Category Archives: Uncategorized

A New Mexico Wilderness Festival and Summer Equipment Swap

WildFest 2007
Produced by the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance
Date and Time

Saturday May 19th 10 to 4
And Sunday May 20th 11 to 4
Equipment Check in Friday May 18th 4 to 8

142 Truman NE
Albuquerque, NM 87108

A Spring and Summer garage sale. Clean out the garage and sell the old stuff so you can buy new.

* Kayaks
* Canoes
* Backpacks
* Sleeping bags
* Tents
* Cooking gear
* camping, climbing, spelunking and hiking gear
* Sell your gear to the public for 20% commission

Vendors

* Backpacks
* Sleeping bags
* Outdoor clothing
* Tents
* Adventure Racing Clubs
* Kayaking Whitewater clubs
* Hiking clubs
* Sports and Outdoor shops
* Outdoor and Fitness magazines
* National forest service: Carson, Cibola, Gila, Santa Fe, Lincoln
* BLM
* State of New Mexico: The Roadrunner
* City of Albuquerque: bike paths, Trolley

Backpacking and hiking seminars

* How to pack light
* How to buy, fit and pack the right pack
* No trace camping
* Wilderness First Aid
* Gourmet Wilderness Cooking
* Layering Techniques
* Intro to Map Reading
* Outdoor Photography

Stage

* Acoustical Folk and Bluegrass acoustical
* Speakers
* Contest.

1. Aldo Leopold look alike contest.
2. Kids Wilderness art contest/ next year’s poster

http://www.nmwild.org/events/wildfest-2007

A Past Worth Preserving

A Past Worth Preserving – New York Times By RICHARD MOE, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation

Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon, known as the world’s longest art gallery because it contains more than 10,000 petroglyphs, could soon be home to nearly 2,000 oil and gas wells. With them will come hundreds of miles of pipeline, compressor stations, new roads and hundreds of heavy trucks whose vibrations and dust can cause irreversible damage to ancient rock art.

Agua Fria National Monument in Arizona, abundant in archeological sites, is attracting growing numbers of visitors from nearby Phoenix seeking recreation, too many of them unfortunately in off-road vehicles. From 2000 to 2004, their number increased fivefold. In spite of the growth in visitors, which increases the threat of looting and vandalism, there is still only one ranger to protect the monument.

Similarly affected by these vehicles is Gold Butte, near Las Vegas. A recent study by volunteers monitoring vandalism at Gold Butte showed a 366 percent increase in major damage to cultural sites in the area from 2004 to 2005, including numerous incidents of graffiti and bullet holes in petroglyph panels. The same sad story is too familiar elsewhere.

More federal financing is needed to protect these places and to survey archeological sites. Only about 6 percent of Bureau of Land Management lands have been surveyed. And we can’t protect these sites if we don’t know where they are. While much of this land is generating huge oil and gas revenue, some reasonable share of that revenue should be returned to care for these sites.

Preserving Sunflowers

ABQJOURNAL: Federal Officials Seek Critical Habitat for Pecos Sunflower Associated Press

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to designate as critical habitat nearly 1,600 acres for the Pecos sunflower — a native plant protected under the Endangered Species Act.

The showy plant survives in fewer than two dozen locations in the desert wetlands of New Mexico and West Texas. The critical habitat include areas of Chaves, Cibola, Guadalupe, Socorro and Valencia counties in New Mexico, and Pecos and Reeves counties in Texas.

“The future of this plant can be secured through habitat protection, restoration projects and maintenance of core populations,” said Benjamin Tuggle, Southwest regional director for the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Public comments on the proposal are being accepted until May 29.

In designating an area as critical habitat, the Endangered Species Act requires that economic and other impacts be considered. If the benefits of excluding an area outweigh the benefits of including it, the U.S. Department of Interior may exclude an area from critical habitat, unless that would result in the extinction of a threatened or endangered species.

The Pecos sunflower was added to the federal list of threatened and endangered species in 1999. It’s similar in appearance to the common sunflower, but it has a cluster of smaller sunflowers at the tip, which are slightly reddish in color. It grows only in saturated soils such as desert wetlands and flowers from August to October.

