Men Who Matched the Mountains: The Forest Service in the Southwest

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*The Apache and Coronado National Forests extend into New Mexico but these are described in the previous chapter on National Forests in Arizona.

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Carson National Forest

There was a time when the nearly million-and-a-half acres of the Carson National Forest provided one of the great sheep-raising areas of the West. Thousands upon thousands of sheep were moved into the Forest for summer range. Back in the days when Aldo Leopold was Supervisor of the Carson Forest before World War I, the first steps were taken to reduce the number of sheep because of the heavy overgrazing. During World War I, the allowables were increased, and one large permittee alone was running 23,000 sheep on the forest. Bob Ground recalls that there were 52,000 on the San Antonio District alone. The present allowable on the whole Carson is 43,000 sheep (and goats) and 9700 cattle (and horses). These 43,000 sheep and 9700 cattle are owned by more than 500 ranchers, the largest number of permittees of any Forest in the Southwest.

The Carson also supports a wide variety of wildlife, including deer, elk, antelope, bear, turkey, and grouse. The largest elk herd in New Mexico grazes on the Carson.

The Forest is managed to supply adequate forage for both the wildlife and domestic animals without overgrazing and damaging the watershed.

An example of what can happen to a watershed was the Taos Canyon area, which was heavily cutover for timber. The Forest Service acquired the land and in 1955 began a program of rehabilitation.

The late Fred Miller, of Taos, whose career in the Forest Service spanned more than 40 years, once said that the greatest accomplishment of the Forest Service on the Carson Forest was the stopping of erosion in the high grazing areas.

"Just look at Taos Canyon," he said. I can remember when that was just a goat range. In fact, nothing but arroyos starting. But go up there now. I happened to go up and help one of the ranchers here with his cattle in that particular area, and by golly, in a good year grass is belly-deep to a horse. I can remember when it was good for nothing but goat pasture, with erosion and nothing else."

The Carson has been a good area for logging through the years and has an allowable annual cut of 30,000,000 board feet. But the fastest growing business of the Carson is recreation. Spectacular scenery, cool summer climate, fabulous hunting and fishing, and deep snow for winter sports provide outstanding opportunities for recreation. Today, summer resorts that used to close on Labor Day or right after the hunting season now stay open all year long to provide facilities for winter as well as summer visitors. Snowmobiling is the new winter sport attracting thousands of winter sports fans to the Carson area, while skiing continues to grow in popularity beyond all estimates of a few years ago.

At the edge of the Carson National Forest northwest of Abiquiu on U. S. 84 is Beaver National Forest, the smallest National Forest in the world. This Forest in miniature covers 1-1/4 acres at the famous Ghost Ranch Museum. It is man-made, developed by the Charles Lathrop Pack Forestry Foundation with the aid of the Forest Service.

In 1970 the museum was transferred to the Forest Service by the Pack Foundation to ensure continuation of the facility as a source of public enjoyment and information on the flora, fauna, and geology of the area and proper multiple use management of forests and rangelands.

The tiny Forest within the museum, using half-scale models, demonstrates the use being made of the recreation, water, timber, forage, wildlife, and fish resources of the National Forests. The figures inhabiting the Forest include cattle, sheep, deer, turkey, quail, duck, and people enjoying a family outing. There also is a fire tower with a lookout on duty and two loggers are busy cutting down a tree.

Cibola National Forest

Reminiscing about his long years as Supervisor of the Cibola National Forest (1949-63), F. J. (Jim) Monighan decided that one of his biggest jobs (and perhaps the biggest headache) on the Cibola is "recreation on the Sandias and part of the Manzanos."

"There are hundreds of thousands of people that go to the Sandias every year for picnics and for overnight camping," he said. "Just to keep the areas maintained and cleaned up, and everyone happy, is quite a job for both the Supervisor's staff and the Rangers. It seems as if we were just maintaining and rebuilding recreation areas in the Sandias all the time."

Providing recreation facilities on the Sandias and other parts of the Cibola will be a continuing task for the Forest Service, for the number of recreation visits is increasing each year. The number jumped from 82,000 in 1943 to half a million in 1968.

But as big as recreation is, this is only a small part of the Forest Service's job on the Cibola. There's timber harvest and grassland and mountain pasture grazing, watershed rehabilitation, game and fish improvement work, and roads and trails construction.

The Cibola, like the Coronado, is a collection of scattered forest islands extending over a wide area of western and central New Mexico—more than a million and a half acres in ten separated sections of forest.

The Cibola National Forest is on both sides of the Rio Grande, and the headwaters of both the Rio Puerco and the Rio Salado are within the Forest—which makes watershed management an important activity. The Cibola undertook its first watershed project—the Bernalillo Watershed Project—on the northwest slopes of the Sandia Mountains in 1954. The pilot project was designed to protect the community of Bernalillo from floods which occurred every time a major storm struck the mountain slopes. The check dams, planting, and re-establishment of vegetative cover provided the protection that Bernalillo now enjoys.

