Recently, Senator Martin Heinrich introduced a bill in the US Senate to change Bandelier National Monument to “Bandelier National Park”. His bill would raise the profile of Bandelier and open some of its land to hunting. While well intentioned, Heinrich’s bill could end up harming Bandelier and degrading the very place people come to enjoy.
Bandelier National Monument is a 33,000 acre park near Los Alamos, most of which is designated wilderness where you have to walk to visit the dramatic canyons and Pueblo ruins of the backcountry. Few people do. About 20,000 people a month in peak season visit a few hundred acres in the bottom of Frijoles Canyon where a narrow paved trail winds up to ruins of a prehistoric Pueblo village and cliff dwellings on an imposing canyon wall. It is a stunning place, utterly unique and beautiful with a creek gurgling through maples and cottonwoods and weirdly eroded volcanic cliffs under bright New Mexico skies.
Bandelier National Monument was designated a National Monument in 1916 to protect its many ancestral Pueblo artifacts from looters who were ravaging Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and the Pajarito Plateau at the time. Managed by the US Forest Service until 1932, Bandelier was transferred to the National Park Service, and expanded over many decades.
Protecting archaeological sites in the park is the top priority for the National Park Service according to the legislation creating the Monument.
Decades ago Bandelier mainly attracted locals but as the tourism popularity of New Mexico has grown, so has the profile of Bandelier. It is one of the top attractions Santa Fe visitors add to their visits and in the peak summer and fall seasons more than 200,000 people a year visit the park. Bandelier is crowded in the summer, so much so that the parking areas cannot handle the crush of cars and the public must ride a shuttle from White Rock to Bandelier.
Once at the Monument, the public finds some excellent facilities and programs but also some unusable rest rooms, and a crumbling paved trail that is so rough that wheelchairs can barely navigate it. The path hasn’t been repaved since the 1970s. The worn facilities belie a grossly inadequate park budget that leaves the public with gaps in services despite the best efforts of the Park Service. Nationally, the National Park Service budget continues to shrink over time and Trump has proposed deep cuts.
Recent studies by Headwaters Economics find that re-designating Bandelier a “national park” would result in a 21% increase in visitation. That would mean the worn facilities would be pounded by thousands more visitors who would crowd the narrow trails. Most important, a re-designation wouldn’t necessarily mean any budget increase and the staff-to-visitor ratio would worsen and facilities may continue to deteriorate. Could Senator Heinrich promise a long term budget increase to protect the park?
Perhaps Senator Heinrich believes a new “national park” in northern New Mexico would stimulate our economy. Maybe it would, but at what cost to Bandelier? Is Bandelier a “national park” quality place? Should we use unique and special places as economic stimuli rather than treated them as sacred?
Senator Heinrich’s bill also contains a confusing proposal to open 7000 acres of the Bandelier high country to hunting, creating a new “Bandelier National Preserve” right next to the Valles Caldera National Preserve which operates under the same rules proposed for the new BNP. This proposal would create a bureaucratic morass and could leave 7000 acres without minimal budget and protection. If this bill gets taken seriously, why not just add the 7000 acres to the Valles Caldera NP?
I have great respect for Senator Heinrich but the Bandelier National Park idea needs much more public and agency input. Bandelier needs a significant budget increase to match an increase in visitation and above all it needs to be carefully protected for future generations by all of us.
Tom Ribe is Executive Director of Caldera Action, a non profit dedicated to helping protect park lands in the Jemez Mountains. This piece was originally published in the Santa Fe New Mexican.
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