I announced this on my return to the upper parking area. The very talkative volunteer turned silent and everyone in the assembled tour group turned to stare. It was a chilly vibe. Reading the informational material afterwards I saw it: No food or picnics. The reasoning hinted at aggressive wildlife. It’s not like I took a cooler but it was awkward.
At the base of the chimney and companion – site of fire lookout, signal fires
Anyway, the small tahini and honey sandwich crammed in one pocket and the larger water bottle sustained me on the short steep walk up the craggy ridge to the old fire lookout site. So did the hiking shoes and walking stick.
I was the first visitor up the mountain and up the trail. I got to the main entrance at 9:15. The contrast with Mesa Verde is profound. I was alone except for a few staff and volunteers. It was the end of the season so you could drive yourself up instead of going in vans.
It’s a stunning landform even without knowing its significance to ancient people. They must have felt a similar sense awe. Racing along US 160 West of Pagosa Springs today we come upon it fast and dramatically. The Chimney and Companion rocks poke up from the top of a mountain that towers over the Piedra River between two other river valleys.
From Visit Four Corners
At the height of occupation the ancient pueblo people grew corn, beans and squash in the valleys. They lived in smaller scattered farming villages, most within a mile of the upper pueblo where a 44’ great kiva is located. This is 90 miles from Chaco Canyon and considered the Northeastern most Chaco outlier. Signal fires were used and I expect there was a code language. There is a lumber camp theory that trees were harvested from here for construction elsewhere. Like other Chaco pueblos, it was abandoned after 1135.
There’s another big kiva surrounded by rooms at the very base of the big rocks. I walked up the steep narrow “causeway” to the old fire tower location. The tower was removed in 2010 and beneath it archaeologists found the 1000 year old signal fire pit. Interestedly, the signal fire communication potential wasn’t proven until a Farmington high school student, Kathy Freeman, used mirrors to relay light from here in 1990.
Chimney Rock National Monument, unlike Mesa Verde, is closed in the winter months. So plan accordingly. It’s not too far west of Pagosa Springs and its famous hot springs. Further west is Durango. Visit Four Corners has a good page about all of it and more.
I sat on the edge of the lookout foundation and ate my little sandwich. A huge raven circled overhead several times, eyeing me. He knew the rules.
Today’s experience visiting Mesa Verde couldn’t be more different from 1000 years ago if we were dropped down from space. We move on asphalt networks in metal capsules of varying sizes, hopping in and out of them (over twelve times by my count) at carefully positioned locations to view ruins covered by monstrously unattractive metal buildings. Funny thing is, I don’t mind. It is a very special place in spite of this strange and temporary connection.
The mesa changes from verde to oro this time of year as oaks and serviceberry turn. I imagined thinner crowds and cooler weather but the parking lot at the big Visitor and Research Center was already busy at 9:45AM and it was warm on the mesa by noon.
TACA Board Member Jerry Widdison remembers visiting the park with his family after the war. They stayed at the Aneth Motel in Cortez. It’s still there. Aneth is a word in many languages but Jerry said it’s Navajo and also a Utah place name. The origin may be a nickname given to a greedy Anglo trader meaning just like a devil. The term was used more widely about unsavory business practices at trading posts.
The Drive
At the entrance kiosk up the road I bought an Annual Senior Pass which is a very good deal. The man staffing the kiosk was a quintessential park ranger in full uniform, full beard, dark sunglasses and Smokey Bear hat. I resisted asking, “All set for Halloween, are ya?”
It is a great road up and across the big mesa and its smaller mesas, that reach like fingers between multiple canyons. There are stunning views from several overlooks. Jerry recalled the hair raising part of the route called “The Knife Edge” that’s now a trail. A tunnel replaced this section of the road.
Far View Ruins site was my first intended stop but, like all of Wetherill Mesa, it was closed. With no choice, like everyone else that day, I went on southward on Chapin Mesa to the museum and two loop roads.
It’s clear from old maps and aerial photos that ruins are all over Chapin Mesa but you can’t see the archaeology from the roads and you’re not allowed off them. This is by design. It protects the sites and landscape from being over-run by humans, no doubt. It also means you can be well over two hours into the park before ever seeing a ruin.
Jerry also recalled that the tours of the famous cliff dwellings were first-come-first-served and that you could walk into many of them unaccompanied by a guide. Those days are gone.
