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New West Feature
Chaco Canyon: Pave The Road or Stick With Gravel?
A fight over the future of one of New Mexico’s greatest historic treasures could soon find a resolution when local county officials and the federal government finally answer a nearly seven year-old question: Should the road to Chaco Canyon be paved?
A visit to Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a United Nations World Heritage Site in remote northwest New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, requires commitment: Potable water is available, but scarce, and driving a car down a 13-mile stretch of dirt road toward the park entrance is often a teeth-chattering, suspension-straining experience. The road is rough enough to keep away large crowds of tourists and tour buses common at nearby Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.
Once inside Chaco Canyon, cell phone service disappears and the blacktop picks up again, leaving you alone to wander about some of the Southwest’s most historically significant and spectacular Ancestral Puebloan ruins.
National Park Service regulations and prohibitions are less restrictive at Chaco than at Mesa Verde and other historical parks, where ranger escorts are often required to visit cliff dwellings and ruins.
The road to Chaco Canyon, San Juan County Road 7950, could be the key to the future of the park.
[more]New West Feature
Colorado Shuffles Parks, Wildlife Departments
After 40 years of divorce, the Colorado Division of Wildlife and Colorado State Parks are set to become a single agency again, joined at the hip as a way to save money and create efficiencies in state government.
The two agencies, formerly hitched together in the 1960s and split in 1972, manage more than 300 state wildlife areas, 42 state parks and Colorado’s hunting and angling programs. They will become the Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife on July 1, consolidating all their operations under a single umbrella.
Colorado isn’t the only Western state to consider shuffling around its parks and wildlife agencies this year in an effort to save money.
New West Feature
Colorado’s Roadless Rule Debate: How Did We Get Here?
Roadless areas are not quite wilderness, but they’re not quite freely open to development either.
They’re somewhere in between, particularly in Colorado, where the fate of roadway-free, undeveloped national forest land has been rancorously contested for a decade and could soon end up with a management scheme entirely unique to the state.
On April 14, the U.S. Forest Service and the state of Colorado unveiled a final draft of a federal rule that will govern how more than 4 million acres of roadless land in Colorado’s national forests are managed. The Forest Service is asking for public feedback on the draft rule through July 14, with the feds’ final blessing expected sometime late this year or in early 2012.
If the Forest Service finalizes the rule, it would mean roadless areas in Colorado will probably get different treatment than similar roadless areas elsewhere in the country. The Colorado rule involves two different levels of roadless area protection, one keeping the land more wild than the other, while allowing some logging of trees killed by mountain pine beetles and some rights-of-way for oil, natural gas, coal and ski area development.
[more]New West Feature
New Mexico’s Rail Runner Express: Groundbreaking or a Boondoggle?
Riding the Rail Runner Express commuter train between Albuquerque and Santa Fe is a distinctly New Mexican experience.
As soon as the train doors close with a “Looney Toons”-style Road Runner “meep meep” chime, the crew warns passengers not to snap photos out of the windows because the train will soon cross the Tewa Pueblo and other sacred Native American lands in the Rio Grande Valley.
With a wave of GOP hostility toward commuter rail projects across the country, that experience is uncertain following the election last fall of Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, who has long questioned the need and cost of the Rail Runner Express, the first inter-city commuter rail project in the Rocky Mountain region.
One of Democratic former Gov. Bill Richardson’s most visible legacies, the Rail Runner Express connects cities in New Mexico’s most populous region, ushering commuters from the state’s largest city to the state capital.
New West Feature
In New Mexico, Fixing The ‘Devil’s Highway’
It used to be the “Devil’s Highway,” but now U.S. Highway 491 is just a deathtrap.
Beginning in May, a $31 million federal stimulus grant will help New Mexico highway officials transform U.S. 491 on the Navajo Reservation from one of the most deadly highways in the state to a major four-lane expressway seemingly passing through the middle of nowhere.
Running for more than 100 miles from Gallup north to the Colorado state line, the narrow two-lane U.S. 491 has a traffic fatality rate 3.6 times the state average as about 9,300 vehicles travel the highway each day as it traverses McKinley and San Juan counties.
“It’s a lifeline between Gallup and the Farmington area and up to Colorado and Utah,” said Joe Henley, transportation manager for the Gallup-McKinley County School District, who has been driving U.S. 491 for 40 years. “There’s lots of traffic, lots of trucks on that road. It’s very important.”
