VallesCaldera.com – The independent news source about the Valles Caldera

National Parks Magazine, the quarterly publication of the National Parks Conservation Association, features in its fall edition an in-depth profile of the Valles Caldera National Preserve and legislation currently in the U.S. Senate that would transfer it to the National Park Service. Read this article here. You can also click below to watch an accompanying video, which features some magnificent shots of the Caldera’s scenic splendor, as well as an interview with Bob Parmenter, the Preserve’s director of science and education:

Below are the first few paragraphs of National Parks Magazine’s profile of the Caldera:

Standing on Rabbit Ridge, on the southern rim of the Valles Caldera, two worlds unfold below you. Gaze to the north and you see a stunning, 14-mile-wide volcanic crater: Ponderosa-covered mountains ring a grassy basin so vast, you have to turn your head to take in its immensity. No roads or buildings mar these meadows.

It’s a profoundly calming landscape, yet occasional bits of glassy black obsidian embedded in the boulders at your feet hint at the volcano’s cataclysmic past. Magma once exploded from this yawning mouth in eruptions that molded the New Mexico landscape for miles around—including 33,000-acre Bandelier National Monument to the south.

In fact, Bandelier’s boundary sits just steps away from this hike-to viewpoint. A signed fence on Rabbit Ridge delineates Park Service land from Valles Caldera National Preserve, two separately managed parcels that have something in common: The ash spewed in one of Valles Caldera’s eruptive fits created Bandelier’s tuff, the chalky stone that ancestral Puebloans carved into dwellings. You can’t discern Bandelier’s ruins from here, but you can admire big swaths of tuff that give the whole panorama a rosy glow.

For now, barbed wire separates the two properties, but advocates seek to close that rift by bringing Valles Caldera under Park Service management. Not only would its inclusion recognize this corner of northern New Mexico as a geological treasure, it would expand access to it—something would-be visitors have long desired.

More than a century of private ownership and ranching kept Valles Caldera off-limits to all but a few. Even after 2000, when it was purchased by the federal government and became public land, access was limited. Valles Caldera sees just 17,000 visitors annually, compared with 212,500 at Bandelier.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman submitted a statement into the U.S. Senate record last week in support of the legislation that he sponsored with Sen. Tom Udall to transfer the Valles Caldera National Preserve to the National Park Service (this statement is included below in its entirety).

In the speech, Bingaman asserted that the Park Service “is best suited to manage the Preserve while ensuring its long-term conservation,” and that it is his “strong belief that transferring management of the Valles Caldera National Preserve to the National Park Service will be the best way to ensure the protection and enjoyment of the Preserve over the long term.”  Furthermore, he stated that the legislative structure that governs the Valles Caldera Trust “is not sustainable in my opinion, and the existing statutory termination of the Trust is looming.”

Bingaman also expressed the following: “I would like to emphasize that in no way is this legislation a criticism of the good work and valuable accomplishments made by the Board Members of the Valles Caldera Trust and the Preserve staff. However, I believe having the Preserve managed by the National Park Service—an agency with a mission protecting natural, historic, and cultural resources while also providing for public enjoyment of those resources—is more appropriate for the long-term future of the Valles Caldera. In my view, the desire for increased public access, balanced with the need to protect and interpret the Preserve’s unique cultural and natural resources, would be best served by National Park Service management of the Preserve.”

SEN. BINGAMAN: Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation that would transfer administrative jurisdiction of the Valles Caldera National Preserve from the Valles Caldera Trust to the National Park Service. I am pleased that my colleague from New Mexico, Tom Udall, is cosponsoring the bill.

Between the New Mexico communities of Jemez Springs and Los Alamos, lies the Valle Grande, a magnificent valley surrounded by foothills and forested mountains. When standing in this valley, visitors begin to realize they are actually inside a larger bowl-shaped formation. This is the Valles Caldera – one of only three supervolcanoes in the United States. The oldest of the three – having formed 1.25 million years ago – the Valles Caldera is also the smallest. And yet the caldera rim spans more than 100,000 acres in area whose violent eruption created a volcanic ash plume that stretched from northern Utah to central Kansas. Because of its relatively small size as compared to the two other supervolcanoes in the U.S.– Yellowstone, Wyoming and Long Valley, California – the Valles Caldera provides visitors with excellent opportunities to learn about large volcanic eruptions and their impacts on surrounding landscapes while they stand in a single space to experience one of the world’s best examples of an intact resurgent caldera. In 1975, the Valles Caldera received formal recognition as an outstanding and nationally significant geologic resource when it was designated a National Natural Landmark.

Continue reading ‘In Senate speech, Bingaman forcefully urges passage of legislation to transfer Valles Caldera to Park Service’

One interesting aspect of administering this website is the ability to see all of the Google search queries entered by users that have led them to VallesCaldera.com. It gives some insight into what topics are on people’s minds when they’re seeking information about the Valles Caldera.