The Fish and Wildlife Service said the Pecos sunflower’s survival is vulnerable due to aquifer depletion, diversions of surface water, filling of wetlands for conversion to dry land and potential competition with nonnative invasive species.

[mjh: if you want to comment, you’ll have to visit:

The New Mexico Ecological Services Field Office Home – USFWS – Region 2
http://www.fws.gov/southwest/es/NewMexico/]

Bombing Glacier National Park

The Hungry Horse News
Railroad claims more study needed in avalanche zones, By HEIDI DESCH

Plans for controlling avalanches along Glacier National Park’s southern boundary range from doing nothing to using military artillery to remove snow. …

The draft outlines four alternative forms of action. One is a no action alternative which maintains the status quo, a plan that calls for extending and adding snowsheds, an alternative that permits blasting avalanches for up to 10 years with a commitment from the company to construct snowsheds and an alternative that allows the railroad to blast avalanche chutes when need be indefinitely. … [mjh: the blasting option is favored by Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad (BNSF)]

Steve Thompson, with the National Parks Conservation Association, said the snowshed alternative is the “most effective and most safe” approach.

“The best way to deal with it is snowsheds, not by firing Howitzers up into the Park,” he said in an interview this week.

He said the environmental risks are the least with that alternative.

The railroad, however, wants the environmental review to be delayed to allow for more analysis. …

“We know enough to know that the best is snowsheds,” [Thompson] said.

Snowsheds would have to be extended less than a mile. The estimated cost of building the additional snowsheds would be more than $5 million, according to the document.

BNSF has also said it would be too expensive to extend snowsheds in the area.

It’s a response that Thompson doesn’t buy.

Thompson said the company has shown “record profit” recently. The railroad has been running lines profitably across the continental divide for decades and has never had to blast before, he noted.

He said using explosives may be less expensive up front, but building snowsheds would be the best long-term solution.

Park Service Reports Surge In Violence Against Rangers

Park Service Reports Surge In Violence Against Rangers By Matthew Daly, Associated Press

It is getting more dangerous to be a forest ranger — and it is not because of the animals.

Attacks, threats and lesser fights involving Forest Service workers reached an all-time high last year, according to government documents obtained by a public employees advocacy group. Incidents ranged from gunshots to stalking and verbal abuse.

The agency tally shows 477 such reports in 2005, compared with 88 logged a year earlier. The total in 2003 was 104; in 1995, it was 34. …

“Things like off-road vehicles are taking people into the backcountry to get away from all rules of civilization, and trouble appears to be ensuing,” said the [Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility’s] executive director, Jeff Ruch.

Volunteer Opportunities for Public Lands Day, Saturday, 9/30

September 30 – Fence removal, Datil area.

The Double H Ranch was donated to the Rocky Mtn Elk Foundation a few years back to be managed for wildlife. An old fence incorrectly marks the boundary between the Double H and the Cibola National Forest and is a wildlife impediment. We will remove the fence and as many posts as we can. You can camp out on Friday or leave early on Saturday and meet us at the site. We will camp out Saturday night as well and go for a morning hike in this beautiful area or you can head back that evening. It’s about 2.5 hours from ABQ. We’ll help with carpools where we can. Saturday lunch, dinner, and Sunday breakfast provided.

Contact Michael Scialdone, scial@nmwild.org, 505-843-8696 to confirm you can attend or for more info.
NOTE: this project is being done instead of the Cebolla Canyon hike we had planned.

OTHER PROJECTS
Oct 7 – Upper Red River Restoration, hosted by Amigos Bravos. Contact
Rachel Conn at rconn@ammigosbravos.org.

Oct 14 – Ojito Trail Maintenance. Contact Michael Scialdone,
scial@nmwild.org, 505-843-8696 to confirm you can attend or for more info.

Wilderness Designation Trade-Offs Faulted

Wilderness Designation Trade-Offs Faulted By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Staff Writer

Congress is on the verge of approving half a dozen bills that would protect as much as 1 million acres of wilderness areas across the West, but the move has infuriated environmentalists who charge that lawmakers are giving away too much pristine public land to real estate developers and local communities in the process.

