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

On July 25, 2000, exactly ten years ago today, the Jemez Mountains of Northern New Mexico were forever transformed as the Valles Caldera Preservation Act was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. In his signing statement, Mr. Clinton proclaimed that the law “protects a magnificent natural resource for New Mexicans and all Americans, and we can all be proud of this legacy that we leave for generations to come.”

The Valles Caldera Preservation Act enabled the purchase of the Baca Location No. 1 (the “Baca Ranch”) for $101 million, and set the course for an “experiment in land management” — the Valles Caldera Trust, a wholly-owned governmental corporation tasked to run the land as a working ranch on a financially self-sustaining basis — to govern the newly-created Valles Caldera National Preserve for the American people. At the time, the Baca Location No. 1 was 94,761 acres, so this transaction worked out to about $1,065 per acre. The source of the money to purchase the Baca was the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which comes from a portion of receipts from offshore oil and gas leases that are placed into a fund annually for state and local conservation, and to purchase land, water and wetlands for the the benefit of all Americans.

The land had been privately owned for 140 years, from 1860 to 2000. You can read more about the history of the Baca Location No. 1 in the History section of VallesCaldera.com.

The bill made it to the President’s desk after having been approved by the U.S. Senate unanimously on April 13, 2000, and after the House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 377-45 on July 12, 2000.

Enjoy some of our reading material regarding the history of the Baca Location No. 1 and the efforts to purchase this land for the public by clicking below:

The National Park Service’s narrative of many efforts in the 20th century to purchase the Baca Ranch – the land that became the Valles Caldera National Preserve – for the American People

VallesCaldera.com’s “Recent History of the Land that Became the Valles Caldera National Preserve”

You can also download the entire U.S. Government publication, More Than a Scenic Mountain Landscape: Valles Caldera National Preserve Land Use History, by Kurt F. Anschuetz and Thomas Merlan. This book is in the public domain.

Roughly one decade after the devastating Cerro Grande fire of May 2000, a new book has been published that aims to tell the complete story of “the most costly wildfire in U.S. history.” Inferno by Committee: The True Story of the Cerro Grande (Los Alamos) Fire, America’s Worst Prescribed Fire Disaster is an in-depth study and “white-knuckle narrative” of the prescribed burn that began on the eastern rim of the Valles Caldera and proceeded to destroy hundreds of homes in nearby Los Alamos, as well as many structures at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, forcing a lengthy evacuation of the town and neighboring White Rock.

The 345-page book, published by Trafford Publishing, is written by Tom Ribe, a fire fighter and science journalist who also serves as the executive director of Caldera Action, a Valles Caldera advocacy group.

You can buy this book online by clicking here. You can also buy it by clicking here to visit the author’s web site, which also contains lots of other information regarding the fire.

The Los Alamos Monitor wrote that Ribe’s book is “useful and valuable to readers,” while informing the public “everything they wanted to know about the dynamics of Cerro Grande fire and the methods to fight it but were afraid to ask.” Click here to read the complete review. Below is an excerpt:

Ribe doesn’t just look back 10 years ago to the first week of May 2000, he scans all the way back to about 8,000 years ago to the area’s first residents. Furthermore, he examines how, over time, humans significantly change the landscape – whether it was through grazing or logging or politics. He discusses at length about the differences between the National Forest Service’s philosophy of maintaining the land and the National Park Service’s beliefs.

After heavily sifting through the ashes of time, Ribe presents an argument that is applicable now, tomorrow and forever after. He stresses the importance of environmental stewardship but also the need to exercise stewardship amongst humans. A lot of problems can be resolved by good teamwork, unity and taking the time and effort to make the right decisions for everyone.

Continue reading ’2000 Cerro Grande fire studied in new book, Inferno by Committee‘

William DeBuys, who from 2001 to 2004 served as the founding chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera National Preserve, wrote an editorial this week on the New West website advocating passage of the legislation introduced by U.S. Senators Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall that would transfer management of the Valles Caldera to the National Park Service and dissolve the Valles Caldera Trust.

Mr. DeBuys, among whose books is Valles Caldera: A Vision for New Mexico’s National Preserve, wrote this piece in response to this week’s editorial written by Courtney White that was titled “A Step Backward: the Valles Caldera National Park.”  Mr. White’s piece argues against the legislation and questions whether the late Stewart Udall, who served as Secretary of the Interior under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (and is the father of Sen. Tom Udall), would have supported the bill that his son co-sponsored.  Click here to read Mr. DeBuys’ piece.

Mr. DeBuys includes some compelling insight, revealing that he visited with Stewart Udall a month before his death in March, and according to Mr. DeBuys, Mr. Udall “expressed deep satisfaction that introduction of the bill was imminent.”

Below is a portion of the editorial, headlined “Valles Caldera: What Would Stewart Udall Think?”

Courtney White has my sympathy. He regrets that the land management “experiment” of the Valles Caldera Trust should be abandoned. I share his regret, but not his conclusion. It is time for all of us to face facts and not entangle the fate of a peerless natural landscape in dreamy notions about “new approaches.” The caldera has been the subject of a new approach for nearly a decade. It hasn’t worked.
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Lamentably, the complex and conflicted mission with which the Trust was charged has produced paralysis, not synthesis, and the public is understandably frustrated by the conspicuous lack of both progress and access at the preserve.

