The Valles Caldera's grand experiment comes to an end

By Sherry Robinson If the Valles Caldera National Preserve were a person, its epitaph would be: They tried. What a preserve brochure called an "experiment in public land management" will end with the signing of federal legislation. In 1997 owners of the Baca Ranch, aboriginal land of Jemez Pueblo and later a Mexican land grant, decided to sell. The 89,000-acre property might have been subdivided and sold but for the movement to keep it whole through a sale to the federal government. The Baca wasn't just any chunk of real estate. Within its boundaries is the Valles Caldera, a gargantuan volcanic bowl created in the Jemez Mountains by violent eruptions 1.4 million years ago. The caldera's green meadows, streams and ponds are home to a variety of wildlife. Congress bought the ranch for $101 million in 2000. Sens. Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman fashioned legislation that combined public and private, ranching and recreation in a national preserve governed by an appointed board of trustees. They were to maintain a working ranch but offer recreation, fishing and hunting while protecting the land and its creatures. And they had 15 years to make the property self-sustaining. It offered something for everyone, and that was the problem. From day one, the debate began: Ranching vs. Recreation. It was never clear whether the preserve was a ranch that allowed in hikers and hunters or a park with a ranch on it. Whatever the board decided, there was a chorus of second guessers and critics who were often at odds with each other. For a couple of years, I had a ringside seat as the board's hired note taker. I watched the board step ever so carefully through the thorny underbrush of interest groups while toeing the senators' line. I listened to various parties (usually environmentalists) criticize the board, at times all but calling them morons, while others (usually ranchers) came hat in hand to seek grazing rights. Trustees decided to focus first on the ranch and a grazing plan, but whatever choice they made, they were hampered by time and money, the usual enemies of grand experiments. Before moving ahead, they needed environmental studies and an understanding of potential impacts of the various activities but lacked the budget to get all the studies done at once. And the folks conducting those studies operated on academic time, not real time. READ ENTIRE COLUMN Sherry Robinson is a New Mexico journalist who began her career in 1976 and has served as assistant business editor and columnist with the Albuquerque Journal, editor of New Mexico Business Weekly and business editor of the Albuquerque Tribune. It didn't work because the powers that be didn't want it to work.  A trust run by a board to manage federal land?  The last thing they wanted was for that concept to work.  Look at the precedent that would set and the threat it would be to future land ownership/management by the feds.  No wonder that Heinrich, et.al. rushed to get it under the thumb of the Park Service.