If lawmakers finish work on the legislation before adjourning — several bills have passed the House already and a Senate hearing is scheduled for Wednesday — it would amount to the largest designation of new wilderness areas in a decade. But advocates and critics are in a bitter fight over the trade-offs, with opponents saying the public is paying too high a price. …

The new legislative approach reflects a simple political reality: Republican congressional leaders will accept new wilderness areas only if they come with these kinds of trade-offs. Wilderness designations have often been difficult to push through Congress because they are more restrictive than national forest or park designations, and bar man-made structures or roads within their confines.

Agency struggles to stop artifact theft

Agency struggles to stop artifact theft By JULIE CART, Los Angeles Times

Only about 18 percent of Canyons of the Ancients has been inventoried to assess historic, cultural or scientific values. That’s more than the BLM knows about a great many of the places it administers. Less than 6 percent of the 262 million acres managed by the agency has been inventoried for cultural resources.

Although about 263,000 cultural properties have been documented, some archeologists calculate there are more than 4 million sites across the BLM’s lands in the West.

With 100 archeological sites per square mile, Canyons of the Ancients is regarded as the richest trove in an area famous for its remnants of American prehistory — the Four Corners region of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. Yet Canyons of the Ancients has only one law enforcement officer to police the monument’s 250 square miles.

At many federally managed cultural sites, damage is widespread, from casual pilfering by arrowhead collectors to excavating by professional thieves.

U.S. Wilderness Areas & More

List of U.S. Wilderness Areas: Information From Answers.com

Four federal agencies of the United States government administer the U.S. Wilderness Areas, which includes 680 wilderness areas and 105,695,176 acres (427,733 km²). These agencies are:

* United States Forest Service
* United States National Park Service
* United States Bureau of Land Management
* United States Fish and Wildlife Service

This is an area larger than the state of California or Iraq. In Alaska, there are 58,182,216 acres (235,455 km²) of wilderness. This represents about 56% of the wilderness area in the United States. The National Park Service (NPS) has oversight of 44 million acres (180,000 km²) of wilderness at 47 locations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has responsibility for nearly 21 million acres (85,000 km²) in 71 areas. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oversees more than 6.5 million acres (26,000 km²) at 177 unique sites. The Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Forest Service oversees nearly 35 million acres (142,000 km²) of wilderness areas in 407 areas. Some wilderness areas are managed by multiple agencies, so the above totals exceed the actual number of units (680) in the system. In addition, some of the 47 NPS areas with wilderness have multiple units designated as such (for example, Lake Mead National Recreation Area).

Some areas are designated wilderness by state or tribal governments. These are not federal parks.

List of U.S. state and tribal wilderness areas: Information From Answers.com

List of wilderness areas designated by U.S. state and tribal governments. Eight states had designated wilderness programs in 2002 while some other states had designated wildernesses. In 2002, the 9 state programs had 74 wilderness areas with a total protected area of 2,668,903 acres (1,080.5 km²). Florida had had 10 wilderness areas but their authorizing legislation was repealed in 1989.

wilderness study area: Information From Answers.com

A wilderness study area (WSA) contains undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, and managed to preserve its natural conditions. WSAs are not included in the National Wilderness Preservation System until Congress passes wilderness legislation.

On Bureau of Land Management lands, a WSA is a roadless area that has been inventoried (but not designated by Congress) and found to have wilderness characteristics as described in Section 603 of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 and Section 2(c) of the Wilderness Act of 1964. BLM manages wilderness study areas to protect their value as wilderness until Congress decides whether or not to designate them as wilderness. Wilderness bills often include so-called “release language” that eliminates WSAs not selected for wilderness designation.

Some WSA’s are managed exactly the same as wilderness areas, and the rules for others permit activities that are generally excluded from wilderness. For example, some WSAs allow mountain bikes and off-road vehicles.

all BLM WSAs by state

Protected areas of the United States: Information From Answers.com

The protected areas of the United States are managed by an array of different federal, state, tribal and local level authorities and receive widely varying levels of protection. Some areas are managed as wilderness while others are operated with acceptable commercial exploitation. By international definitions, the United States had 7448 protected areas, not counting marine areas, as of 2002. These protected areas cover 578,000 square miles (1,500,000 km²), almost 16% of the land area of the United States. This is also one-tenth of the protected land area of the world. U.S. marine protected areas cover an additional 347,000 square miles (900,000 km²) with varying levels of protection.