The trust would have better served its fortunes in recent years by focusing its energies on building a broad public constituency; ultimately, its failure is not that it cannot be self-sufficient in dollars, but that the people it should be serving have failed to care sufficiently about it. As a result, the enormous reservoir of public goodwill with which the Trust started its journey has largely been consumed. Let’s move on.

Mr. White’s assertion that the “national park idea… is not well-suited for the onrushing, global challenges of the 21st century” is nonsense, and it is offensive that he should utter this foolishness in reference to Stewart Udall. If Stewart were still alive, he would be the first to say that the national park idea has proved adaptable and enduring, not least in lands beyond the borders of the United States where the defense of the natural world is led by citizens with sharper vision than Mr. White’s. The national park idea continues to represent one of the best strategies yet devised for protecting the environmental commons against the relentless push to privatize and exploit the earth’s goods.

Making the Valles Caldera National Preserve a unit of the National Park System will assure the protection and effective stewardship of an extraordinary place. New Mexico Senators Bingaman and Udall are demonstrating realism and leadership in championing the necessary legislation. Their bill would permit continued grazing and hunting on the preserve, and it also calls for continuation of the preserve’s science and education program, one of the signal achievements of the Trust’s early years. When I last saw Stewart Udall, about a month before he passed away, he expressed deep satisfaction that introduction of the bill was imminent.

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’

On February 10, 2000 — exactly one decade ago — VallesCaldera.com was launched, predating the creation of the Valles Caldera National Preserve (above is a screen shot of this website’s original masthead).

This site went live in the tense months before the Baca Ranch was purchased by the American people, when many New Mexicans watched with bated breath out of concern that this spectacular, 95,000-acre parcel of vast mountain valleys, forested volcanic domes, and sparkling streams might be sold to developers.

In the months that followed the launch of this site, the Baca Ranch was transformed into publicly-owned land after being purchased by taxpayers for $101 million, becoming the Valles Caldera National Preserve with the signing of the Valles Caldera Preservation Act by President Bill Clinton on July 25, 2000.

VallesCaldera.com is operated by a Jemez Mountains local who lives within the geologic Valles Caldera (one mile from the National Preserve fence).

We extend our appreciation to those who have utilized the resources on VallesCaldera.com for the past decade, and have made this the #1-ranked independent website about the Valles Caldera (according to Google).

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.

The latest addition to VallesCaldera.com’s section of 360° virtual-reality panoramas comes from a meadow on top of a foothill on the eastern flank of Cerro del Medio (which means “middle mountain”). Also known as “CDM,” the mountain is the oldest ring-fracture dome in the Valles Caldera (formed about 1.2 million years ago). The Valle Grande can be seen through the trees as the panorama opens.   Click here to download this panorama.  You can also see some views from the sky of Cerro del Medio here and here.

QuickTime (version 5.0 or above) must be installed to view our 360° panoramas. Click here to install QuickTime. You also need to have a high-speed internet connection, as this panorama is more than seven megabytes in size. QuickTime will automatically launch when the panorama has been downloaded.

Once the panorama loads, enter full-screen mode (by pressing Command-F on a Mac or Control-F on a PC) for the most enjoyable viewing experience. Drag the cursor in any direction to change your perspective. You can also press the shift key to zoom in, and the Command key (Control key on a PC) to zoom out.

Finally, enjoy the remainder of our collection of virtual-reality 360° panoramas — many of which feature locations that the public has rarely, if ever, been granted access.

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In this controversial chapter of the post-Baca Ranch era, in which a spirited debate about alternative visions of future management of the Valles Caldera National Preserve has been extensively covered by state and national media, it is fitting to reflect on this Thanksgiving Day about certain historical aspects of the scenic crown jewel of New Mexico for which one should be thankful, because without these details of history this land might not be owned by the American people today.

