Forest restoration in El Salto protects watersheds, promotes community and economic health
When Arnold Quintana was a kid, he used to help his grandfather trail cattle up the Canõncito to graze amid the iconic granite cliffs at El Salto, at the north end of Arroyo Seco. For generations, families like his have gone to those mountains to run livestock, hunt game, gather firewood, cut timber or simply get away.
“It’s a place to call J.R. Logan
our own,” says Quintana, who today serves as warden of the El Salto del Agua property. “Somewhere you can just go out and enjoy.”
Over the next year, a restoration project at El Salto is helping safeguard that mountain by improving the ecological health of the forest, protecting watersheds from catastrophic fire, and providing jobs and career paths for young Taoseños.
This summer, the Taos Valley Watershed Coalition received a $260,000 grant from the Río Grande Water Fund to support the Río Lucero Watershed Restoration project. The work includes 75 acres of forest thinning at El Salto del Agua Association — a 2,000-acre property owned jointly by many of the families who originally settled the communities of Arroyo Seco and El Salto.
In collaboration with existing work at Taos Pueblo and on the Carson National Forest, this project will reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfire in the Río Lucero and Arroyo Seco watersheds. Both streams are vital sources of water for residents of Taos Pueblo, Arroyo Seco, El Prado, the town of Taos and several surrounding communities. Additionally, they provide water to acequias that irrigate a combined 6,200 acres of valley land.
But like many forests in the Southwest today, the mountain above El Salto is in rough shape. For millennia, natural, low-intensity fires used to burn along the ground in these forests as frequently as every seven to 10 years. These ground fires cleared out smaller trees and dead material, while giving older trees a competitive edge that made them more resilient to wildfire, disease and bug infestations. Ponderosa pine, for example, tended to grow in stands that looked like parks, with lots of spacing between large, healthy trees, often with native grasses as ground cover.
But now, after people have spent more than a century stomping out wildfires of any kind, we’ve allowed an unnatural buildup of small weak trees to fill in the area underneath the older trees. Instead of a park, we see a thicket of spindly trees, brush and deadfall. All of these trees are competing for limited water and nutrients, meaning they’re all weak. And now, when wildfire occurs, it doesn’t burn in a crawl along the ground. Instead, it climbs the weak trees, gets into the crowns of the older trees, and burns with devastating intensity that often leaves nothing but a charred moonscape in its wake.
Should something like that occur at El Salto, the results would
be catastrophic. Computer models predict a wildfire could run from El Salto to as far as Taos Ski Valley, not only threatening homes, recreation infrastructure and wildlife habitat, but creating long-term impacts from ash flows and erosion to communities in the Taos Valley. That’s the sort of worst-case scenario the work at El Salto is hoping to avoid. By thinning out weaker, less fire-hardy trees, the forest that remains will grow bigger and stronger while increasing the availability of ground and surface water in the villages below.
The Río Lucero Watershed Restoration Project is a critical link in a chain of work being coordinated by the Taos Valley Watershed Coalition. Formed in 2015 to amplify existing efforts to reduce wildfire threats and protect watersheds, the Taos Valley Watershed Coalition includes tribal government, fed
eral, state and local agencies, nonprofits and community members. Together, they’re planning and implementing projects intended to protect watersheds along the west slope of the Sangres — from San Cristóbal in the north to Pot Creek in the south. To date, the coalition has leveraged more than $3 million in local, state and federal funding to thin 1,400 acres, perform 775 acres of prescribed burning, support 525 acres of managed fire and initiate 66,000 acres of environmental planning.
The Río Lucero project represents the coalition’s ideal balance of restoring ecosystem health, encouraging traditional uses and promoting economic development. Trees cut down as part of the project are available for the El Salto del Agua Association’s members for firewood or building materials.
The thinning itself is being done by young sawyers from Rocky Mountain Youth Corps working alongside a local thinning contractor who is providing mentorship, and possibly a full-time job once they graduate from the Corps. At the same time, Taos Soil and Water Conservation District and New Mexico State Forestry are training local college students with handson forest science experience in the hopes of cultivating the next generation career foresters and other natural resource professionals. And local nonprofit Amigos Bravos is monitoring water quality before, during and after the project treatments to ensure that precious water sources are protected and measure their response to the thinning work.
For Quintana, the El Salto warden, the project has been a chance to explain to his 5-year-old grandson, Mateo, the history of the mountain and the beauty of the place his ancestors have called home for centuries. Quintana says he and the association’s board are grateful for the partners who have come together to make the work happen, so there will be a place for kids like Mateo to show their grandkids someday.
J.R. Logan is the Taos County Wildland-Urban Interface Coordinator and manager of several forest restoration projects that promote ecosystem health, traditional uses and economic development in Northern New Mexico. To learn more about the forest restoration and wildfire risk reduction in Taos County, visit