Park History
The people behind designation of Mesa Verde as a National Park in 1906 included women. Virginia McClurg (1857-1931) started a movement to preserve the cultural treasures of the mesa. Lucy Peabody, (1863-1934) the “Mother of Mesa Verde” worked nine years to gain national support for park creation, including negotiation with the Weminuche Utes.
Wetherill and Chapin Mesas are named after Richard Wetherill and Frederick H. Chapin. Along with Wetherill’s family, including Marietta Palmer Wetherill, they explored the ruins during the summers of 1889 and 1890. Chapin wrote the first book about the place in 1892, “The Land of the Cliff Dwellers.”
Wetherill was from a Quaker ranching family that settled in the Mancos River valley in 1880. He ran trading posts, including one in Chaco Canyon where he was murdered in 1910. Artifacts he and his family collected were subsequently donated by Marietta Wetherill to the University of New Mexico.
Jesse Nusbaum NPA photo
Perhaps the people with the mostly visible modern impact on the park were Jesse Nusbaum and his wife Eileen. Jesse Nusbaum was selected as park superintendent in 1921 and began significant improvements in 1922.
Parkitecture
Before arriving at the museum I turned off on a whim to check out the picnic area. It was delightful. No other people were there. Old thick junipers shade the picnic tables. This was once the campground and the spaces and little roads are scaled for Model Ts. I found a choice spot in front of a serviceberry bush in full yellow fall color and saw a turkey, crows, and a hawk.
It was here in the old campground that first noticed a little sandstone brick building that looked a bit like an ancient pueblo structure. It was a restroom. The reinterpretation of ancient architecture for modern purposes at Mesa Verde in the early twenties created a cluster of unique historic buildings on Chapin Mesa – a layer of history upon prehistory.
Jesse Nusbaum (1887-1975) was born in Greeley, Colorado and became an archaeologist when the science was new. He studied teaching and then taught in Las Vegas, New Mexico before becoming an archaeologist and architect, undertaking work on new and ancient buildings, including the Palace of the Governors and the State Art Museum in Santa Fe.
I left the picnic area and headed into that cluster of historic buildings – hidden in and among large junipers and punctuated by expanses of asphalt roads and parking. The museum was one of six buildings funded by JD Rockefeller Jr. and built by the newly appointed superintendent between 1922-1925, with an addition in 1939. It’s design subtly mimics a scaled down Spanish mission with a small interior courtyard (barely visible through the windows) and a “church” or auditorium where a film about the park was showing.
Ruins at Last
In spite of its position as the focal point atop the trail that descends into Spruce Canyon and Spruce Tree House – my first view of a ruin – the museum is underwhelming and crowded. The building was apparently tortured into ADA compliance and ramps consume entire rooms. It’s obvious a lot more money and effort have gone into displays at the visitor center at the entrance in recent years than at the old museum on Chapin Mesa.
There’ve been many fires but many beautiful trees remain. During the height of occupation in the thirteenth century, the plateau was largely deforested. According to dendrochronologists cited in the extensive wiki page about Mesa Verde, the last tree used in construction was cut in 1281. This marked the tail end of mesa occupation.
The loop roads have many overlooks from which to view canyon ruins. Jerry said he visited an overlook exactly 100 years after Wetherill rode a horse up to that same spot and saw Cliff Palace for the first time. It’s still awe inspiring.
I’m planning on visiting Mesa Verde again before my annual pass expires. I’ll never grow tired of trying to envision life on this mesa, even in the more recent past when visitors in early cars or wagons climbed the mesa over difficult roads to visit mysterious stone structures for the first time. Plenty of mysteries remain on Mesa Verde.
1927 NM highway map showing US 550 as 44 and the road west to Silver City, NM 152, as US 180
My first concern is no hot shower. The phone is charged, which is good because otherwise I would have missed the notice on my weather app about a “Regional Planned Emergency Power Outage.” That’s the wording. As a former city planner I’m especially amused by the oxymoronic term, ‘planned emergency.’ Apparently it provided “plausible deniability” for hotels that rented rooms in spite on knowing what was coming.
Up until then I liked my big bright corner room in the grand old hotel. The fire escape door at the end of the hall was tied open and there was a smell of room deodorant masking a sewer scent in the bathroom. But the mountain view – incomparable and stunning.