1. The Baca Ranch was never subdivided.  Throughout the entire 140-year history of private ownership of the Baca Location No. 1 (the land that became the Valles Caldera National Preserve), the parcel of land (originally 99,289.39 acres) was never subdivided.  This was despite, among other things, an 1898 court decree calling for the partitioning of the land amongst the dozens of various heirs of Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca (and other landowners, including Joel Parker Whitney and Maríano Otero) who each held fractional interests in the ranch (this order was later overturned by court-appointed commissioners).  If partitioning had happened then (or at any time in the next century) it is not unrealistic to conclude that our Caldera might today be a patchwork of communities, resorts, golf courses, and hotels.  It also certainly would have made the establishment of the Valles Caldera National Preserve in 2000 impossible.
2. The Dunigans were responsible stewards of the land, and played hardball to stop clearcutting.  The Dunigans of Abilene, Texas, were the final private owners of the Baca Ranch, having purchased the land in 1963.  However, they did not own the timber rights to the land; in 1918, a 99-year lease to the timber rights had been signed by the Redondo Development Company, which later deeded the rights to the New Mexico Timber Company.  In the mid-20th century, New Mexico Timber Company began clearcutting the forests of the Baca Ranch (clearcutting is a logging practice in which all trees are cleared from an area).  In fact, the owner of New Mexico Timber, T. P. Gallagher, Jr., stated about the timber on the Baca Location that his company “intended to log it all” (Anschuetz 2007).  Chagrined at the harm that this practice was causing to the land, James Dunigan sued the owners of the timber interests in 1964.  Clearcutting continued for the next seven years as a legal battle was waged between the Dunigans and New Mexico Timber, until Dunigan purchased the timber interests back from the company in 1971, ending clearcutting on the Baca Ranch.  He bought back the timber rights for $1.25 million, which was a hefty 50% of the $2.5 million that he had spent eight years prior to purchase the entire ranch.  Author Kurt Anschuetz pays tribute to the good land stewardship of the man from Abilene as such: “Dunigan… went to extraordinary lengths, as shown by his lawsuit against New Mexico Timber, Inc., to try to restrain wasteful land use. Further, his companies eventually sold the Baca Location back to the public after his death…It is clear that Dunigan was interested in long-term conservation and went to great lengths to restore and sustain the property’s scenic qualities.”  Without Dunigan’s efforts, the scenic and environmental values of the Caldera might today be substantially diminished because of clear-cutting, and were it not for Dunigan’s wish that the Baca Ranch be sold to the American people upon his death, it is not unreasonable to assume that in 2000 the land would have been sold to private interests, precluding the creation of the Valles Caldera National Preserve.
3. After 140 years, the Baca Ranch was purchased by the American people.  Q. What do the following have in common:  Jemez National Monument (1916-1932), Pajarito National Park (1916-1932), Jemez Crater National Park (1939), Valle Grande National Park (1961), Valles Caldera National Park (1979)?  A. All of these names represent unsuccessful efforts by local residents and political leaders throughout the 20th century to have the Baca Ranch purchased on behalf of the American people (the years represent when each proposal was floated).  For nearly a century, these efforts failed, until the Dunigan family sold the ranch to the American people in 2000 for $101 million, with the money coming from the Land and Water Conservation Fund.  Given that there had been so much energy invested for so many decades in finding a way for the Baca Ranch to become public land, without success, it was a remarkable confluence of events and circumstance that enabled New Mexico’s representatives from both political parties (as well as the President of the United States) to work together and find the political will to compromise on a deal that enabled the Baca Ranch, at long last, to be preserved into perpetuity.

The April 11, 2009 issue of “The American Surveyor” has a detailed account by Fred Roeder of the saga of Don Luis María Cabeza de Baca, and his actions that led to the creation of the Baca Ranch (Baca Location No. 1) and in 2000, the Valles Caldera National Preserve.

Don Luis was a descendent of the original Cabeza de Baca, who was awarded his name by King Sancho VII of Navarre (a kingdom that includes what is now Pamplona, Spain) in 1212. This royal title was conferred upon him due to his key role in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa on July 12, 1212, a decisive battle of the Reconquista, the long period in the Middle Ages in which various European kingdoms gradually expelled the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula.

In 1212, the Moorish army was situated to the south of the Sierra Morena mountains in Andalucia (southern Spain). The Moors had blocked the Despeñaperros Pass through the mountains, and consequently the Sierra Morenas served as a seemingly impenetrable fortress defending the Moors from the Spanish army to the north. However, a local shepherd named Martin de Alhaja knew of a pass through the Sierra Morenas unknown to the Moors, through which the Spanish army might penetrate the mountains and surprise the Moorish army on the other side. Alhaja informed the Spanish of this route, and said he would place a cow’s skull in the pass to mark the secret route for the Spanish army. The Spanish did find this marker, and pierced the mountains through this hidden pass, defeating the Moors in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. King Sancho VII subsequently awarded Martin de Alhaja the title “Cabeza de Baca,” which means “Cow’s Head” in Spanish.

Six centuries after this turning point in Spanish history, Cabeza de Baca’s descendent, Don Luis María Cabeza de Baca, petitioned the Spanish government in Durango, Mexico, for a land grant in 1821.  The Spanish crown acceded to this request and awarded Cabeza de Baca a large tract of land currently occupied by the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico.

The Cabeza de Baca family eventually ended up losing this land grant.  After legal wrangling, murder, an act of Congress, and a signature by President James Buchanan, the descendents of Don Luis María Cabeza de Baca were allowed to choose five separate 100,000 acre floats of land in the New Mexico Territory (which at the time consisted of present-day New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Colorado) to compensate them for the loss of their original grant.  The first location they chose, the “Baca Location No. 1,” encompassed most of the Valles Caldera of the Jemez Mountains of Northern New Mexico, and ultimately became the Valles Caldera National Preserve.

Read more about Don Luis María Cabeza de Baca’s saga, and how his actions ultimately led to the creation of the Baca Ranch (Baca Location No. 1), most of which in 2000 ultimately became the Valles Caldera National Preserve, here in “The American Surveyor.”