While the warm days linger, summer 2024 has officially come and gone. It was a busy season in the greater Zuni Mountains landscape with ongoing risk reduction forest thinning, trails creation and maintenance, riparian area and forest monitoring, fuelwood projects, field tours, collaborative meetings, youth involvement, and more. Read on for a roundup of land management and stewardship successes and ongoing work.
Youth Conservation: The Forest Stewards Youth Corps
In a successful 25th season for the NM YCC-funded and Forest Stewards Guild-led Forest Stewards Youth Corps (FSYC) summer program, the Mt. Taylor Youth Crew spent eight weeks from June to August assisting with project work and learning about land management on the Cibola National Forest and beyond. They kicked off the summer with a week of orientation, training, and getting to know their fellow crew members. The next seven weeks flew by in a blur, the days filled with fence-building, hiking and biking trail maintenance, wildlife monitoring, and post-fire restoration.
Crew members work together to cut and carry logs from the surrounding forest to drainages and steep hillsides where they construct one rock dams, trash racks, and other erosion control structures.
Crew members work on private land impacted by the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire and post-fire flooding.
In July, the crew met up with all four other FSYC summer crews from around the state to spend a full week in a rural area north of Las Vegas, NM, learning about soil erosion and flooding that often follow high-severity fire and what can be done, from the national to grassroots scale, to mitigate these negative outcomes. They worked with staff and crew members from the Hermits Peak Watershed Alliance, a local nonprofit, to build small sediment capture structures on private land using logs, sticks, rocks, and other natural materials found on-site. Everyone got their hands (and faces) dirty by moving burned logs, collecting rocks, and constructing over 15 restoration structures. After each day of work, members got to go swimming in a nearby lake, play baseball, volleyball, and football, and simply enjoy being out in nature. For many, this project was their favorite part of the FSYC program. Members learned about watersheds, worked hard, made an impact on the community, and had a lot of fun. This was the second summer that the FSYC program assisted with post-fire restoration in the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon burn scar - you can read more about the 2023 experience in this newsletter from the Forest Stewards Guild.
Throughout the rest of their season, the crew worked with multiple land management specialists from the USDA Forest Service to make a difference in their local landscape. They put up and repaired fencing, working with Range Mangers to improve fence lines heritage around grazing allotments, with Cultural/Archaeology to protect historical sites such as railroad grades, and with other specialists to protect the entrance around Zuni Caverns. The crew loaded and hauled hay to the back - the southernmost portion - of the USFS Mt. Taylor Ranger District to feed a horse, mule, and herd of goats kept by the Forest Service for backcountry work and surveying. They worked with Botany staff to construct a community garden and adjacent pollinator garden behind the District Office in Grants. Finally, the crew assisted Wildlife Biologists with Mexican Spotted Owl surveys to better inform management for and impacts to this federally listed species.
A member of the Forest Service goat herd checks out the FSYC truck delivering hay.
Daymien Brien, the 2024 Crew Lead, prepares a load of hay for hauling into the back country.
Crew members inspect their handywork after constructing a new barbed-wire fence.
While this is many members’ first job, a substantial number return to FSYC for multiple seasons; this year, three of the five members were returning alumni, and the crew lead, Daymien Brien, spent several prior seasons as a crew member, growing his skills and confidence through experience before moving into a leadership position. FSYC members receive exposure to many elements of land management, setting them up to pursue a career in the field and bolster the workforce with locally based and trained young professionals.
Collaborative Gatherings: From the Office to the Field
Attendees walk past programmatic buildings, including a mess hall and small museum, at Cottonwood Gulch Expeditions Basecamp.
Every year, members of the Collaborative come together to share current projects, successes, and needs for assistance. This is done in formal gatherings, such as the annual collaborative meeting which usually takes place indoors and happened this year at the NMSU Extension in Grants, or it can take place in less formal settings such as the annual field tour. This year’s field tour took attendees to the east (Bluewater) side of the Zuni Mountains. Members of the Collaborative visited Cottonwood Gulch Expeditions Basecamp in Bluewater Creek where they viewed a recent cooperative prescribed burn and heard about the importance of continuing to return fire to these fire-adapted forests, then continued on to Bluewater Creek to discuss planned upcoming work to remove feral horses and invasive plants from a sensitive riparian area.
