30-Hour Valley

I had the good sense to grow up in New Mexico and the bad fortune to leave before I wanted to. Consequently, the faintest whiff of piñon smoke provokes intense spasms of nostalgia. But returning to the state last fall after many decades' absence, I felt like Rip van Winkle.

The plain east of Albuquerque running up to the Sandias, where I once stalked horned toads and prairie dogs, is now covered by subdivisions. The old adobe our family rented in Santa Fe is owned by a retired starlet. Taos boasts a Wal-Mart, and is threatened by a Wal-Mart Supercenter. And on the highway north of the capital, I sat in a traffic jam in once-sleepy Espaola, behind a pickup that was hauling an elk head with the largest rack of horns I had ever seen.

Some things haven't changed in New Mexico: Elk hunting is still a big deal, and not just for those seeking a trophy to hang on the wall. Lots of families in the impoverished north of the state count on a freezerful of elk steaks and sausages, and when the season opens in October, many New Mexicans load up the pickup and head for the hills.

And so I find myself in a hunting camp with Oscar Simpson, the lean and scrappy president of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, in the middle of the Valle Vidal, home to some 2,000 elk, the largest herd in the state. The 100,000-acre "Valley of Life" is a high mountain basin in Carson National Forest, just south of the Colorado border, ranging from 8,000 to more than 12,000 feet. Its huge open meadows are ringed by ponderosa pine, luminous stands of aspen and cottonwood, and the rocky peaks of the Sangre de Cristo, which tower above the nation's second-largest bristlecone pine forest and streams sheltering rare Rio Grande cutthroat trout.

The combination is a paradise for elk — Simpson tells of visiting in the spring and encountering two herds of more than 300. The hunting is legendary, and closely protected: Hunters compete in an annual lottery for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Simpson hasn't drawn a lucky tag. Instead, he is bearing news of impending doom to the assembled huntsmen like an Old Testament prophet. We set out on horseback in the crisp fall air, following McCrystal Creek up to where it runs out of Whitman Vega, the large meadow at the heart of the elks' winter range. There we find two out-of-shape hunters — cousins from nearby Peasco — resting on the ruins of an early homesteader's wagon, idly hoping that someone else will flush an elk from the highlands into the open. After exchanging sportsmanlike pleasantries, Simpson cuts to the chase:
"You know they want to drill this whole area for coalbed methane, don't you?"

They did not, so Simpson fills them in: Houston-based energy giant El Paso Corporation is seeking to drill for natural gas on 40,000 acres of the Valle Vidal, including Whitman Vega, where we now stand. At first, wells on three-acre drill pads would likely be spaced every 160 acres, each with its attendant network of pipes, power lines, storage tanks, roads, and compressor stations. Once extraction began, however, the company would likely put intense pressure on federal and state officials to go down to 80-acre spacing, and eventually down to 40. If fully developed, the area would provide the country with, at most, 30 hours of natural gas. with, at most, 30 hours of natural gas.

Coalbed methane is simply natural gas trapped in coal seams. Its presence under the area is not much in doubt. Hundreds of wells are producing throughout the surrounding 2.5-million-acre Raton Basin, and El Paso is already pumping as fast as it can from Ted Turner's neighboring Vermejo Park Ranch, just over the ridge to the east. (When Turner bought his 588,000-acre ranch in 1996, making him the second-largest landowner in New Mexico, he didn't purchase the subsurface rights, and thus couldn't refuse El Paso permission to drill. He has, however, been able to impose relatively stringent restrictions on the drilling. Even so, driving into the Valle Vidal from the east along the dirt road shared by Vermejo Park, I had to dodge more than a dozen trucks from Dick Cheney's old energy-services company Halliburton, barreling toward the highway.)

Simpson doesn't have to spell out the consequences for the local hunters. "A little money makes people crazy," sighs Luis Sanchez, cradling his rifle. "You let 'em drill in here, and all the elk are gone."

Passions about the land run high in northern New Mexico. This is where the bloody Colfax County War erupted in the 1870s, when a Dutch syndicate bought the Valle Vidal (plus another couple million acres) and sent hired guns to eject the homesteading "squatters." Many of the early homesteads are still recognizable, and the Forest Service has even restored the Ring Ranch, a large home built by a 19th-century pioneer with seven daughters.

By the 1920s, the area had become the Vermejo Park Club, a playground and hunting camp for the wealthy and famous, including Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Cecil B. DeMille. The Depression ended the party, and the land eventually passed into the hands of the Pennzoil Company, which found neither oil nor marketable coal and so donated it to the Forest Service in 1982 for a tidy tax break.

