Bandelier should stay a national monument
Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., recently introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to change Bandelier National Monument to Bandelier National Park and Preserve. His bill would raise the profile of Bandelier and open some of its land to hunting. While well-intentioned, Heinrich’s bill could end up harming Bandelier and degrading the very place people come to enjoy.
Bandelier National Monument is a 33,000-acre park near Los Alamos, most of which is designated wilderness where you have to walk to visit the dramatic canyons and Pueblo ruins of the backcountry. Few people do. About 20,000 people a month in peak season visit a few hundred acres in the bottom of Frijoles Canyon, where a narrow paved trail winds up to ruins of a prehistoric Pueblo village and cliff dwellings on an imposing canyon wall. It is a stunning place, utterly unique and beautiful with a creek gurgling through maples and cottonwoods and weirdly eroded volcanic cliffs.
Bandelier National Monument was designated a national monument in 1916 to protect its many ancestral Puebloan artifacts from looters who were ravaging Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde and the Pajarito Plateau at the time. Managed by the U.S. Forest Service until 1932, Bandelier was transferred to the National Park Service and expanded over many decades.
Protecting archaeological sites in the park is the top priority for the National Park Service, according to the legislation creating the monument.
Decades ago, Bandelier mainly attracted locals, but as the tourism popularity of New Mexico has grown, so has the profile of Bandelier. It is one of the top attractions Santa Fe visitors add to their visits, and in the peak summer and fall seasons, more than 200,000 people a year visit the park. Bandelier is crowded in the summer — so much so that the parking areas cannot handle the crush of cars and the public must ride a shuttle from White Rock to Bandelier.
Once at the monument, the public finds some excellent facilities and programs but also some unusable restrooms and a crumbling paved trail that is so rough that wheelchairs can barely navigate it. The path hasn’t been repaved since the 1970s. The worn facilities belie a grossly inadequate park budget that leaves the public with gaps in services despite the best efforts of the park service. Nationally, the agency budget continues to shrink over time, and President Donald Trump has proposed deep cuts.
Recent studies by Headwaters Economics find that redesignating Bandelier as a national park would result in a 21 percent increase in visitation (“Two new national parks? A boon for state,” Our View, March 31). Could Heinrich promise a long-term budget increase to protect the park? Perhaps he believes a new national park in Northern New Mexico would stimulate our economy. It would, but at what cost to Bandelier?
Heinrich’s bill also contains a confusing proposal to open 7,000 acres of the Bandelier high country to hunting, creating a new Bandelier National Preserve right next to the Valles Caldera National Preserve, which operates under the same rules proposed for the new national preserve. This proposal would create a bureaucratic morass and could leave 7,000 acres with minimal budget and protection.
I have the greatest respect for Heinrich, but his Bandelier National Park idea needs much more public and agency input. Bandelier needs a significant budget increase to match an increase in visitation, and above all needs to be carefully protected for future generations by all of us.