Red Mountain White Knuckles
The drive on US 550 between Durango and Ouray is intense. As kids we called the whole stretch the “Million Dollar Highway.” It probably costs at least that much every year just to maintain it. It is now apparently only called that between Silverton and Ouray. According to wiki, it’s the portion twelve miles south of Ouray – that last hair raising portion through Uncompagre Gorge, that gives the highway its name. Quick glances at faces in oncoming cars show passengers expressing worry or terror.
The highway is a staggering and impressive drive all the way from Albuquerque. It’s US 550 the entire way – Bernalillo on the Rio Grande Valley to Montrose on the Western Slope – through some of the most interesting geology in the west. Portions follow routes used in prehistory and the Old Spanish Trail. In the San Juans a man named Otto Mears built the first tollroads on parts of what became 550. Then he built the first railroad to Silverton. Collectors of railroad memorabilia love his Silverton Railroad passes, printed on buckskin and adorned with silver filigree.
It’s nice to divide the drive into two parts with a stop in Silverton for relief from the cliff-clinging road. A free Shakespeare production of As You Like It in intimate little Anesi Park that night was delightful. Multiple sponsors included UpstART Theater That Moves. The play was also preformed in Ouray.
The Silverton history museum has expanded from the old jail to a mining boarding house donated to the San Juan Historical Society and moved to town. In and under those buildings is everything related to mining but a live burro. A mineral exhibit has me transfixed and I stare at innocent looking yellow uranium powder for probably too long wondering if it’s safe.
My second concern on the morning of no electricity, is no hot coffee. I thank my stars for the cold brew I bought yesterday in Durango and sit in my car taking big gulps while admiring the looming mountainsides. They’re illuminated like a stage backdrop by the rising sun. No stage production could match it. Somewhere someone is whistling.
The whole county seems to be lined up in the one coffee shop with a generator. There are delicious pastries. A hot cup takes over ten minutes. Everyone is listening to city workers – big guys in work clothes talking loud and greeting each other as they file in between the tourists. One guy says marijuana is a gateway drug and another says it sure was for him. The whole place erupts in laughter.
Carnegie Library, Silverton CO
I love old places, including big richly storied western hotels. I worked at an old resort near Denver for a summer in college. It was memorable. I can smell it now – old wood and dust. The work was grueling – dragging an old vacuum cleaner to hillside cabins, cleaning all day after serving breakfast then cleaning up to serve dinner. The six of us lived in a bunk room under the porch with no insulation and touchy wiring. No one could use a blowdryer without blowing a fuse and this was the late seventies so that was a problem. We got one day off a week, separately. I would drive to Denver in a borrowed VW beetle alone to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
It was pretty – that canyon and the trees and the grand old three-story tower. We rattled the bones of that building at square dances in the lobby, attendance at which was mandatory. Sometimes people played the piano. The whole place seemed alive.
Give me an old hotel over a new dull and anonymous one any day. But some people think that’s what a hotel should be. They don’t want character, just sleep. Preferably with electricity.
Silver City
A few weeks later I drove west to Silver City from I-25 through the Black Range. It is a magical and less scary for the height conscious passengers. I remember boys at NMSU hauling bicycles up and riding them down the curvy steep bits above Kingston. I drove the pickup. No one was hurt, remarkably. Tiny grey deer under ponderosa watch the occasional traffic. I try and take photos but end up attempting watercolors later for the first time in years – simply inspired.
Silver City is a good and interesting. It’s one of those places where the rolling Wheel of Fortune has been very visible and left an indelible track. Artists and seekers sometimes come to places like this. Sometimes money or popularity “ruin it” and we’ll talk about how Vail or Durango or Santa Fe used to be. Silver is like that now. I’m sure it’ll change again. Cultures have been displacing, absorbing, undermining each other from prehistory. Land and landscapes used and abused. Mountains turned upside down for copper. Rebellion over cows to controversial feral cow elimination.
It’s always the end of an era. Sometimes things get better. Sometimes (usually) long after “we” are gone. Like how a flood in 1895 washed out Silver City’s Main Street leaving a 55 foot deep trench. Main street became the next street over. Now the trench is a pretty linear park.
The copper mines could be a set piece for the recent Netflix series “KAOS” with Jeff Goldblum as Zeus sitting in a giant excavator observing the miles-wide pockmarks, seeping festules, funny-colored fake mountains. A friendly cowboy in the brew pub said when dust from blasting settles on cars it eats away the paint, “and that can’t be good.” He knows dust, being from where dust storms frequently close I-10. I asked if the mines employed many people. He said he didn’t really know but that they’ll never close them. They’ll always keep “a skeleton crew” to avoid the costs of reclamation work required when they close.