Pennzoil, which had treated the area with greater care than many past owners, wanted the Valle's abundant animal life protected — an understanding shared (at the time, at least) by the Forest Service. As the Taos News reported the dedication ceremonies of June 14, 1985, "Max Peterson, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, told the assembled dignitaries, government employees and ranching neighbors the Forest Service would manage the unit to protect its prime resource — its wildlife."

Since then, the Forest Service and the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish have been doing precisely that. The elk hunt is well managed and sustainable. Great efforts are being made to restore the Rio Grande cutthroat trout, which is a prime candidate for listing as an endangered species. District ranger Ron Thibideau proudly exhibits the scores of "exclosures" along Comanche Creek, fenced-off areas meant to allow brushy growth and trees to once again cool the waters for the native fish, which have already lost 99 percent of their historic range. Thousands of volunteer hours have gone into the endeavor, which has led to two successful reintroductions.

This project would be for naught, however, were drilling to occur. The cracks in coal seams that contain methane also contain water, often highly saline or otherwise contaminated. Before the gas can be brought to the surface, vast amounts of this "produced" water must be pumped out. It is often simply dumped into rivers and streams, but even when reinjected into the aquifer (which Ted Turner requires on his property), it can easily contaminate nearby wells, as it has in many other areas sacrificed to coalbed-methane production.

At present, the broad meadows of the Valle are spotted with occasional lazy windmills, drawing up water for the 850 fortunate cattle that graze there during the spring and summer. The Valle Vidal Grazing Association is run by Joe Torres, a compact, white-haired rancher. When I pull up to his house, he and a mechanic friend have their heads stuck under the hood of his pickup. "It's all sensors and diodes now," says the friend, shaking his head. "It's not driveway work anymore."

Torres's grandfather homesteaded in the area in the 1800s. Joe, now in his 70s, remembers visiting the Valle Vidal as a kid "with boogers hanging off my nose, chasing sheep in the snow," and encountering "Old Lady Ring," the last surviving Ring daughter, who never appeared in public without a .45 strapped to her side. He admits that the Valle was overgrazed in the past, but boasts about the progress made in recent years — much of it because the grazers hired a full-time cowboy to mind the cattle. "We have a right to be there," says Torres, "but we don't have a right to abuse it." Sure enough, as we rode through the southern reaches of Whitman Vega, native grasses brushed the horses' withers.

Torres insists that he's not anti-drilling; he's just worried about what it would mean for the Valle Vidal. "If the Forest Service lets them drill, they'd damn well better have a lot of people to watch them," he says; he figures the taxpayers can afford at least as much supervision as Ted Turner's land has. ("We can just tax him more," he suggests.) But Torres is also aware that there isn't much precedent for such scrupulous attention from the federal government. "There are some areas," he concludes, "that probably shouldn't be drilled at all."

If drilling contaminates the wells and ends cattle grazing in the Valle Vidal, only a couple of elderly ranchers would object. But the consequences would ripple much farther. Several studies from Wyoming, where coalbed-methane drilling is widespread, show that the noise and traffic of drilling lead elk to avoid an area of 100 acres for every acre of drilling disturbance. Since the Valle Vidal's elk winter range overlaps 100 percent with prime drilling territory, that means the end of New Mexico's largest elk herd. If the elk went, they'd naturally be followed by the hunters.

The equestrians who come from all over the country to ride the broad meadows and open, parklike forests would similarly be unlikely to return to ride among screaming compressors. Ditto for the hikers, like the couple from Santa Fe we overtook on the trail who, after Simpson's warning of the drilling threat, were desperate to know what they could do to stop it.

In a report on local economic impacts of natural-gas development in the area,

Thomas Power, professor and chair of the Economics Department at the University of Montana, shows that "visitor services" contribute more to the economy of Colfax County than the entire mineral sector. Power concludes that risking damage to the Valle Vidal "in the pursuit of the small and temporary local economic gains that would accompany developing it as a natural gas field threatens to convert that which is unique, valuable, and of long-term significance into something that is cheap and common: another industrialized landscape."

Industrial development would also mean the end of a decades-old Boy Scout tradition. Just to the south lies Philmont Scout Ranch, a 137,000-acre retreat from which, every year, some 2,500 to 3,000 scouts cross over to the Valle, where they earn merit badges in backpacking, camping, and wilderness survival, and take the Boy Scout Wilderness Pledge: "Through good camping and hiking practices, I pledge myself to preserve the beauty and splendor of America's wilderness, primitive and backcountry areas."

