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

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.”