I stayed at the Murphy Hotel, a downtown classic. It is solid, simple, nice. I like to pretend I’m the Hotel Inspector. That reality show follows famed hotelier, Alex Polizzi, around Britain as she visits and critiques hotels and B and Bs. I don’t have her background, experience, heritage or chops, but I know good vibes and clean sheets when I feel and see them. I also see that cool Mondrian inspired mural on the back wall across from restored old brick buildings. I can smell the sweet little bakery downstairs around the corner.
Mimbres pottery is a reminder of prehistory and that spinning wheel of time. Western New Mexico University has a huge collection housed in a beautiful 1917 Arts and Crafts building. The distinctive black on white Mimbres pots with animal images became so popular with collectors that ancient sites where the pottery originated have been routinely destroyed. A century of looting resulted in several large private collections that this museum has acquired for analysis and display.
Mimbres means little willow in Spanish. We don’t know what these people called themselves or the beautiful river valley where many villages were located. Similarly, the Mimbres are classified as part of the Mogollon culture, named after mountains that were named for a Governor of New Spain.
The Sonoran Desert
Interstate 10 is very bumpy and busy past the Arizona border. It’s best viewed as it stretches out in the distance on the descent from Silver City. Trainline-like lines of tractor trailers move back and forth. You barely see the cars, seemingly outnumbered by big trucks.
Arizona Highways November 1953 Commemorating “The First Hundred Years” of the Gadsden Purchase
This was part of the Gadsden Purchase – 45,000 square miles the US ripped-off from Mexico in 1854 for a transcontinental route and a railroad magnate’s aspirations. Mexico pretty much ripped it off from the Apaches who ripped it off from the Mogollon and Hohokam and Ancient Puebloans. All this within a millennium.
It never stops. Subdivisions punch holes in the delicate Sonoran desert. It is an honor and a tragedy to be this close. Like petting an endangered fish. I baby talk to javalina from a swimming pool and sketch quail from the bedroom window. The relentless wheel spins. What will be next, you can’t predict.
So breathe the delicate morning air. Enjoy the native desert. Come back when it’s cooler.
When the Albuquerque Indian School (AIS) was established in 1881, it brought together students mostly from the Pueblos and other Southwestern tribes. Bringing children of different ages and tribes together in a concentrated and regimented way had an impact on the health of the school community. Contagious infectious diseases such as influenza, scarlet fever, measles and mumps could break out among students living in dormitories. Although the Indian Bureau provided medical care and vaccinations, these services were limited by low budgets.
Wittick, Ben, A visit to the Indian School Dining Room at Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1880-90? Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Ben Wittick Collection, Negative No. 086868.
Even with the establishment of an Indian hospital on the AIS campus in 1890, there were students who died from epidemic disease outbreaks. In some situations, the remains of deceased students were not returned to their home communities. A cemetery was established on school property around 1885. The best information we have is that twenty five to thirty individuals were buried therebetween 1888 and 1932. There are indications that some of the individuals buried at this Cemetery were AIS staff members or Native people who died at the AIS Hospital. There are also recorded Native American burials in a dedicated area at Historic Fairview Cemetery, some of whom were AIS students.
Albuquerque Museum – PA1978-141-20 ca. 1932
As AIS phased out its vocational agriculture programs in the late 1950s, the property west of 12th Street used for crops and grazing land was no longer needed. On April 25, 1960, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (B.I.A.) conveyed a 7-acre parcel of land to Bernalillo County, including the Cemetery grounds. The County leased part of the property to the 4-H Building Corporation, which established a 4-H Center and rodeo grounds. Other land transactions occurred in the next few years, resulting in the creation of a new diagonal street, Menaul Extension, connectingMenaul Blvd. with Indian School Road. The old route of Menaul Blvd west of 12th Street was adjusted to fork off of Menaul Extension next to the Cemetery. The City sub-leased the 2.95-acre triangular plot north of Menaul Extension from the 4-H Building Corporation on November 4, 1963, originally for a tree nursery, but ultimately for a public park they named 4-H Park.
City of Albuquerque Right of Way Survey, May, 1962. In Solar Arc project files of the Public Art Urban Enhancement Division.)
