Some hunters frustrated by road closures
Fires left many Valles Caldera roads impassable, cutting access for those with limited mobility
“The National Park Service will endeavor to make hunting on the Preserve as extinct as the Valles Caldera volcano,” Dr. Jim Clary recently declared in Universal Hunter Magazine, a national publication. His anger was piqued by the massive closure of mountain roads on the Valles Caldera National Preserve, a situation that severely impacts mobility-limited hunters, a group including wounded veterans, many seniors, disabled folks and infirm people.
Dr. Clary and his disabled wife, Mary, both with decades of big game experience, hunted the preserve last September without seeing an elk. The animals were “all in the backcountry nowhere near the two tourist roads that were open,” the Clarys said. “But the National Park Service could not have cared less,” Mary said, bristling with resentment.
In fact, the park service is trying to comply with the mandate to allow hunting on the preserve, a major tenet of its operational status that was approved by Congress in 2015. Jorge Silva-Banuelos, the preserve’s superintendent, said, “Road access to the backcountry was always restricted by the Valles Caldera Trust, but hunters were given special use permits to use them. Runoff from two recent fires — Las Conchas and Thompson Ridge — rendered many roads impassable, and we don’t have the resources to repair them. We tried to be consistent to all user groups by permitting vehicle use on roads that we could maintain and were safe to drive.”
It was classic bureaucratic sophism, a decision that looked good on the surface but was actually deleterious to the mobility community. “We respect the needs of mobility hunters,” Silva-Bañuelos said. “Considering funding constraints, we are evaluating long-term alternatives for the preserve’s road network.” He is planning to engage the public in that decisionmaking process. Meanwhile, the mobility community prays that some roads can be opened in time for the coming hunting season.
But solving this problem won’t be easy, because the park service is $12 billion in arrears on deferred maintenance throughout the system, and Congress has steadfastly refused to appropriate sufficient funding. Without a sea change in congressional disposition, the service must consider new and innovative ideas to address needs of mobility users.
Dennis Trujillo, a past executive director of the preserve, has suggested a public-private partnership. “Why not allow grazers to use the preserve at a reduced rate but require them to maintain some of the roads at their expense? They have the equipment, know-how and incentive to repair the roads to access their cattle.” The Property and Environment Research Center, an environmental think tank in Montana, has recently suggested that public-private partnerships are but one of seven ideas to reduce the park service maintenance backlog.
The road closures are an unfortunate part of an extremist national environmental movement to close most of our public lands to vehicular access, leaving hundreds of millions of acres of property inaccessible to millions of mobility users. It is enormously unfair, because everyone pays for these restricted lands through their taxes, but only hikers can access and enjoy them. It is time to reconsider the government’s steamrolling propensity toward wilderness and roadless area sequestrations and to consider and accommodate the needs of mobility users.
If the preserve’s management is sincere about addressing this mobility access problem, a good start is to form and listen to an advisory committee comprising representatives of the affected community. I have presented several candidates for Silva-Banuelos to consider along with Trujillo’s suggestion.
Taking Silva-Banuelos at his word, the mobility community is anxiously awaiting a new and more equitable approach to managing this vast, beautiful, and bountiful public land.