As a result of this pilot project, watershed projects were undertaken in the San Mateo Mountains and several thousand acres of rangeland were successfully treated and stabilized for intensive grazing management. Additional projects are being undertaken as the forest management plan for the Cibola progresses.

The grasslands and mountain pastures of the Cibola have been grazed since the days of the Spanish conquistadores—and, unfortunately, many thousands of acres were overgrazed so that today there are still scars of early-day, unmanaged grazing.

Part of the Cibola's activity today seeks to heal and erase the old scars and restore the waist-high seas of grass that the historians have described. Present forage availability limits the number of cattle and horses to 17,000 and sheep and goats to 11,600.

Because of its central New Mexico location, the Cibola has an unusual variety of special use permits, including television transmitters atop Sandia Crest, telephone microwave stations, military, state, and commercial radio networks, power lines, and oil and gas pipelines, and a tramway.

The Gila National Forest

Zane Smith's introduction to the Forest Service in the 1920's was a three-day fire training session on Hillsboro Peak, and then helping to install some lightning protection on the old wooden lookout at Diamond Peak where he was to be stationed for the summer.

"We were having some dry lightning storms," Smith recalled. "There was no lightning even close; otherwise I would have left the tower and gone down into the cabin as we were instructed to do as a protective measure. All of a sudden a bolt of lightning struck the tower and burned big black strips down the legs where the copper wire was located, knocked the phone out and blinded me for about 30 minutes. It was tremendous white light and it just left me blinded. I couldn't see, and it just about scared me to death. I went down to the cabin, and I was still pretty scared. The lightning hit a big old fir tree right back of the cabin and knocked a huge slab off. This slab bounced over and hit the back of this log cabin. On the inside, we had an apple box tacked up there in which we kept our tin dishes, tin cups and so forth. All the tinware fell off on the floor, and the rattle and tremendous crash of thunder just about spooked me off the mountain. I almost quit the Forest Service and ended my career right there. Actually I wasn't hurt, and I'm sure my safety was due to the fact we had installed this lightning protection."

Smith did not quit the Forest Service that summer. He went on to a distinguished career. And the Forest Service went on to develop new and more effective methods of combating fire danger.

Lightning caused many of the fires on the Gila Forest in past years and still does today. Dangerous, explosive conditions can develop in the Forest during the dry season.

A series of disastrous fires burned 56,000 acres in 1951, 10,000 acres in 1953, and 11,000 acres in 1956.

To combat the high fire danger, the Gila now seasonally employs, in addition to its trained lookouts and ground attack crews, all the modern air attack methods available, including aerial observers; smokejumpers; helitack crews, who are trained firemen transported by helicopter; tanker aircraft carrying fire retardants; and aircraft equipped to drop fire-fighting equipment, food, and water by parachute to firefighters in remote wilderness and primitive areas. With this multipronged attack, fires on the Gila are now being kept to a minimum. And while lightning still causes fires, the record indicates that most disastrous fires on the Gila were those caused by careless or unthinking people.

The largest of the National Forests in New Mexico, the Gila covers a total of 2,701,614 acres—an area twice the size of the State of Delaware.

Because it is not as close to large centers of population as other Forests in the Southwest, not as many recreation seekers were using the Gila resources in past years as visited in other Forests. That situation is beginning to change. Sightseers, especially, are attracted to the Gila for its great variety of attractions: the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, now accessible by paved road; other Indian ruins, mountain streams and fishing lakes; a growing number of camp and picnic sites; wilderness areas; and scenic loop roads out from Silver City, headquarters of the Gila. Annual visitor days are estimated at nearly 600,000.

The Gila National Forest surrounds the Black Range and Gila Primitive Areas and Gila Wilderness. (These are discussed in another chapter). With so much game habitat, the Gila is a big attraction for hunters. More than 20,000 are tallied on the Gila and about one in five gets a deer. A few are lucky enough to get an elk or a bear.

The Gila has been ranching country for a hundred years and about 160 ranchers now run 29,394 cattle on the Forest under grazing permit. As with other Forests, the Gila is working under a range management plan to provide additional forage whenever possible. Stabilization of key watersheds is underway, and the Gila is also engaged in a one-year road and trail construction and reconstruction program.

Lincoln National Forest

The Lincoln National Forest is Smokey Bear country. This was the Forest where Smokey, the living image of the Forest Service Fire Prevention Poster Bear, was rescued—badly burned and clinging to a tree during the Capitan Gap fire of 1950.

