Idea for a new national park in New Mexico
Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2012 12:35 am
As everyone knows, all the western states have at least one signature national park (except Idaho, but near miss Sawtooth would have made a great one!). While the Carlsbad Caverns certainly deserve to be a national park, I have always felt like New Mexico was never very well represented by that park, as the cave parks all seem similar to me. While a park in the Gila would be cool, I think that it is too remote and retrieving it out of wilderness status would impair its particular historical value, since it was the first place set aside as wilderness. Better to keep the continuity. A park in the Sangre de Cristo's to seems oddly out of place as well, perhaps because so much of it is still wild as well, which brings me to the Jemez. I have thought that a park there would be perfect for a lot of reasons but to sum it up, I think it captures a lot of what is best about New Mexico. Now, I know much of the landscape has been marred by fire, but even that adds to its potential to observe the regrowth, just as it has in Yellowstone. Still, the area offers scenery: a complex geography, vast meadows, forests, canyons, peaks, rock formations, waterfalls, rivers, etc. It also boasts a lot of history: layers of Native American history, Spanish history, the wild west and cowboys, 20th century nuke stuff, Georgia O'Keefe stuff as well. It also has a lot of the structural aspects of a good park: a pre-existing road network accessing various parts of the park, trails galore both for hiking and backpacking, with the potential for more, attractions and scenery close to the roads but a an extensive backcountry for those who seek the wilderness. In total, it has something for everyone and the potential to offer a HUGE boast to the local economy.
How feasible is it? I think it is tough to develop a park out of whole cloth, but the ambiguous status of the Valles Caldera Preserve lends itself toward a National Park solution. Plus, we have recently seen a new national park created by combining an existing park with portions of the adjacent national forest (Great Sand Dunes). Of course, nothing will probably ever come of this but I still think it has fascinating potential.
My proposal:
How feasible is it? I think it is tough to develop a park out of whole cloth, but the ambiguous status of the Valles Caldera Preserve lends itself toward a National Park solution. Plus, we have recently seen a new national park created by combining an existing park with portions of the adjacent national forest (Great Sand Dunes). Of course, nothing will probably ever come of this but I still think it has fascinating potential.
My proposal: