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

The Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera National Preserve will conduct the last of its three required annual public meetings for 2010 on Wednesday, Sept 29, at the Preserve’s Science and Education Center in Jemez Springs, from 9:00 AM to noon.

With this event, the Board of Trustees will have conducted all of its public meetings in 2010 in the vicinity of the Caldera and its neighboring communities. This is a welcome departure from its plans of earlier this year, when the Board intended to have its 2010 public meetings hours away from the Preserve in far corners of New Mexico, in places like Roswell and Farmington. The Trust should be applauded for changing the locations of its meetings to better accommodate its neighbors.

However, as VallesCaldera.com has urged in the past, in order to fully accommodate working people in the local community who might wish to participate in these public meetings but cannot because they have jobs, common sense dictates that the Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera should conduct its legally-required public meetings in the evenings or on the weekends.

This strategy, which maximizes participation and community involvement, was employed by the U.S. Forest Service in its recent series of eight meetings throughout Northern New Mexico to receive comment about its proposed alternatives for closing roads in the Santa Fe National Forest. All of these meetings were held in the evenings, except for one meeting which was conducted on a Saturday afternoon.

Unfortunately, only once in the last four years has the Board of Trustees decided to make it easy for people with day jobs to attend its meetings, when they scheduled an evening meeting two summers ago in Los Alamos that was “standing room only.”

The Forest Service clearly demonstrated through the manner in which it scheduled its aforementioned meetings that it was truly interested in having as much community participation and involvement as possible in these events. In contrast, by nearly always scheduling its meetings when most folks are at work, the Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera National Preserve exhibits a lack of concern in maximizing the number of people who participate in these meetings, and suggests an insufficient level of interest in having a face-to-face dialogue with community members who are impacted by the management decisions that they decree.

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 Congressional Budget Office has released a report asserting that passage of S.3452, legislation that would transfer management of the Valles Caldera National Preserve to the National Park Service, would increase federal discretionary spending by $16 million over the 2011-2015 period and by $16 million over the following five years. Read the CBO report here (PDF).

The CBO also predicted that passage of this legislation, which has unanimously cleared the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and is now up for consideration by the full Senate, would not affect revenues and would have no net effect on direct spending.

The report additionally states that the bill would impose no costs on state, local, or tribal governments.

The extra discretionary costs predicted by the CBO would total $1 million annually, which “would be used initially for required management planning and studies and later to improve routine operations and maintenance. In addition, CBO estimates that $22 million would be spent over the next 10 years to develop facilities for maintenance, administrative, and recreation purposes.”

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.