Probably to many who see the fire prevention posters, Smokey is only a picture. But to the people of Capitan and the Lincoln Forest country, Smokey is real, for they remember the fire that burned 17,000 acres, and they can still see the scars in the Forest from the tragic carelessness of someone throwing a cigarette or match from a car window. They remember, too, that human carelessness provided the spark for the fire that devoured 25,000 acres in four hours in 1953.

At Capitan there is a museum dedicated to Smokey. The fire lookout tower which first spotted the Capitan Gap fire is Smokey Bear Lookout.

The Lincoln National Forest is a high fire danger area because of weather conditions resulting from hot, dry winds from the Pecos River Valley and Tularosa Basin, so there is a constant alert to "hit 'em fast and keep 'em small" when a fire is reported. The Lincoln Forest has the benefit of the Mescalero Red Hats from their neighboring reservation and the closeby military firefighting crews of Holloman Air Force Base and Fort Bliss, Texas.

The population growth of Alamogordo, El Paso, Texas and the Pecos Valley of eastern New Mexico has had a heavy impact on recreation use of the Lincoln. Back in 1958, it was estimated that less than 300,000 persons visited the Forest that year. The figure has jumped to more than a million.

Besides the construction of facilities to take care of this influx of both summer and winter visitors, the Lincoln is concerned with the usual problems of forest management: harvest of timber, improved forage for wildlife and domestic animals, watershed management and rehabilitation work, road and trail building.

The Lincoln is one of the best big game hunting areas in the state and is improving fish habitat, with the result it attracts nearly a hundred thousand hunters and fishermen each year. The annual deer harvest averages 11,500 animals. Two hundred and seven permittees graze 11,870 cattle and horses and 2254 sheep and goats on Lincoln allotments.

The Lincoln has some rather unusual special use permits in effect, including the Sierra Blanca Winter Sports area, operated by the Mescalero Apaches; the SAC Peak Solar Observatory, White Sands Missile Range, Alamo Lookout Radar Tracking Facility, 205 oil and gas leases, 217 miles of powerlines and a number of organization camps in the Forest.

The Santa Fe National Forest

The Santa Fe National Forest is "high country." Here are located the 13,000-foot high peaks of the Truchas and the sister peaks that give birth to the headwaters of the Pecos, part of the Rio Grande, and the Red River.

When Frank Andrews was supervisor of the Santa Fe National Forest in 1942, it was his proud boast that "the Pecos area ranks high among the attractions supporting the tourist industry, which has been one of the leading industries of New Mexico."

The Pecos River Forest Reserve was one of the first set aside in the United States, and in 1942 Frank Andrews could write that "the Pecos Forest area has changed little with the passing of years, even though many changes have come about in Forest administration. True, here and there is a fire lookout tower, or a Forest Service telephone line. The old wagon road up Pecos Canyon has been improved by the Forest Service into a good motor highway. The Forest Ranger of today has a sturdy pick-up truck for travel where roads are available. But he still needs a trailer behind the truck to carry his horse and equipment for riding on after the road ends... . The Pecos highway, in fact, still ends at Cowles. The trails that Stewart and other early Rangers blazed have been improved, but they mainly follow the same routes. There is still practically as much wilderness land here as in the early days."

Much of what Andrews wrote 30 years ago still holds true today—and the appeal of the Pecos high country, with its fishing, hunting, hiking the high trails, picnicking and camping are even stronger attractions.

The impact of population increase has changed directions for the Forest Service in the Santa Fe National Forest as it has with others. While there is still great activity in timber and grazing, there is big emphasis on recreation. Total recreation visits to the Santa Fe now approach a half-million a year, and this will probably go to a million in the 1970's. More miles of trails to open up more of the back country are being built each year.

Where once there was recreation activity only in summer and during the hunting season, now it extends into winter. The Santa Fe Ski Basin, for example, brings thousands of visitors to New Mexico from Thanksgiving until Easter.

The eight major campgrounds that existed in Frank Andrews' time were expanded to 16 by 1963, and the demand for more led to a program of planning at least two additional campgrounds each year.

The Santa Fe National Forest vies with the Lincoln in offering the best hunting conditions in the State. More than 50,000 hunters are in the Forest during the hunting seasons, and more than twice that many fishermen enjoy the sport on the lakes and streams of the Santa Fe.

While much is being done to improve recreation facilities, the revenue-producing activities of timber cutting and grazing are still big business. In the 1968-69 fiscal year, 47,768,000 board feet of lumber were sold, with a value of $660,018.15. The annual allowable cut on the Santa Fe is 41,000,000 board feet.

Grazing is still important, too, with 9,800 cattle and horses but fewer than a thousand sheep under permit on the Forest. Like the Carson, the Santa Fe has a high number of permittees grazing small numbers of livestock. In all there are 422 permittees. The Santa Fe is the only other Forest besides the Carson, which has more than 400 permittees.