Fall-Winter 2000-2001 Bulletin

Comanche Creek: A Confluence of Interests

It is well known that in the real estate business, the three primary selling points for any property are ‘location, location and location’. According to Trout magazine, the excellent conservation journal of the national Trout Unlimited, the first principles in the trout-conserving business are always‘partnership, partnership and partnership’. Local TU chapters have had remarkable successes nationwide – such as the removal of the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine – when they’ve allied with diverse other interests with overlapping concerns on particular projects. In a way this makes good ecological sense. If every part of nature is part of an ecological system, coupled to other parts in complex but structured ways, it makes some sense to match these complex structures with human diversity when it comes to ecological restoration. The only problem may be that Nature is rather better at this productive coexistence than we are, perhaps because She has had more practice. A confluence of diverse human interests is starting to come together at Comanche Creek, the main headwaters tributary of the Río Costilla near the Colorado border. This is the beautiful Valle Vidal area of high meadows interspersed with rolling hills of aspen and spruce – a tract of land which, not unlike the Baca Ranch of the Jemez Valle Grande, was acquired by the US Government from a private interest, Pennzoil (as part of a tax write-off deal with the oil corporation in the ‘Sixties). Before that the whole area had been the Maxwell Land Grant, all 1.7 million acres of it, acquired from Spanish grandees in the mid-nineteenth century before becoming a sporting retreat for movie moguls and the like in the 1920s. Appropriately, perhaps, media mogul Ted Turner presently owns much of the remainder of the Maxwell Grant, now known as the Vermejo Park Ranch. In addition to his initiatives in restoring native land animals of the Rocky Mountains such as the bison, Turner has now got into restoring endangered native fish. The Río Grande cutthroat trout is the startlingly colorful, if (in angling terms) gullible, native trout of the southern Rockies. Vermejo has already electro-shocked many miles of its mountain creeks to remove non-native trout which inter-breed or compete with the cutthroat, and erected small barriers to prevent re-colonization by the interlopers. Comanche Creek is a slightly larger proposition. The main creek is about seven miles in length, and its watershed is wholly within the Valle Vidal and thus under US Forest Service jurisdiction. The watershed was once heavily grazed by sheep, then cattle, and mined and logged as well. These land-use impacts are reflected in a stream which has cut down below its original floodplain, has few shading trees, and has excessively high summer temperatures (into the 70s F) plus elevated sediment and aluminum levels. Despite this, it has an almost pure population of Río Grande cutthroats. Though not nearly so severe a problem as historically, cattle still have their impact, loafing in the stream and eroding its banks, and – along with the large resident herd of elk – preventing riparian tree regeneration. The Forest Service, prioritizing Comanche Creek for watershed restoration after public acquisition of the Valle Vidal, experimented with cattle and elk ‘exclosures’ for riparian and some upland restoration – but elk take a lot of excluding, and the main fencing was never secured against them. In 1998 New Mexico Trout, the statewide voluntary trout conservation group, decided to take on Comanche Creek as the focus of its Río Grande cutthroat restoration efforts. Though far from the main New Mexico population centers, it seemed a good choice: it still supported a good cutthroat population (which could be enhanced), it was a highly visible project accessible to many anglers from the nearby highway, and it was wholly within public ownership and management. New Mexico Trout’s vision is of a whole headwater area restored to the native fish – Comanche, Vermejo Ranch, the Latir Lakes that once supplied the state record Río Grande cutthroat, and perhaps even the mainstem Río Costilla below Costilla Reservoir. This year the Quivira Coalition have also come on board. Aiming to obtain a Clean Water Act s.319 grant for watershed restoration, Quivira are focusing on Best Management Practices to prevent sediment losses in the catchment, and on improved cattle management to protect sensitive parts of the system, particularly the riparian area in the later growing season. Part of the project will be careful monitoring of the effects of these management changes on the stream and riparian zone – and the management regime will also have to compete with the ‘total exclusion zone’ of the elk exclosure, now secured, where riparian regeneration should be rapid. It will be an opportunity to learn and improve practices for all concerned. Amigos Bravos has entered into this evolving partnership to complement our existing Río Costilla project. We wish to improve flows for the ecosystem and traditional acequias, and to improve water quality presently impacted by siltation. The Comanche project promises to help with both these objectives – even with improving water yields, in that reducing stream temperatures through riparian shading will cut evaporation. We may be able to monitor whether this effect outweighs presumably increased transpiration from new riparian trees. The evolved frugality of a natural system faced with a severe resource shortage – in this case, of water – and experience elsewhere, suggest that net yield will increase as the riparian zone is restored. Amigos Bravos also has local economic justice objectives in the Costilla catchment, and these are shared by the other partners. A significantly enhanced and protected Río Grande cutthroat fishery in the area could become a considerable tourist draw, to complement the significant elk hunting revenues already derived from the Valle Vidal. Quivira aims to invite the local grazing community into workshops on holistic range management, helping establish practices that will improve the health of the riparian areas throughout the catchment – and so increasing ecological and ultimately economic productivity. For example the Río Costilla just outside the Valle Vidal is presently so overgrazed that its habitat will not support a wild trout fishery, and it has to be sustained by expensive stocking from state hatcheries. Changed grazing practices, at little or no cost, could reverse this. Improved ecological health can mean increased economic self-sufficiency. The challenge to this broad vision is that it will require large quantities of goodwill and cooperation to bring about. Already the inertia of bureaucratic good intentions is being experienced, as the government agencies laboriously go through their own NEPA process (designed to protect the environment against impacts from development) in order to make management changes to achieve ecological restoration. The question of potentially contested water rights is also at issue in this situation. Even so, the Comanche partnership seems like a cooperative vision worth holding onto.

Please return to Fall-Winter 2000-2001 Bulletin Index.

Return to the Amigos Bravos Home Page.