Attendees of the annual field tour participate in a riparian health assessment exercise along Bluewater Creek, several miles south and upstream of Bluewater Reservoir.
Some lessons from the day included the essential nature of inter-agency and multi-jurisdictional collaboration to implement prescribed fire in a holistic and safe manner, the surplus of wood that the Forest Service has sitting in the Zuni Mountains and what Collaborative partners are doing to get that wood to communities in need, the threats to riparian areas and waterways and how the Forest Service assesses those threats, and how land managers must adopt a moderate approach to invasive plant species, recognizing that total eradication is not possible or reasonable but that any path forward must include prioritization of species and areas and a tempered approach to impact mitigation.
Read more about the day, including site-by-site overviews and details from the group discussions/Q&A, in the June field tour notes.
Members of the Collaborative gathered in the fire-adapted Ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests of the Zuni Mountains to discuss recent prescribed burns, among other land stewardship topics.
Ecological Monitoring for Adaptive Management: Completing the Dataset
As written in an April 2023 blog post, “ecological monitoring provides a snapshot of the health and condition of the landscape and, when done over a long period of time, it paints an image of if and how that condition is changing. This is an important and worthwhile exercise in its own right; however, much of the data collected in the CFLRP footprint are analyzed to determine the impact of our forest restoration activities.”
Members of the monitoring team regularly encountered wildlife while taking forest health measurements, such as this horned lizard camouflaged along an understory transect line.
The Forest Service, Forest Stewards Guild, and other Collaborative partners have been working together for years to complete ecological monitoring, analyze the data, and use the results to guide best management practices for the health of the land and the communities which depend on it. In summer 2023, these partners spent a week camping in and traveling through the east (Puerco) side of the Zuni Mountains, collecting forest health data from the area surrounding McGaffey Lake. This predominantly Ponderosa pine and Gambel’s oak forest was slated to be thinned for fire risk reduction and ecological benefit beginning in federal fiscal year 2024, which put some pressure on everyone to collect data on the condition of the forest pre-treatment as quickly as possible. With expediency in mind, the group opted to only measure forest overstory data rather than collecting a full suite that also included understory and fuels.
A historic livestock tanker, considered a heritage site of interest, sits in between thinning units northwest of McGaffey Lake.
In August 2024, the group returned to these same thinning units to complete their data collection by recording ground cover by type (shrub, forb, grass, litter, etc.) and species and measuring the amount of combustible organic material, called fuel, on the forest floor (measured in tons/acre). Over the course of two days, Forest Service and Guild staff took measurements from ~80 plots in a tour de force of the McGaffey area. In addition to typical data collection on understory composition, the group kept an eye out for edible berries, priority invasive plants, and other species of concern or interest. This data will be added to the dataset from 2023 and will establish a baseline for comparison following forest thinning activities in late 2024-2025.
In the News: Op-Ed on Old Growth Forest
In early September, longtime Collaborative member and supporter Eytan Krasilovsky of the Forest Stewards Guild published an op-ed in the Cibola Citizen: Collaborative management is integral to Forest Service’s proposed national old-growth policy. This piece details a potential advancement of a new federal policy to identify and protect old growth forest, something that the Collaborative has been championing locally for many years. While Krasilovsky recognizes that “the draft Forest Service policy is a step in the right direction”, he also writes that “it needs some improvements”.
“It is crucial that the final policy ensures our remaining old-growth forests are stewarded for ecological health and integrity, not degraded. The final policy should also promote the collaborative development of strategies which the Forest Service can follow to help our oldest forests adapt to climate change. Another key element is allowing some mature trees to become the old-growth forests of the future. Stewardship includes letting some forests grow old.
The current threats to forests are far too severe to continue business-as-usual. The proposed national old growth policy can be a north star of ecological integrity if it incorporates science based, community supported stewardship – New Mexico can show them how!”