I found myself clearing out old files from my activist work in the 1980s about Bandelier National Monument. It struck me how I have been focused on this area and its environmental problems for 40 plus years. I found my old writings – pleadings really – for people to let the world stay the way it had been for centuries before.
I suppose I found an emotional and intellectual connection to that landscape as it was, the depth of cultural and natural history all blended in a beautiful place. I know many other people felt a similar connection, people who like me have stayed around and played whatever role we could to honor and protect Bandelier National Monument.
Before 1996, Bandelier was sublimely beautiful, a land of forests cloaking strange volcanic mesas and canyons. Ghosts of the ancient ones seem to speak to anyone outside at night. Creeks made their soft sounds near huge old trees that spread their branches among the stars.
In retrospect I see that all efforts to hold on to the old Bandelier were somewhat futile. We fought against timber sales brought by the Forest Service right beside the Bandelier boundary (Los Utes). Those were spirited fights that cost some Forest Service people their jobs. But in time that area we hoped would remain old trees and shady cool forests was burned over by at least two high severity fires (Dome and Las Conchas). If you found the acreage where these timber sales took place, you would be walking among grassy scrub fields where few if any trees grow today. Nobody bothers to visit these places now unless they are hunting deer or elk. There is little appeal, little aesthetic, and the brush has thorns.
We fought off Los Alamos’ efforts to build a highway through the beautiful Tsankawi Mesa country. We put in much effort, and we won. But now the Lab wants to bring in another 6000 employees and the road system, designed probably by accident in the 1940s, probably can’t sustain the new traffic. We’ll see what gross ideas they have, and where they plan to send their heavy equipment so Los Alamos can be a pit factory and employ people to spend money in New Mexico’s weak economy.
We worried about a subdivision proposed for the land where Manhattan Project employees created a ski area for themselves (Sawyer’s Hill). They used dynamite to clear big trees and made a rope tow powered by an old car engine. That subdivision never happened, and the land is Forest Service land now, complete with the ruins of a Girl Scout lodge where high school kids go to drink booze and terrify themselves in the dark ruin. I remember summer camp at the same in the early 1960s.
Today
Overall, when we visit upper Bandelier today, it is unrecognizable from how it was in the 1980s and before. Gone are the forests that coated the mesas and canyons; tall firs, and ponderosa pines (that grew in thickets in places due to fire suppression and overgrazing). Gone are the forests on the San Miguel Mountains. Gone are the shaded riparian areas in Capulin and Alamo Canyons and with them the streams that used to nurture the gallery forests there.
Rather we have a landscape of dead trees, oak and locus thickets, and welcome stands of young aspen in places. Some people may say that this place no longer warrants National Park Service protection but, of course, they miss the point. Not only was Bandelier established primarily to protect archeological sites and the prehistoric heritage of nearby Pueblos, the NPS has a mission to protect places permanently. If humanity and the United States survive for another century, hopefully the National Park Service will still be at Bandelier to help nurture the land toward whatever forests grow there in the future.
It seems unlikely the forests I knew in my youth will ever be back given climate change, drought, and the possibility of more high severity fires re-burning the fire scars of the Dome Fire, Cerro Grande Fire, Las Conchas Fire, and others. But the NPS will do their best to care for this place, scarred and stressed as it is, for as long as the agency exists.
Hopefully some future people will advocate for this place, collect records of the park and its progress. I hope new people will stand up to care for this unusual, beautiful, and spiritually powerful place. By caring for a place, we merge with it. We lose out distinction between person and land.