Some areas are managed in concert between levels of government.

* List of areas in the National Park System of the United States
* List of National Wild and Scenic Rivers
* List of BLM protected areas
* List of U.S. National Forests, includes National Grasslands
* List of USFS protected areas
* List of U.S. Corps of Engineers protected areas
* List of U.S. marine protected areas
* List of U.S. National Wildlife Refuges
* List of U.S. wilderness areas
* List of Biosphere Reserves in the United States

National Landscape Conservation System: Information From Answers.com

The National Landscape Conservation System (NLCS) houses all of the designated special places on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an agency of the U.S government. This conservation system consists of more than 800 individual units on 26 million acres (105,000 km²), including U.S. National Monuments, National Conservation Areas, U.S. Wilderness Areas, wilderness study areas, National Wild and Scenic Rivers, National Scenic Trails and National Historic Trails.

List of U.S. state parks: Information From Answers.com

Mountain Lion Slide Show Set

ABQjournal: Around New Mexico

Environmental groups Sinapu, Animal Protection of New Mexico and Forest Guardians will present a slide show about mountain lions Friday at REI in Albuquerque.

The program, “Mountain Lions in New Mexico & the West: Natural History, Conservation, & Co-Existence,” will include information about cougar natural history, skills to co-exist with the predators and issues about the state’s cougar management.

Wendy Keefover-Ring, director of Sinapu’s carnivore protection program, and Jon Schwedler, of Animal Protection’s cougar campaign, are touring eight New Mexico cities in advance of New Mexico Game Commission meetings where cougar management will be considered.

The event is at 6 p.m. at REI, 1550 Mercantile NE.

An Evening with David Muench — July 1, 2006

Petroglyph National Monument – Special Events
An Evening with David Muench

Date
July 1, 2006

Times
6:30 – 7:30

Location
Petroglyph National Monument Visitor Center

Contact
Ed Dunn, 505-899-0205 ext. 347

David Muench has been a freelance landscape photographer for over 35 years and has been the primary photographer for over 40 books depicting the wonders of nature. In 1975, he was commissioned to provide photographs for 33 large murals on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, along with 350 smaller pictures, for the permanent exhibition at the Jefferson Expansion Memorial in St. Louis. A resident of New Mexico, he and his wife and author, Ruth Rudner, have most recently produced a book called Our National Parks, which will be on sale in the bookstore.

You are invited to visit with David and ask questions about his photographic and travel experiences in some of the world’s most remote and beautiful regions.

Location: Petroglyph National Monument’s Las Imágenes Visitor Center located at 4735 Unser Blvd. NW at Western Trail. Our gates will open at 6:00. Come early and browse the monument’s Western National Parks Association book store. This program is free and open to the public. No advanced registration is required.

Draft of Park Rules Stresses Conservation

Draft of Park Rules Stresses Conservation By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Staff Writer

The Bush administration has issued new draft guidelines for managing the national parks that make conservation the top priority — ahead of recreation and energy development. …

In a news conference Monday, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said department officials had decided that preserving the country’s parks ranks above any other management goal.

“When there is a conflict between conserving resources unimpaired for future generations and the use of those resources, conservation will be predominant,” Kempthorne said. “That is the heart of these policies and the lifeblood of our nation’s commitment to care for these special places and provide for their enjoyment.”

The Antiquities Act: 100 Years of Saving the Four Corners’ Heritage | Politics | New West Network

The Antiquities Act: 100 Years of Saving the Four Corners’ Heritage | Politics | New West Network By Connie Gotsch

In 1900, President Theodore Roosevelt saw the need for a quick way to set aside important sites without wrangling protective bills through Congress. He asked for the power to create national monuments.

“The first was Devil’s Tower in Wyoming,” says Terry Nichols, a Park Service ranger at Aztec Ruins National Monument, in Aztec, N.M. “The second was El Morro, in New Mexico. Chaco Canyon was the fifth.” Aztec Ruins made the list in 1923, Canyons of the Ancients in 1999.

Canyons of the Ancients may have been late to the list of national monuments, but its cultural resources are unmatched in the country.

“We have the highest site density in the United States,” explains Jacobson. “About 110 archaeological sites per square mile in some parts of the monument.”