[more]New West Feature
Is Utah’s Energy Office Designed to Oppose Federal Drilling Rules?
After Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Bureau of Land Management chief Bob Abbey announced in December that much untrammeled public land across the West may soon receive the new “Wild Lands” designation, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert warned Congress in March that the designation will cost Utah billions, while others in the GOP called the move a “land grab” that sent “shockwaves” across the West.
The announcement provoked Utah state lawmakers and the state’s oil and gas industry, whose temper was still simmering after Salazar rescinded 77 oil and gas leases around eastern Utah national parks in 2009. It was when those leases were being sold that activist Tim DeCristopher staged his famous protest, for which he was recently convicted and faces prison time.
[more]New West Feature
Small-Time Prospectors See Big Future in New Mexico Uranium
A former geologist for the Bureau of Land Management in Moab, Utah, Frank Bain says he’s betting his future on a small uranium claim in rural Catron County, New Mexico.
Staked when Bain worked for Vane Minerals in 2009, the Deer Claim, about 15 miles north of Datil, New Mexico, ended up in Bain’s hands after a disagreement with his former employer. Now he’s part of a wave of small-time uranium prospectors taking a second look at a remote part of New Mexico long left in the dust by uranium companies looking for ore in the 1960s and 1970s.
“There’s actually a proven resource of three to four million pounds of uranium,” Bain said, referring to the Deer Claim.
New Mexico is seeing renewed interest in both conventional and in situ uranium mining and exploration.
[more]New West Feature
Future of Southwest’s Mexican Gray Wolf Uncertain
Like many outfitters and ranchers in Catron County, New Mexico — one of the counties of the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 70s and 80s — Tom Klumker wants Mexican gray wolves out of the Gila National Forest, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been releasing the endangered wolves into the wild since 1998.
“They’ve been successful at wiping out a bunch of livestock and hurting a bunch of ranchers,” Klumker said. “As a result, they’ve made a big difference on the livestock industry in Catron County. I don’t think we need them. The early settlers worked very hard to get rid of both the wolf and the grizzly for a very good reason.”
Klumker, based in Glenwood, N.M., is a board member of the vehemently anti-wolf Americans for the Preservation of Western Environment, or APWE, and the Southwest Director of the New Mexico Council of Outfitters and Guides, a group now part of a new Fish and Wildlife Service Mexican Gray Wolf Recovery Planning Team. The team will create a new recovery plan that may eventually lead the way to a healthy and sustainable population of Mexican wolves in New Mexico and Arizona.
[more]New West Feature
New Mexico Governor Takes New Approach to Environment, Energy Industry
When Republican Susana Martinez was elected to succeed two-term Democrat Bill Richardson as governor of New Mexico, voters knew they were getting a conservative budget-slasher who declared the Land of Enchantment is “open for business.”
But the Susana Martinez administration New Mexicans ended up with was a little cozier with the oil and gas industry and more skeptical of climate change and renewable energy programs than many expected.
On her first day on the job, Martinez issued an executive order halting the publication of all pending state rules and regulations, including a greenhouse gas emissions regulation and another rule restricting wastewater discharge from dairies. Environmentalists sued, and in late January the New Mexico Supreme Court overruled Martinez, saying she is not above the law. Following the court’s decision, the rules were published Jan. 31.
[more]New West Feature
The New Future for Valles Caldera Depends on Action by a New Congress
“It’s Your Experiment” is the official slogan of northern New Mexico’s Valles Caldera National Preserve, a broad volcanic valley in the heart of the Jemez Mountains near Los Alamos.
The slogan doesn’t refer to a science experiment, but to the preserve itself and its unorthodox management scheme. Congress created the preserve in 2000 to be managed by the Valles Caldera Trust, a wholly-owned government corporation with the mandate to make the national preserve financially self-sustaining by 2015.
With that goal looking increasingly unlikely, a Sen. Jeff Bingaman-led effort to end the experiment failed in December when the lame duck Congress sidelined an omnibus public lands measure that included a bill that would have transferred management of Valles Caldera from the trust to the National Park Service. The NPS manages the adjacent Bandelier National Monument and oversees many of the nation’s other national preserves.
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