Entrance gate at Valles Caldera National Preserve. Courtesy photo
BY SETH GAYNER
White Rock
(In response to https://losalamosreporter.com/2026/06/04/lte-a-caldera-open-to-all/)
In their defense of the draft General Management Plan, Los Amigos de Valles Caldera points to rising “visitation” numbers to claim public access has never been greater.
However, looking at inflated raw headcounts ignores the reality on the ground.
While management touts 86,000 visitors, the actual vehicle entry logs tell a completely different story, showing a meager annual count of around 33,000 vehicles. When you factor in that this 33,000 includes daily entries by park employees, researchers, contractors, and volunteers, the number of actual public recreational vehicles allowed into the preserve shrinks drastically.
By keeping the main gate locked until 9:00 AM, park management forces this limited number of visitors into a dangerous traffic bottleneck on the shoulder of NM-4, pushing them into a staging lot just to obtain a keypad code for the inner gates.
The high headcount numbers aren’t a sign of booming recreational freedom; they are a direct result of counting a single family vehicle multiple times to mask institutional gatekeeping.
Los Amigos notes that the backcountry vehicle pass system only reaches daily capacity 40% of the time. If demand is already constrained by a rigid, hyper-restrictive 35-to-40 vehicle daily quota, encoding these limits into a permanent management plan is a mistake.
We need a flexible management paradigm that solves front-gate bottlenecks and accommodates the public, rather than designing plans that maximize bureaucratic convenience.
It’s time to stop letting insider groups with deep roots in the old, restrictive Trust era dictate how today’s public lands are managed. The public deserves an open, transparent process—not a continuation of the old guard’s hush-hush gatekeeping.
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