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

Bob Parmenter, the chief scientist at the Valles Caldera National Preserve, provided some insight today about our previous post, describing a blackened San Antonio River that smelled of ash this weekend, as well as a similarly dark and murky East Fork of the Jemez River.

Dr. Parmenter left the following voicemail with VallesCaldera.com today:

[The black flow coming out of the San Antonio] was an ash flow from a flash flood that originated up in Indios Creek Canyon. We had kind of hoped that we wouldn’t get hit that hard with a thunderstorm but we’ve actually had four floods come out of there since the 25th of July — which was the first one — and each one of those brings with it a large amount of ash and organic debris coming down from the burned areas of these watersheds. We’ve also had floods come off into the Rio San Antonio from Cerro Santa Rosa and Cerro Abrigo, and there’s been some ash flows into the Jaramillo Creek Area, which of course eventually will work its way down to the East Fork of the Jemez.

The areas that have not been hit are the upper East Fork of the Jemez in the Valle Grande and the Valle Toledo. The large expanses of grassland have mitigated that because the ash flows coming down the mountains spread out, and the grass filters it, and eventually stops the ash slurry from reaching the stream. So, at least at this point in time, those areas are OK.

But, yes, the Rio San Antonio has had major ash flows down that stream through the Rio San Antonio — through the Valle San Antonio — and we’ve noticed a lot of fish kills along the way, so that’s why we’ve pretty much closed fishing on the Preserve for the rest of the summer.

This morning, VallesCaldera.com conducted an exclusive podcast interview with Dr. Bob Parmenter, the chief scientist of the Valles Caldera National Preserve. You can listen to the podcast here.

Parmenter provided a wide range of information regarding the Las Conchas Fire, including that highly burned forest areas will take up to a century and a half to recover. He also spoke of how the fire, which ignited “one acre of forest every 1.17 seconds for 14 hours,” is still burning underground as it torches through trees’ root structures. “A tree that may look like it escaped the flames just fine — 3 weeks from now can just fall over because all the roots are killed,” he said. He also stated that “a tree that looks like it might have only gotten singed by the heat and only the first ten feet or so might have brown needles, those trees could be dead in two, three, four years.”

The chief scientist also said that elk, deer, mountain lions, and most bears probably emerged unscathed from the fire, but that many songbirds, tree-nesting birds, and tree squirrels probably did not survive the inferno.

Parmenter also painted a distressing picture of the short-term future of the Jemez Mountains as he related a graduate study being conducted that has concluded that “there are many times in the past that the entire Valles Caldera burned over a two year period. So half the Preserve burned one year, and half burned the next year. And so, this type of pattern is not unprecedented either — it shows up in the fire record. So are we into the 2011 and 2012 fire season of two years and we’re going to burn the rest of the Preserve next year? It is not unprecedented.”

The interview also touched on the impacts of the cultural resources on the Caldera, firefighting operations on the Preserve, the chances of monsoons coming, as well as volunteer opportunities to restore the Caldera, and also what he hopes the fire’s impact will be on people’s opinions and behavior:

“I would hope that the trend continues for a wider acceptance of natural fire and prescribed fire as a natural ecosystem process, and that the tolerance for a couple weeks of smoke each summer, or fall if we do fall burns, or early spring if we do spring burns — that having a little smoke in the air is better than having a lot of smoke in the air, because these forests are going to continue to burn, and we either let them burn on our terms, or we let them burn on nature’s terms, and if it’s on nature’s terms, it’s very difficult to stop,” he said. ” So I would hope that, as we look back on this, that Cerro Grande, Las Conchas, and the CFLRP [Consolidated Forest Landscape Restoration Program], will all come together and have the citizens of, basically, all forested ecosystems in the west, really understand that there are natural ways to manage these forests by reintroducing fire and keeping the fuel loads down.”

The following is a transcription of key topics of the podcast:

Continue reading ‘Exclusive podcast interview with chief scientist of Caldera: Intense burn areas won’t recover for 100-150 years; Many birds and tree squirrels did not survive; Wet winter not expected; Fires in Jemez often occurred historically in consecutive years’

State Senator Tim Eichenberg (D-Bernalillo) has introduced a memorial that would request that the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish work with the National Park Service to “determine the feasibility of conducting limited-entry bow hunts for elk in the backcountry of Bandelier National Monument.”

The bill states that a rationale for this goal is the proposal to transfer management of the Valles Caldera National Preserve to the National Park Service, which would permit hunting on the Caldera. According to the Eichenberg’s memorial, “given that Valles Caldera National Preserve is contiguous to Bandelier National Monument, establishing a hunting program in the backcountry of Bandelier National Monument should also be considered.”

The text of the memorial is shown below:

Continue reading ‘State Senate bill introduced to urge study of feasibility of bow hunting at Bandelier’

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.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week declined to provide immediate federal protection to the Jemez Mountain Salamander, an amphibian found only in the Jemez Mountains.

The FWS did admit that the salamander is worthy of such protection, but indicated that it is too busy at this time to add it to a candidate species list. The agency stated that it will add the amphibian to such a list and develop a proposed rule to list it “when priorities allow.” Click here to read an Associated Press article about this news.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has been studying whether to offer protection to the salamander for the last year, as a result of an agreement between the agency and Santa Fe-based conservation group WildEarth Guardians.

