Trespass Cattle Damaging the Valles Caldera – Out of Control

The Valles Caldera National Preserve is one of the most beautiful places in New Mexico. Congress bought the former ranch west of Santa Fe for the American people in 2000 and eventually placed the 89,000-acre landscape into the National Park system. Yet today, the park is overrun with trespass and feral cattle which are damaging the headwaters of the Jemez River.

Congress established the Valles Caldera National Preserve to create a protected high altitude preserve where the public could experience a rare unspoiled landscape of grasslands, streams and forests. The National Park Service generally protects its lands from industrial uses like grazing which are prevalent on National Forest lands. In New Mexico, high country landscapes protected for wildlife, Native cultural uses, and watershed restoration are extremely rare.

The managers at the Valles Caldera set aside an area away from streams for a legal cattle program where ranchers may run a small number of cattle at almost twenty times the per-head price of grazing on nearby National Forest land. Jemez Pueblo has used the Caldera’s legal grazing program.

But for the last few years, cattle from the Coyote District of the Santa Fe National Forest have spilled into the Valles Caldera through broken and cut fences. They have trampled the streams in the Valle Toledo and Valle San Antonio that volunteers and land managers spent years restoring from past livestock damage. This summer around 130 illegal cattle were in the Preserve for weeks, standing and defecating in the streams, ruining the fishing, displacing game animals, and contaminating the waters which now violate federal and state water quality standards. Two endangered species are threatened by trespass grazing.

Naturally ranchers may like to fatten their cattle for free inside the Valles Caldera National Preserve because the rich grasses and streams stand in contrast to the often-overgrazed national forest allotments where their cattle graze legally. Grasslands in the Valles Caldera are reserved for elk and a wide range of other native wildlife and rare plants.

Two agencies are responsible for illegal grazing damaging the Jemez River headwaters. First the US Forest Service that manages lands outside of the Preserve allows permittee ranchers to graze national forest land. Ranchers sign a contract with the US Forest Service that says they will maintain fences and keep their cattle on their specific allotment area under penalty of law. Yet the US Forest Service doesn’t enforce the trespass rules in these contracts.

For its part, the National Park Service has the authority to impound stray cattle and fine any ranchers who allow their cattle to trespass in the Preserve. The Park Service calls the ranchers to remove their cattle, yet often the same cows later return. The cow’s owners are easily identified by color-coded and numbered ear tags the cattle wear. National Park Service policy requires owners of stray or trespass cattle to pay $10 per day for each cow, yet for unknown reasons, the NPS at the Caldera doesn’t fine the ranchers or impound their animals.

The NPS built a new fence along with north side of the Preserve which ranchers will soon be required to maintain under their federal grazing contracts. Already the new fence has been vandalized in places and trees fall across it. Senator Martin Heinrich is seeking funding to fortify the fence from damage in key places.

Since neither the Forest Service nor the National Park Service penalizes ranchers for trespass grazing on the Preserve, one wonders if trespass grazing will ever end at the Valles Caldera? Whatever happened to the rule of law on lands managed for all Americans?