In 1992, the University of New Mexico asked the City to relocate the Solar Arc, a public art sculpture at Central and Girard NE. The local neighborhood association successfully requested that it be placed in 4-H Park.During the process of relocating the Solar Arc, City officials took the Cemetery’s location into account. At the dedication ceremony in 1995, Dr. Joe Sando spoke about the Cemetery on behalf of the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. A quotation from his remarks was included on the plaque describing and explaining the Solar Arc. “In honor of former Albuquerque Indian School students interred in the burial ground nearby. ‘Few are recalled after going to rest as these resting here. Indeed, they are in peace.’ “
When AIS was closed in 1981, the students were transferred to the Santa Fe Indian School. AIS records were placed in a basement, and many of them were damaged in a flood. There may have been records in other files that remained on the remaining campus buildings. There were no resources to protect these buildings, and several were destroyed by vagrants starting fires to keep warm in winter. In 1992, the remaining campus buildings were razed. Most of the records from the school were lost during this period. It is likely that among the lost records was any registry of the names of the individuals buried in the Cemetery.
In 2019, neighbors discovered that the 1973 memorial plaque was missing. It seems highly likely that the bronze plaque was stolen for its value as scrap metal. During this period the theft of historical plaques in Albuquerque became a common occurrence.
When AIS was closed in 1981, the students were transferred to the Santa Fe Indian School. AIS records were placed in a basement, and many of them were damaged in a flood. There may have been records in other files that remained on the remaining campus buildings. There were no resources to protect these buildings, and several were destroyed by vagrants starting fires to keep warm in winter. In 1992, the remaining campus buildings were razed. Most of the records from the school were lost during this period. It is likely that among the lost records was any registry of the names of the individuals buried in the Cemetery.
Part 2.
Following revelations in June 2021 of unmarked gravesites at Indian Boarding Schools in Canada, protests and demonstrations occurred nationally about the condition of cemeteries at former Indian Boarding Schools. Native American demonstrators in Albuquerque noted that the missing plaque was typical of the dominant culture’s attempt to erase their heritage and culture. They placed ribbons, teddy bears and other children’s toys around a tree next to the missing memorial. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive review of the troubled legacy of federal boarding school policies.
Photo by the author.
In response, the City of Albuquerque closed off the area around the Cemetery and initiated a public process with tribal involvement to acknowledge their responsibility for the site and to protect and commemorate the Cemetery. On September 25, 2021, Mayor Tim Keller held an AIS Cemetery Healing, Reflection and Memorial event at the Native American Community Academy, at which he apologized for the City’s treatment of the cemetery grounds. The City Council also passed a resolution of apology and commitment to do a proper memorial.
The City’s Office of Equity and Inclusion reached out to regional tribal governments seeking records about children who died while attending AIS. They sought input about the appropriate way to memorialize the cemetery. There were several public and online meetings seeking historical data and recommendations on securing and memorializing the Cemetery. The Parks and Recreation Department commissioned a survey of 4-H Park using ground penetrating radar.
The COVID-19 epidemic caused significant delays in the public process. In June, 2024 the Parks Department replaced the temporary mesh fencing enclosing the Cemetery grounds with a permanent tubular steel fence that matches the existing fencing along Menaul Extension. Community and tribal members will now have the opportunity to provide input on appropriately commemorating the century-long heritage of the Albuquerque Indian School and its Cemetery.
Additional information about the history of the Cemetery and the public memorialization process is available on the City of Albuquerque website.
Memorial Weekend 2024 and the month of Jerry Widdison’s 90th Birthday
We drove on the old 66 highway in the trusty old Civic, past Red Ryder’s “Beavertown” location and past the old building that stretches along the bottom of the canyon where Glen Campbell once joined his Uncle Dick Bills playing and singing with the Sandia Mountain Boys. Jerry recalled the radio and TV show. Remember the KOB jingle that Glen sang?*
Riding down the trail to Albuquerque
Saddlebags all filled with beans and jerky
Heading for K Circle B
The TV Ranch for you and me
K Circle B in Albuquerque
You’d sing it in the car on long drives home in the un-air conditioned Plymouth station wagon. “The TV Ranch for you and me,” changed to “That’s the place for you and me.”
*A couple of TACA board members who’d never heard it were subjected to a rendition at a recent meeting.