According to the conservation group, 90% of the salamander’s habitat is in the Santa Fe National Forest. The species can be found in the Valles Caldera, both in the areas of the Caldera managed by the National Forest, as well as the portions of the Caldera managed by the Valles Caldera National Preserve.

The amphibian is small — its total length is between 1.5 and 4.5 inches, of which about half is the tail, according to the New Mexico Game and Fish Department. “This salamander typically lives on shady, wooded sites at elevations of 7,500 to 9,500 feet,” according to the Department. “In these habitats, characterized by coniferous trees, salamanders spend much of their time under and in fallen logs. Old, stabilized talus slopes, especially those with a good covering of damp soil and plant debris, are important types of cover for this species.” The animal has no lungs, and thus must remain moist to breathe, according to WildEarth Guardians. It’s carnivorous and nocturnal, spending much of its time underground, eating insects found at night.

Yesterday’s edition of the Santa Fe New Mexican featured a story by reporter Staci Matlock about the recent release of a GAO audit of the Valles Caldera Trust. The article begins as follows:

The group charged with managing the Valles Caldera National Preserve is five years behind schedule and suffers from weak planning, a new federal report says.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office, which released its latest review of the preserve on Oct. 30, notes the Valles Caldera Trust has fallen short in its efforts to meet mandates Congress set for the Jemez Mountains property. Most problems stem from a mandate that the preserve pay for itself and be free of federal financial help by 2015.

The findings likely will bolster a push by a Santa Fe-based group, Caldera Action, to dismantle the trust and place the preserve under National Park Service control.

“Our thoughts on the report is that it confirms what the earlier report shows and that they really haven’t made any progress,” Tom Jervis, a Caldera Action board member, said. “They say they can run the place like a business, but they can’t.”

Jervis also indicated in the article that Caldera Action has collected over 1,500 petition signatures in support of a plan to have the National Park Service assume management of the Valles Caldera as a National Park Preserve. This idea is currently being studied by the NPS at the request of New Mexico’s U.S. Senators, Jeff Bingaman (D) and Tom Udall (D), and is supported by the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, Audubon Society, Sierra Club, and New Mexico Wilderness Alliance.

Click here to read the full article.

An audio recording of the most recent public meeting of the Valles Caldera Trust is now available at VallesCaldera.com.  Click here to listen to this meeting in its entirety, and see below for a detailed overview of the meeting.

VallesCaldera.com will endeavor to provide online access to audio recordings of all future public meetings of the Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera National Preserve.  Until this point, such recordings have never before been made available online to the public.

Among the developments from the meeting, which was conducted on Sept. 29, 2009 in Las Cruces, it was revealed that Preserve management is now in possession of a draft copy of a Government Accountability Office audit of the Valles Caldera Trust.  This audit has been mentioned by Sen. Tom Udall as a tool that that will help the New Mexico Congressional Delegation “take stock of where we are today” as a precursor for determining “the options in the future” regarding management possibilities for the Valles Caldera.  The GAO audit (the contents of which the Trust could not reveal) should be released to Congress on Oct. 31, according to Trust Chairman Stephen Henry.

Additionally, it was disclosed that Trust management has established a maximum potential total capacity of the Valles Caldera National Preserve during its summer recreation season of 23,000 visitor-days (which is the amount of total days that each visitor could spend on the Preserve. For example, one person visiting for three days as well as three people visiting for one day would both yield three visitor days). For the sake of comparison, the Preserve’s neighboring Bandelier National Monument hosted 243,765 visitors in 2006, which is more than ten times this amount (the most recent official figures provided by the Trust to Congress show that 15,000 people visited the Preserve in 2008). A Preserve representative stated that maximum visitor capacity would generate $865,000 (which is 20.2% of the most recent estimation provided to Congress of total annual Preserve expenditures of $4,278,508).

The meeting also featured an extensive presentation on the impact of grazing on the riparian areas of the Caldera, with a detailed discussion about the overall health of the two main Caldera watersheds.  Dr. Colleen Caldwell, who performed the presentation, declared that the Valles Caldera is home to “the greatest density of salmonids seen in the intermountain West” and that the lower East Fork of the Jemez River “would be a wonderful place” to reintroduce the Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout (see this detailed U.S. Forest Service report on the Cutthroat in PDF).  She also advised that some streambank restoration work on the East Fork needs to take place in order to maximize the health of that river and its population of fish.

A compilation of the highlights of the meeting is as follows.  Each highlight is preceded by the timestamp for the point on the recording that the discussion or quote takes place.

1:27 — Chairman Stephen Henry stated that the Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera National Preserve is “not governed by the Open Meetings Act.”

1:42 — Henry mentioned that the Trust has received a draft of an audit of the Valles Caldera National Preserve that has been conducted by the Government Accountability Office.  He stated that the Trust is preparing a response, but is not permitted to discuss the findings of the audit until it is officially released.  The GAO will submit the report to relevant Congressional committees on Oct. 31, 2009.

4:15 — Henry stated that he was reelected by the board of Trustees to be its chairman “for however long, if and when the Trust continues to exist.”  Ed Tinsley will remain vice-chair of the Trust.

Continue reading ‘Audio from most recent Trust meeting now available here; GAO audit of Trust to be released Oct. 31; maximum summer capacity at Preserve set at 23,000 visitor days’