In George W. Bush's America, however, "beauty and splendor" are out. Energy development is in. The White House and the Department of Energy are speeding the exploitation of oil and gas fields across the Rocky Mountain West, which includes lifting protections on millions of acres of public land. In Wyoming, 51,000 new coalbed-methane wells are planned, and 26,000 in Montana. In southern New Mexico, there is intense pressure from the Bureau of Land Management to drill 1.2 million acres of wildlife-rich Otero Mesa, a haven for the state's last thriving herd of native pronghorn.

Washington's energy-development message was made plain to the staff of Carson National Forest when the Bush administration intervened directly on behalf of El Paso's request to drill the Valle Vidal. The Los Angeles Times quoted staffers at the Forest Service's Taos office saying that the White House "began making calls almost every week, beginning in 2003, to inquire about the progress of the Valle Vidal project."

David Seesholtz, the Forest Service planning staff officer for the Valle, insists that the White House made only a single call. Whatever the frequency of pressure applied, that process is now lurching forward, whereas past applications to drill were summarily denied. There are numerous hearings, studies, and environmental impact statements to come, promises Seesholtz: "2009 or 2010 is about as fast as anything could hit the ground," he says.

The Valle's many friends are looking for permanent protection, not a five-year reprieve. El Paso, on the other hand, is in a hurry to raise cash to pay down the $1.6 billion debt it owes California for manipulating energy prices during the state's "energy crisis" in 2001. According to the Houston Chronicle, "The company aims to focus more on coal-bed methane...The trick, in part, will be not spending too much on production, but forking out enough to produce the needed cash." El Paso offered the underfunded Forest Service $2 million to pay for the necessary studies in its planning process; the agency, to its credit, refused.

The Forest Service's integrity will be further tested in the days to come. "We're going to sort through this," promises district ranger Thibideau. "We're not being pressured, not being rushed." For now, the many parties seeking to preserve the Valle Vidal are taking him at his word. If the agency's process is allowed to run its course, says Jim O'Donnell, outreach coordinator for the Taos-based Coalition for the Valle Vidal, "they will be extraordinarily hard-pressed to open the Valle to industrialization." Since the time of Gifford Pinchot, the Forest Service's mantra has been "multiple use," but El Paso's drilling would obviate all other uses.

On horseback with Oscar Simpson, I ride across Whitman Vega, savoring the lush meadow in the soft light of late afternoon, encumbered by neither wellhead nor haul road. The next day we ride south, past Old Lady Ring's cabin, along pioneer wagon tracks, skirting the charred remnants of the two-year-old Ponil fire, already sprouting new growth. The fire finished off the last remaining pioneer cabins, leaving only foundations and the sad graveyard of men and women who never saw 30. Taking a shortcut through the blackened woods, we find our trail marked by the cairns of riders before us who made the same choices in the same places.

Leaving the horses to rest, we clamber up the Rock Wall, the dramatic formation of upthrust sandstone that bisects the higher west side of the Valle Vidal from the natural-gas-rich east side. It looks like China's Great Wall, winding up and down the ridgeline. To the west, autumn cottonwoods blaze against the cool dark conifers, and wind rippling the aspen trees makes them appear as though through a clear running stream.

To the east, the "area of interest," in the bland jargon of the Forest Service: the vast golden meadows, pine-covered hills beyond. A sharp line of rain obscures the sudden end of the Rockies, the beginning of the plains, and it's next stop, Tulsa. The only signs of humans are a single road and our own steaming breaths before us. From far below in the gathering twilight comes the bugling of an elk.

It seems so unlikely, as the valley falls into shadow, that this timeless vista would ever change. Yet the energy industry won big last November with the reelection of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and the painstaking public process initiated by the Forest Service could easily be derailed. "The Great White Father in Washington could always step in," suggests Joe Torres. "I've seen it happen: They put it on the fast track, and the next thing you know drilling rigs are going in."

Forest planner Seesholtz admits that "there could be things outside of our process that will occur." The Bush administration could — by underfunding, subtle pressure, or simple fiat — subvert that process. Drilling could begin quite soon, since much of the necessary infrastructure lies right over the ridge at Vermejo Park Ranch. The Valley of Life would be replaced by the Valley of Industry. Simpson gestures at the enormous Raton Basin from atop the Rock Wall. "All that is open to development," he says. "All we want is for this 40,000 acres of wildlife area to be left alone."