Northward from the Village of Tijeras was our route. The first stop wasn’t far – the Ojito de San Antonio county open space. The parking area is behind the San Antonio Catholic Mission Church which sits on a portion of an ancient Pueblo ruin. Treasured water from springs flows through the secluded valley to the settlement below – on the other side of the fast four-lane. The speeding traffic adds a special frisson to our journey.
From the giant roundabout construction project at Sandia Crest Road we headed up into to the Cibola National Forest. It was still early when we pulled into the Doc Long Picnic area and quickly left, reminded it was busy Memorial Weekend. The crowded noisy parking area was nearly full.
The place was named for William Henry ‘Doc’ Long, who was a pathologist with the US Forest Service and had an experimental station and cabin there from 1910 into the thirties. Jerry noted the canyon here is called Tejano, probably for Long, who was from Texas.
Onward and upward, past the Sandia Peak Ski Area – closed. That’s a missed opportunity. We’d pay to ride the chairlift on a nice day like this. Skiing and development for winter sports began as soon as the first road was built in the twenties. The La Madera Winter Sports area opened in 1938 and replaced an even older winter recreation area at Tree Springs. This and other factoids from the wonderful rich and heavy tome published by the East Mountain Historical Society.
Portions of NM 165, the Sandia Loop, date from the twenties and it was likely a trail before that. It follows the creek that runs north called Las Huertas. According to Place Names of New Mexico, the book Jerry has contributed to, the upper portion of the creek was named Ellis for the family that homesteaded there. There was once an old two story cabin on a pond fed by springs at the Ellis place. Toured in the eighties, the cabin was spooky dark and low and full with books. The woods were full of bear and the pond was full of water. The cabin burned down decades ago.
The Civilian Conservation Corps did a lot of work on the roads, trails, and picnic areas on forest lands here. The Las Huertas picnic area is one wonderful result. At a quiet a picnic table surrounded by beautiful huge ponderosas we had our lunch of chicken sandwiches and ginger beer.
The trusty Civic made it through the mountain on rocky rough NM 165 down to Placitas. On a whim we went north where the paved road bends west into the village. There are new big houses all over these hills now. They’re a stark contrast to what some people had going out here 50 or 60 years ago. Jerry remembers the commune named “Tawapa” and it’s in the Place Names book. There were several others, most short-lived.
The Tawapa residents were displaced after losing a court battle over ownership in the 1980’s. It echoed the fate of a place called Tejon near here. The Tejon Land Grant was purchased and its residents displaced after losing a legal fight in 1890. It’s always been about land. And water.
Las Huertas Creek is named for the vegetable and fruit gardens and the meager flow is precious here.
We came upon a feral horse herd. It felt like a magical equine safari. Chirrups at a bay stallion from the open window failed to even cause an ear to twitch. He didn’t give us the time of day. But it was about 3PM.
We completed the Sandia Loop Road, and headed down the trail to Albuquerque in the trusty dusty Civic, thoroughly enchanted.
Jerry Widdison had his 90th and celebrated in May at a surprise birthday party and again at the May TACA board meeting. Here’s background on Jerry from a previous post.
As remaining rural agricultural land in the Albuquerque area is swallowed up by growth it is important to know that owners have alternatives. That could be a more innovative development that seeks to protect the character of the property, such as maintaining common land. Others may hope for outright purchase by the city or county for open space or a park. Undeniably, far more often land is sold, divided and developed as conventional subdivisions that build to the maximum density possible without room or sentiment for preserving views, wildlife corridors, trees, or even significant archaeological sites.
Conservation easements are a way landowners may choose to preserve property voluntarily. The owner enters into a legal agreement with a land trust that permanently protects conservation values by limiting future uses. The easement runs with the land in perpetuity.
Aside from the obvious benefits of preservation, owners still own their land and can sell or lease it if they want and may be eligible for significant income, estate, and property tax benefits.
Statewide in New Mexico 17 different land trusts protect nearly 2.5 million acres.
There are at least 8 accredited land trusts working in the Albuquerque area according to the Land Trust Alliance. (landtrustalliance.org) Each has one or more conservation priorities such as forests, wildlife habitat, agricultural land, and archaeological sites.
The Rio Grande Agricultural Land Trust (http://rgalt.org) is active in the Middle Rio Grande Valley. They presently hold 6,269 acres and are working with Bernalillo County on additional easements in the Albuquerque area.
The Albuquerque Conservation Association 