For example, the current eruptions of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland seemed to have sparked a great deal of interest in the potential for another eruption in the Jemez Mountains.  Below are some search terms that folks have entered recently into Google that have directed them here:

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To answer some of these queries, geologists who study the Jemez Mountains suspect that the Valles Caldera (underlain by magma only 3-4 miles beneath the surface) will probably erupt again. However, it is impossible to predict when this will take place. Scientists do know that the last two eruptive events in the Jemez took place 50,000-60,000 years ago.

These events were:

1. The El Cajete eruption, between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, the vent of which was El Cajete Crater (a panoramic photo of which can be seen here). This eruption formed Battleship Rock (a panoramic photo of which can be seen here), 4 miles north of Jemez Springs, and also covered the area with a thick layer of pumice.

2. Shortly thereafter, the Banco Bonito Flow occurred, which expelled “thick, obsidian-like lava” (Martin) on at least four separate eruptions.

One can see the output from both of these volcanic events at a roadcut on NM Highway 4 at the East Fork of the Jemez River near Jemez Falls campground. A large layer of pumice from the El Cajete eruption can be seen, topped by a layer of black obsidian from the Banco Bonito Flow. (Martin)

The eruption that formed the Valles Caldera occurred 1.25 million years ago, and expelled between 300 to 400 cubic kilometers of ash and ash flow tuff.

In terms of future activity, if there were to be an imminent eruption again, we’d know because of the occurrence of large earthquakes as well as changes in temperature in the hot springs and fumaroles of the Jemez Mountains.

You can read more about the geology of the Valles Caldera in our Geology section, as well as in our FAQ section.

Articles about the Valles Caldera’s eruptive potential can be found elsewhere online:

According to the Discovery Channel’s recent profile of supervolcanos, the Valles Caldera is “a sleeping monster in the heart of New Mexico.” Click here to read this mini-feature on our Caldera, with links to profiles of seven other supervolcanoes that this feature examined.

The science news website LiveScience has some unpleasant predictions regarding the destructive potential of a supervolcano, citing the Valles Caldera:

The eruption of a super volcano “sooner or later” will chill the planet and threaten human civilization, British scientists warned… And now the bad news: There’s not much anyone can do about it.

Several volcanoes around the world are capable of gigantic eruptions unlike anything witnessed in recorded history, based on geologic evidence of past events, the scientists said. Such eruptions would dwarf those of Mount St. Helens, Krakatoa, Pinatubo and anything else going back dozens of millennia.

U.S. District Judge Robert Brack has ruled that the portion of the mineral rights that were not sold to the American people when the Valles Caldera National Preserve was was established in 2000 are worth $3.8 million, according to a story in today’s Albuquerque Journal. Click here to read the full story (after clicking on the prior link, non-subscribers must click on the “trial premium pass” button on the bottom left of the screen to read the article).

When the Baca Ranch was purchased in 2000 for $101 million, the federal government was able to negotiate a mutually acceptable price for the purchase of only 87.5% of the mineral rights to the land.

Concerned that the owners of the remaining 12.5% of the mineral rights might seek to build a geothermal power plant on the National Preserve, the U.S. government condemned these mineral rights in 2006. However, that action required that the owners of the interests be compensated, but the parties had been unable to establish a fair compensation price: the U.S. government initially offered the owners $1.8 million, but the owners asserted that the value of these rights was $14 million. Brack also ruled that the government pay an additional $50,000 in legal costs.

This news is a postscript to the era of geothermal exploration on the Baca Ranch/VCNP, which began in 1960 when an oil test well was built on the western base of Redondo Peak that did not strike oil, but instead struck superheated water (Anschutz and Merlan, 2007). After several more geothermal exploration wells were built in the 1960s, a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy, Union Oil of California, and Public Service Company of New Mexico was formed in July of 1978 to assess the feasibility of building a geothermal power plant on the ranch. The partnership drilled 20 deep wells, but determined that a potential power plant built there could only generate 20 megawatts of electricity, despite the hope at the outset that it could generate up to 400 megawatts. Consequently, the project was disbanded in 1982. In total, about 40 geothermal test wells were drilled on the Baca Ranch through 1983 (Anschutz and Merlan, 2007). Sealed wells can be seen to this day on the Preserve in Redondo Canyon as well as Alamo Canyon.

Click here to read the entire chapter, “Industrial Mineral Extraction and Geothermal Exploration,” from the U.S. government publication More Than a Scenic Mountain Landscape: Valles Caldera National Preserve Land Use History, by Kurt F. Anschutz and Thomas Merlan, published into the public domain in 2007. To download other chapters of this book, click here.

For more information on the geothermal characteristics of the Valles Caldera, check out the following articles:

Geothermal Potential of Valles Caldera, New Mexico (PDF), by Fraser Goff. GHC Bulletin, Dec. 2002.

Valles Caldera Scientific Drilling, by Fraser Goff and Jeffrey M. Heikoop. Geotimes, Mar. 2004.

Finally, a sizable amount of information on the overall geology of the Caldera can be found on VallesCaldera.com’s Geology page.