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Saturday, July 05, 2008

Sabinoso Moves Closer to Wilderness Designation


Associated Press
       SABINOSO WILDERNESS — Only the occasional flight of a hawk or jump of a rabbit reminds visitors to the proposed Sabinoso wilderness area in northeastern New Mexico that the day is passing.
    "It's just you and nature here," said Sam DesGeorges, manager of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Taos Field Office on a recent visit to the proposed wilderness area. "There's no cell phone coverage, no roads. If anything happens, you have to depend on your own skills and the skills of people you are with."
    The 17,638-acre Sabinoso area has been a wilderness study area since the 1970s.
    Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill sponsored by Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., to formally designate it a wilderness area. If approved by the Senate and signed into law, it will become the first BLM-managed wilderness area in northern New Mexico.
    The land — about 40 miles east of Las Vegas, N.M. — is covered with jumbled stands of junipers and pinions, cholla cactus and scrub oak and is home to elk, mule deer, turkeys, Swainson's hawks and red-tailed hawks.
    The mesas within the Sabinoso area rise more than 1,000 feet above the plains on what geologists call the Canadian Escarpment. Chinle shale dating to the Triassic period is crowned with Dakota sandstone from the Cretacious, creating strips of burnished red and gold ringing the mesas.
    Udall has ridden into the Sabinoso area on horseback.
    "I was struck by the feeling that this area offers something unique to the surrounding communities and to visitors," he said. "The Sabinoso makes you feel like you've stepped into another world outside of time. The land, the trees, the animals all seem like they have been there forever."
    Private land surrounds the proposed wilderness, and some private in-holdings are down in Canon Largo.
    Vehicles and power tools are prohibited in designated wilderness areas and no improvements are allowed.
    If the area becomes designated wilderness, that doesn't mean the government has to provide access to it, DesGeorges said.
    Those issues have created critical challenges for the Sabinoso area.
    Udall's bill grandfathers in existing grazing rights. About 12 permitees hold leases to graze up to 1,700 head of cattle over the course of a year.
    But at least one landowner with a family ranch in Canon Largo is concerned about how he'll access and maintain the road through the Sabinoso area to reach his property.
    "I don't mind them making it a wilderness area as long as I have vehicle access to my property," said Jim Carter, whose family bought the Canon Largo ranch in the 1970s before it was a wilderness study area. "Vehicle is the key word here. In other wilderness, they allow access only via horseback or foot. You can't operate a place that way."
    Carter, who lives in Rio Rancho, said there's only one road into Canon Largo that gives him access to his property and that roadway periodically gets washed out by rain.
    He's concerned about how he'll maintain that road, if improvements are prohibited under the wilderness designation.
    Visitors must obtain permission from area ranchers to access Sabinoso.
    DesGeorges said the BLM is working with private landowners to create public access to trail heads around the Sabinoso.
    People can visit the Sabinoso by contacting the BLM for a list of property owners they can call for permission to use private roads to reach the wilderness.

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