Nature in Its Rarest Form Can Be Found at Baca Ranch

State Highway 4 is, by the standards of this picturesque landscape, an unremarkable road wending through the Jemez Mountains. The view--stands of fir and pine trees and sheer rock walls--is compressed and close.

Then it reveals itself. A slight bend in the blacktop opens to an enveloping valley, so broad and vast it threatens to swallow the horizon. The ranch is home to what some scientists call the world’s most perfect volcano. Rivers cut through a golden plain, mountains rise on its distant edges, and everywhere is the majesty of nature at its most rampant.

For all but a select few--wealthy elk hunters or friends of the family--a gravel perch on a well-worn roadside pullout has been the only way to view the Baca Ranch, a 95,000-acre square of real estate that many say is the most pristine slice of the American West existing today.

But if congressional votes go as expected, the Baca and its natural treasures could become the property of the American people as soon as this month. Funding legislation was unanimously approved last month by a Senate committee, and the House has scheduled its own committee hearing for Wednesday. For the first time since 1860, the public would be allowed, sparingly, on land that has remarkably few roads, buildings or other traces of human spoilage.

(The ranch has barely escaped the worst of the forest fires burning in New Mexico. Officials said 600 acres were scorched but that there should be no lasting effect if firefighters succeed, as they have this week, in containing the blaze.)

To the conservationists, hunters and scientists who have followed the sometimes tortuous saga of the Baca’s sale, the expenditure of $110 million to acquire the unique parcel is cheap at the price, considering the land’s value to developers. To them, it’s Shangri-La on a shoestring.

If you have never heard of the Baca Ranch, it’s because the owners, the Dunigan family of Abilene, Texas, have wanted it that way. Prior to the satellite photo program, the massive collapsed volcano in the Valle Grande was among the most-photographed objects by astronauts. On the ground, however, few but elk hunters who pay as much as $10,000 for a permit or a handful of scientists have been granted permission to set foot on the land. One study estimated that only 200 people a year visit the sprawling ranch.

Public Ownership Could Change Ranch

In an unusual arrangement that some see as the future of public land management, the U.S. Forest Service would oversee the Baca via a board of trustees. The Baca would continue to be run as a working ranch, and the board would be required to make the ranch financially self-sufficient through grazing and possibly logging.

Roy Weaver, superintendent at nearby Bandelier National Monument, would be on the board and acknowledges the possible conflicts with public ownership. Would hiking and camping compromise the unspoiled nature of the place? The Baca must make money, but fee-producing enterprises such as cross-country skiing, stepped-up elk hunting and extensive grazing could affect the untouched land in a profound way.

“We have to be very careful to find the balance between consumptive use and conservation,” said Weaver, who has since been put on administrative leave for his role in the fires, which were touched off by a controlled burn. “It’s a delicate balance.” Others worry that the Baca will be bought to preserve it and in the process destroying that which makes it worthy of preservation.

“We don’t even know all the plants and animals we have here, it’s never been inventoried,” said Craig Allen, a research biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. “There are animals found here and nowhere else on the planet. It’s like a giant library where only a few books have been opened.”

The Jemez Mountains were formed from nearly 13 million years of robust volcanism. That almost immeasurable violence came from a field of nearly 100 volcanoes. The field produced monstrous lava flows that streamed at hurricane velocity of 100 mph. The region’s spectacular orange cliffs are a byproduct of the flows. The Bandelier Tuff, a vertiginous drop-off at Bandelier National Monument, was formed by decades of rushing volcanic ash.

Born of such power, the Valles Caldera--15 miles in diameter--seems tame today. The caldera was formed by at least two massive eruptions, the first 1.6 million years ago. The explosions spewed a column of solidified ash miles into the air with a force that scientists estimate as 600 times more powerful than the eruption on Mt. St. Helens.

Ash from these blows has been found in Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma, and deposits here have been measured as thick as 2 miles deep. When the rim of the volcano collapsed, an arm of superheated magma punched up through the Earth’s crust in a violent shudder. Thus Redondo Peak rose like a molten spear--11,254 feet--in the middle of the caldera.

Like most volcanologists, when Fraser Goff speaks of the Valle Grande there is genuine affection in his voice. The caldera is, he believes, the perfect example of a collapsed volcano. Goff meticulously describes its scientific value as if detailing an especially fine work of art.

“In geologic jargon, we call it a type volcano,” he said, explaining that the caldera is perfectly preserved and thus an excellent subject of study. “It’s the one that everyone compares everything to: the state of preservation, the perfectly symmetrical hole, filled with all the kinds of deposits that we look for. It has the ring of volcanic domes, the central mountain, the lake deposits. It’s young and well formed with classic volcano features. It’s a great scientific laboratory.”

