The expanse of the Valles Caldera National Preserve is an unsung natural wonderland and an under-the-radar destination for hiking, fishing, hunting, and pristine night skies. The National Park Service is looking to get the word out about the volcanic crater, attracting new visitors while helping to repair harm done to both the land and its Native stewards.
The Valles Caldera is a supervolcano site dedicated to conservation, scientific research, and cultural preservation.
WHEN JORGE SILVA-BAÑUELOS showed National Park Service staff the 40-acre parcel of Sulphur Springs land he wanted to add to the Valles Caldera National Preserve, they were more than a little hesitant. “Are you sure?” they asked.
Abandoned vehicles and trailers, black pipes, and the footprints of bathhouses burned to their last timbers would make for a massive cleanup project. But Silva-Bañuelos, the preserve’s superintendent, was positive. “It takes some adjusting your eyes to see what this place could be,” he says, while walking the bare, pale earth of the egg-scented basin.
The ground hisses and bubbles where pockets have opened to hot water spewed from the ancient volcano underground. Steam curls from openings in the dirt laced with delicate yellow fringes. Hot water trickles through a rainbow of extremophiles—bacteria that thrive in difficult conditions and stain the streambed in shades of yellow, emerald, tangerine, and dark brown. The preserve is the only place in New Mexico, and one of few places in the country, where these fumaroles and mud pots can be found.
A ranger leads hikers on an excursion through Valles Caldera National Preserve.
Silva-Bañuelos envisions eventually allowing vehicle traffic on a rutted dirt road that now serves as a trail for hikers, bikers, and skiers, and adding boardwalks so more people can loop through the park to see these geothermal features. “It’s a remarkable place,” he says. “I think it’ll become one of the preserve’s main attractions.”
Although the Valles Caldera National Preserve celebrated 10 years under the National Park Service in December and 25 years as public land this summer, its transition from a private ranch into a beacon for outdoors enthusiasts, a wellspring for artistic inspiration, and a hotbed for scientific research is still unfolding. The 14-mile-wide caldera has been and remains a sacred place for Native people, particularly the nearby Pueblo of Jemez, whose history there dates back thousands of years.
For decades, people could only peer over the fence into this landscape, so part of Silva-Bañuelos’s mission is to promote the preserve’s many opportunities and attractions, from Sulphur Springs and trout-filled streams to obsidian-scattered trails. He’s also working to highlight this land’s importance to Native people and create a better relationship with these historic stewards. Looking beyond the site’s complex history and toward the future, he says there’s so much more underway.
The expanse of the Valles Caldera provides epic views.
WHEN TRAVELING NM 4 through the Jemez Mountains, the highway rounds a corner and the view pours into a massive basin called the Valle Grande. Threaded with meandering creeks, the grassland fills the heart of a volcano that once towered over the mountains before exploding 1.2 million years ago in lava and ash flows that formed the surrounding canyons.
In fall, as elk herds drift through the Valle Grande during mating season, mornings are haunted by the long, wavering whistles of bugling. Pale purple blooms of wild iris dot the green expanse in early summer. On the edge of the crater, pine trees grow in strips, with aspens filling between the dark skeletons left from old fires. Creeks through Valle Grande seem to catch the sky in their water, shining blue. Coyotes trot along through chin-high grass.
Silva-Bañuelos grew up in Albuquerque and visited the Jemez Mountains regularly, but the Valles Caldera was private property then. He never even ventured near it. In 2007, a few years after the federal government acquired the former ranch, he rounded that corner on NM 4 and set eyes on the Valle Grande for the first time.
In Sulphur Springs, the ground hisses and bubbles.
“I was like, ‘What is this? Where have I been?’ ” he says. Silva-Bañuelos was working for U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman to change management of the caldera from a trust overseen by the Forest Service to a National Park Service preserve. When it came time for someone to steward the preserve, he applied to become superintendent.
Silva-Bañuelos begins our tour at the entrance station early on an autumn morning. Frost tips the grass by the East Fork of the Jemez River. Gunnison’s prairie dogs stand on their hind feet to watch the truck roll past as we head to the knoll not far from the gates, where the 20- to 30-year plan calls for building a bigger visitor center with short trails looping out of it. A spot for all-hours access is expected to allow for night sky viewing from within the caldera. Although national parks all over the country face a $23.3 billion maintenance backlog, these projects queue up in a different line for money earmarked for developing new parks.
Silva-Bañuelos’s goal—and this has been misquoted elsewhere, he explains almost as soon as we’re in the truck together—is to see the preserve become the most-visited national park in the state. Given its proximity to Santa Fe and Albuquerque, he thinks, once people understand the access and options, more people will come regularly to hike, bike, fish, hunt, and cross-country ski. In 2023, the park saw 76,090 visitors, 19 percent more than the year before.
