Picking up the pieces
After busy holiday weekend, national forest contends with illegal campfires, lots of trash and human waste
CJEMEZ RANGER DISTRICT andice Sando cried when she saw what visitors had done to national forest land near her home.
Empty liquor and beer bottles lined the riverbank and day-use area of the Spanish Queen Picnic Site off N.M. 4 in the Jemez Mountains, not far from Jemez Pueblo, where Sando lives. Discarded fast-food wrappers, paper plates and other disposable dining remnants were strewn all over the place.
So were dirty diapers. Some were floating in the Jemez River.
Then there was the human waste — some of it on the ground behind restroom buildings and some in buckets visitors clearly brought to the site for such a use but which they did not haul out.
“This is my ancestral homeland,” said Sando, 36, a pueblo member, as she tied up another bag of garbage she had gathered from the site.
“They’re showing disregard for our history, humanity and culture,” she said.
Sando was one of at least a dozen volunteers who joined Santa Fe National
Forest staff Wednesday to clean up and clear out the garbage crowds of visitors had left at the picnic area over Memorial Day weekend.
Santa Fe National Forest had reports of large crowds, trash dumping, and illegal and abandoned campfires at sites across all five of its ranger districts, spokeswoman Julie Anne Overton said.
Rangers reported dozens of abandoned fires, she said, including some that required fire crew responses to prevent a wildfire.
“We are seeing lots of people weary of quarantine and looking to get out of the house,” Overton said.
After more than 10 weeks of living under the governor’s stay-at-home order to help slow the spread of COVID-19, visitors flooded the forest over the holiday weekend.
Rangers spoke with many people who were first-time forest visitors, Overton said.
Some of them might not have known the basic tenet of forest stewardship, said Jemez District Ranger Brian Riley: Leave the land as you found it.
“Perhaps no one taught them that if you bring it in, bring it back with you,” Riley said as he surveyed a pickup full of garbage that Sando and other volunteers gathered from around the Spanish Queen Picnic Site.
“We’re finding a lot of use — and abuse as well,” he said. “Somehow, some way, we have to find a better way to educate the public.”
State and national forests across the U.S. have faced similar challenges as folks going into the wild have kind of gone wild themselves.
While entertainment venues and many campgrounds have closed during the pandemic, people eager to get out of the house have turned to other public spaces, often leaving behind trash and smoldering fires, or even cutting fences to gain access to off-limit sites.
Trashed forest lands are nothing new, Riley said.
In the weeks leading up to Memorial Day, rangers and others patrolling the forest saw increasing signs that people had been exploring the great outdoors.
The problem was compounded by a decision to lock restroom facilities and suspend garbage pickups because the U.S. Forest Service did not have enough personal protective equipment and supplies for workers.
The Forest Service installed signs alerting visitors that restroom facilities were not available during the COVID-19 pandemic and directing them to take their trash home. But visitors did not pay enough attention, Riley said.
He said Santa Fe National Forest staff received protective gear last week and have been working since then to clean up ranger stations.
Trash wasn’t the only challenge for forest crews this week. As drought conditions persist in the state, winds and rising temperatures are raising the risk of wildfires.
And campers haven’t been heeding widespread fire bans.
Overton said a total of 53 illegal or abandoned campfires were discovered in the Jemez Ranger District alone. Luckily, none got out of hand, she added, though she said crews did respond to several of them.
The Pecos/Las Vegas Ranger District reported seven illegal and abandoned campfires, while the Cuba Ranger District reported 10 abandoned fires and issued 10 citations for illegal fires, Overton said.
The Cuba district had more luck than others, she said, because District Ranger Jamie Bennett and her staff went out in force to “welcome people and educate them to get them to love the forest and therefore take care of it.”
They were prompted to make the effort by visitors’ disregard over the previous few weekends, Overton said.
She said Bennett told her staff to return to places that had been damaged by visitors in past weeks, and “they were astonished when they went back this past Monday and saw people had picked up their stuff and taken their trash out.”
Riley said he doesn’t want to see the forest close down its recreational areas to stop the abuse.
But forest officials aren’t ruling that out.
If weather conditions remain hot and dry, fueling the potential for an illegal campfire to cause a major wildfire, Overton said, “I am sure it will be one of the options under consideration.”
Adrian Jauriqui of Albuquerque, who was fishing at the Spanish Queen site Wednesday, said he hopes that doesn’t happen. He drives up to the Jemez Mountains about twice a month to fish.
“There’s an unbinding contract with the forest,” he said. “You expect everyone to keep the land exactly as they found it.”
As he loaded up his fishing gear, he looked over the garbage he had found along the Jemez River.
“This is definitely more than usual,” he said. “You don’t usually see this kind of destruction humans leave behind.”