The Valles Caldera in northern New Mexico is a vast collapsed volcano now coated with forests and grasslands. People have been coming to the Caldera seasonally for centuries, making paths between the large open grasslands and trailing though the once great forests of mountain trees. In modern times private owners built a system of roads to access the northern reaches and logging companies spiraled roads up the volcanic domes that once nurtured large ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees. Livestock grazed the grass away for decades. Now park planners plot to change this former ranch into a national park style property.
When the federal government bought the Baca Ranch from private owners in 2000, we (the public) inherited the roads and a scattering of buildings left behind by a century of private ownership, mostly by wealthy local and Texas businesspeople. It would be easy enough for the National Park Service to just leave the place alone and keep using the roads and buildings that exist today. But the Service has a long tradition of planning for lots of visitors and they understand how to channel people around a landscape, so a majority of the land is left in its natural state and the public has quality experiences.
Right now, the Valles Caldera National Preserve is starting a park planning process for the preserve. While many would say they should have done this years-ago, better late than never. Using knowledge built up in the National Park Service over its 115 years of existence, they will come up with a landscape plan. They will consult with the public and tribes in the process.
The whole idea of planning a landscape may have started in medieval Europe or before, in the United States, “landscape architecture” came into its own when Fredrick Law Olmstead designed parks and campuses back in the time of the Civil War. He is most famous for designing Central Park in New York City, but he also designed the landscape around the Capitol Building in Washington DC, and the University of California, Berkeley campus among many other places. In any case, he started a profession that now has thousands of professional practitioners and can be learned at the graduate level in places like the University of Oregon.
Wikipedia says that “landscape planning is defined as an activity concerned with developing landscaping amongst competing land uses while protecting natural processes and significant cultural and natural resources.” A place like the Valles Caldera needs such treatment when we think that the place (hopefully) will be a national park for many decades into the future. Thousands of people will visit, perhaps millions.
So why would a basically wild area need planning? The park is a finite area, about 90,000 acres. People come to national parks with expectations that they will see amazing things, that they will learn from displays and rangers, and will move through the landscape on roads and trails that offer nice access to significant, protected places. These are reasonable expectations. At the Valles Caldera, the fixtures of national park style people management and education have yet to arrive.
The Valles Caldera will be transformed from a former ranch into a park. What changes could happen? Will the NPS reroute the entrance road? If they do where will it go? Will they build a visitor center near Highway 4 so it can serve many travelers, or will they build it inside the Preserve where fewer people can access it, especially in winter? Will they pave the road that goes to the Valle San Antonio? Will they extend it so it makes a loop and invites a big increase in motor traffic that will disturb wildlife and public users? Will they protect wilderness values in those places where wilderness qualities persist? Will they make new trails that don’t follow old logging roads from the private ownership days? Will they remove old livestock management facilities like corrals and cattle ponds?
The managers propose to have a few small areas where most new development will be built and they propose to tier less development into two other zones in the park. You can look at the proposed maps of their planning here and put in your comments here.
The Downside
Nobody wants to see hasty or haphazard development at the Valles Caldera. Developments such as roads and buildings, once they are added to this arid, high altitude landscape will be there for a long time into the future. Thus, these need to be planned with care.
We have no way of knowing how popular with Valles Caldera National Preserve will become with the public. Will thousands of people stream to it like they do to so many other parks and monuments? Or will its subtle scenery and obscure human history keep visitation down. Nobody knows but the NPS has no choice but to plan for larger crowds over time.
Park managers have a multi-layered planning process going on here. They will complete the zone planning and then move into other plans such as one for the Valle Grande. Other plans such as transportation and trails will follow. Each one of these has to go through layers of legal approvals such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
The park Superintendent says they plan to move “slowly” and that it could be a decade before they start to move earth, mark trails, and improve roads. Will increasing visitation happen in the meantime and how will the NPS handle the new visitors with the lack of facilities they now have? The park has little interpretation (public education). Will that have to wait a decade too?
The NPS is a good agency with a great mandate but over the decades they have become bogged down the regulations, procedures and bureaucracy that can frustrate both staff and the public.
Hopefully the managers will forget about “slowly” and put it in gear. We need good planning done with urgency. The public shouldn’t have to wait 17 years for basic facilities and trails at our preserve.