Scientists began to chart the caldera on horseback in the 1920s, and it has become perhaps the most-studied volcano in the world. Alas, for the world’s volcanologists, far more scientists have studied data about the caldera than have actually obtained permission to observe it in person.

“The big caldera guys have all tried to make a trip there,” Goff said. “It can take a year to get permission, and even then it’s tough.”

Biologists and ecologists lust after the treasure trove of the Baca too. Three thousand feet below the rim of the caldera are vast meadows that sprawl across six valleys. Owing to its inaccessibility and the stewardship of the Dunigans, there is more biomass in the Jemez Mountains today than in the last 8,000 years.

When the caldera collapsed, lakes were formed in the indentations. After those lakes dried, eons of storms beveled the landscape. The now-innocuous lake beds hold a climate record dating back 700,000 years.

Trees here are routinely dated at 200 to 450 years old. The Baca is home to the rare limber pine, which survives by bending like rubber tubing in the wind.

The ranch has one of the largest wild elk herds in the country; 27 miles of streams rich with rainbow, brown and cutthroat trout; golden and bald eagles; and the Jemez Mountains salamander. It is home to 17 threatened or endangered species.

The ranch has been preserved by decades of benevolent ownership. The property was first given to Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca in 1860 by the governor of New Mexico to compensate Baca for land taken from him in Las Vegas, N.M.

The ranch remained mostly intact as it passed to the Dunigans, who paid $2.5 million for the property in 1962. Under the Dunigans, whose money was made in the Texas oil fields, the ranch was run with an eye to conservation and the longtime practice of logging was ended. When the family patriarch died, the Dunigans sought to sell the land but approached the U.S. government in 1998 so that it would be protected from developers.

That began lengthy negotiations that have been hampered by partisan politics and the usual Western concerns about the government acquiring more property. This is an especially sensitive issue in New Mexico, where one-third of the land is already owned by the federal government. Those in the private-land movement oppose any federal purchase of land. On the other hand, some conservationists are uneasy that the Forest Service will oversee the land and had campaigned to promote the Baca to national park status.

Congress Steps in to Preserve Baca

However, there are recent signs of concord. Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman is the co-sponsor, with Republican Pete V. Domenici, of the authorizing legislation for the purchase. Bingaman and his wife used to drive north from their home in Santa Fe on weekends and stop at the turnout to view the breathtaking valley. So have scores of others, notably the Washington-based National Parks and Conservation Assn.

“We don’t want to see ‘Baca Grande Estates’ here,” said Dave Simon, regional director of the group, which has taken a keen interest in monitoring the negotiations. The legislation calls for the trustees to take up to two years to develop a management plan for the ranch. While it is explicit that there must be public enjoyment of the land, it gives the board the right to restrict access. No specific plans for park visitation have been discussed, but officials say day passes and some camping are possible.

Valle Toledo is one of many lakes in the Baca’s northern moat zone. It is this area that the ranch’s cowboys have long stopped at to submerge up to their saddle sores in the thermal springs. Cowboys have always been part of this working ranch. A photo taken in the 1940s of a Baca cowboy was seen for years on boxes of Stetson hats.

In this rugged valley, Jaime Gardner kicks absently at rocks, then stoops to pick one up. “This is an andesite,” said the geologist, who works at Los Alamos National Laboratory, turning the stone in his hands. “It’s 10 million years old. They are everywhere around here. It’s a storehouse of information.”

The right to gather such information is hard to come by, even for scientists. About the only steady access is granted to trophy elk hunters to stalk the abundant herd.

The massive animals roam freely, unaccustomed to humans and unafraid. When the bull elks are in rut, they emerge in the early evenings, crashing out of the trees searching for females. Their thick necks crane, and the bellowing begins. The bull elk’s eerie, almost electronic calls rise and drift for miles.

Adrienne Picket is a cook who works for the outfitter who runs the elk hunt. Working busily in the bunkhouse kitchen, she advises that elk must be cooked lightly, with no oil or fat. Gazing at the sunset, she said she’ll be sorry when the ranch is sold and she is no longer among the privileged few to wander here.

“I went to Paris last year and we went to the Louvre. There were huge lines to see things that were from the 9th century,” she said. “Look out the door here and you see things that are 100 million years old. The first time I came here I got out of the car and locked the gate behind me. It was like I was locking the world away. A place like this makes you think about who you are and where you have been. And how small you are. Yeah, pretty small.”

Times researcher Belen Rodriguez contributed to this story.