonito area of the national preserve. The decade-old case that a split 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on in late March revolved around whether the pueblo had "the exclusive right to use, occupy and possess” the lands of the national preserve under its continuing aboriginal title.

What that might mean on the ground in the preserve remains to be seen. For their part, preserve officials have declined comment on the ruling, saying the matter remained pending.

Despite all of the challenges, Silva-Bañuelos remains positive about the long run for the preserve.

"I feel very strongly that Valles Caldera is the crown jewel of New Mexico, and one day in the future it will become the most-visited national park site in the state," he said.