Santa Fe New Mexican: Donation, ranch sale to help BLM open up Sabinoso Wilderness
The 16,000-acre Sabinoso Wilderness, a remote area east of Las Vegas, N.M., that’s marked with mesas, woodlands and deep, cliff-lined canyons, has been nearly untouched by the public since its designation in 2009 as a federal wilderness area. Landlocked by private properties and lacking a legal public access point, the rugged acreage one U.S. senator described as a “crown jewel” has been off-limits to visitors.
But thanks to a $3.15 million donation from the Wyss Foundation to the Wilderness Land Trust, a national nonprofit that purchases lands for preservation, a private ranch will be bought and donated to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to eventually create public access to Sabinoso.
The funding award allowing for the purchase and donation of the Rimrock Rose Ranch was announced Thursday. “BLM is excited about exploring this opportunity at providing the public access to Sabinoso wilderness,” the BLM’s New Mexico state director, Amy Lueders, said in a statement.
The ranch property, 94 miles east of Santa Fe, originally was listed at $5.5 million but then was advertised at a “huge price reduction” by Hayden Outdoors, an online real estate site for recreational properties.
The Sabinoso area has been favored by New Mexico’s congressional delegates since 2009, when Democratic U.S. Sen. Tom Udall and then Sen. Jeff Bingaman co-authored a bill to make the land a protected wilderness. The measure was signed into law by President Barack Obama under an omnibus lands package.
In a joint statement Thursday, Udall, along with New Mexico Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich and Democratic Rep. Ben Ray Luján, said they were proud to contribute to the bill that helped create the wilderness area, and they touted the agreement that will open the area to the public.
“The public has effectively been locked out of this crown jewel of our public lands,” Heinrich said in the statement, calling the agreement between the Wilderness Land Trust and the BLM “a major achievement.”
The BLM has been working to build partnerships with private landowners for years to create access to public lands.
Out of the 77.7 million acres that are federally owned in New Mexico, just more than 2 percent are designated wilderness areas. Garrett VeneKlasen, executive director of New Mexico Wildlife Federation, an organization that supports sportsmen and land conservation, called wilderness areas “a flyspeck.”
He said public access to federal lands, “regardless of who you are,” is “a uniquely American ideal.”
“ ‘In the beginning, there was wilderness, a raw landscape’ — that is the first sentence in our [New Mexico] history,” he said.
Preservation of that wild “antiquity” is essential, VeneKlasen said, both to the public interest and for economic development. Public lands create jobs, he said.
The Sabinoso Wilderness is home to elk, deer, mountain lions and wild turkey. When the access roads are created, the public will be able to visit Sabinoso to hike, hunt and camp.
“It’s a wonderful resource that we have all been sort of salivating over for a long time,” VeneKlasen said.
However, VeneKlasen and others eager to the visit the area may have to wait a little longer. The Bureau of Land Management said environmental and wilderness evaluations have to be done before the land can be opened, a process that can take between five months and a year.