The caldera offers opportunities to see birds, elk, coyotes, and black bears.
“I would not be surprised if we got to a half-million visitors per year because of this stunning landscape,” he says. (The busiest national parks in the country see more than four million visitors annually.)
So the Park Service has mapped some of its trails, groomed cross-country ski tracks in winter, and added events designed to spark intrigue in the preserve’s ecology, human history, and uniquely dark night skies.
But the Park Service is also still mending relationships with the people who have the longest ties to the caldera, where their ancestors prayed, hunted, gathered, and fished for thousands of years. In 1860, the U.S. Congress signed off on a 100,000-acre land grant that turned the caldera into private property—a move that barred Jemez Pueblo members from their ancestral lands.
“One day, they couldn’t practice their historical way of life,” says a representative of the Jemez Pueblo, speaking on behalf of tribal leadership. The pueblo council has worked for years to restore land in the Jemez Mountains to the tribe. “Our traditional way of life is seasonal, and every portion of the Valles Caldera is worshipped on a seasonal basis.”
Hikers can find trees with messages carved generations ago.
Just as the Jemez people resisted surrender to the Spanish crown and cross, he says, they were not about to give up their access to that landscape. Some owners gave them permission to enter. At other times, they slipped under fences and hiked for miles—from first thing in the morning until just before dark—to reach their worship sites. “That’s determination,” the spokesperson says, “because we respect our culture.”
Silva-Bañuelos says he would like to see the preserve serve as a national model for collaborating with tribes, at least 35 of which have a relationship with the caldera, including all the pueblos, the Diné (Navajo), Apache, and Hopi. But visiting anywhere outside of Banco Bonito, for which the Jemez Pueblo secured a co-management agreement with the National Park Service in late 2024, still requires tribal members to secure a permit.
“It just truly hurts,” the pueblo’s representative adds. Since that settlement, though, there has been more direct and frequent communication between the Park Service and the pueblo. “I’m excited that there’s a lot of discussion about how we can work together. That’s all we’ve been asking for all these years—that we work together.”
Superintendent Jorge Silva-Bañuelos looks for a bright future at Valles Caldera National Preserve.
As the Park Service overhauls the ranger station (expected to reopen in July), new interactive displays will showcase the deep Indigenous history that is rooted in the caldera. Under previous management, a lot of attention fell on the ranching history. “To me, that’s a small blip in terms of the entire human history on this landscape,” Silva-Bañuelos says.
After tribes were pushed out and settlers moved in with tens of thousands of cattle and sheep, the land was exploited. Each summer, sheep ate the grass down to bare soil. Overgrazing skews which plants remain in an ecosystem, increases erosion, and dries out the landscape.
Although the ranch owners fought it, clear-cut logging swept through the preserve in the 1960s. The timber was sold off as a separate commodity from the land itself, and even a lawsuit couldn’t stop almost every tree from being cut down.
With few big predators left in the caldera, elk are abundant.
The results almost fully reset the forest to young thickets of trees and left thousands of miles of dirt forest roads, some of which can be seen slicing hillsides like a layer cake. The preserve’s list of master-plan projects includes trying to heal some of those visible scars.
Just a mile past the backcountry gates on our tour, History Grove hosts a rare pocket of old growth ponderosa pines that were protected, the story goes, by a logger who was friends with the ranch owners.
Sun streaks through the towering pines, and the breeze rushes through them with a sound like distant running water.
“There’s a number of different stories that this landscape can tell,” Silva-Bañuelos says. “One is just appreciating the quiet. You can hear birds. You can hear elk. It’s really somewhat of a time portal.”
“Our traditional way of life is seasonal and every portion of the Valles Caldera is worshipped on a seasonal basis.”
—A spokesperson for Jemez Pueblo
Restoration work is underway to return native species, mend wetlands, and reduce the risk of another severe wildfire. Beavers, which might be reintroduced as companions for the single intrepid rodent found in the preserve last year, would improve stream and wetland health. For now, crews are building beaver-dam-like structures to slow and spread water.
Fences block the abundant elk population from chewing and trampling streamside willows and other wetland plants. After rainstorms, chorus frogs call out from where those efforts are working. The wetlands would likewise benefit from having more big predators to hunt the elk. A Mexican gray wolf that swung through in 2023, the first to visit in about a century, would have been welcome had it chosen to stay.
The preserve is also still struggling with cattle from nearby grazing allotments. Years of negotiations and work have finally restored most of 33 miles of fencing between the preserve and the adjacent Santa Fe National Forest. But cattle continue to find their way to the caldera’s lush green grass.
Valles Caldera's night sky is a stargazer's paradise, offering breathtaking views of the Milky Way and countless constellations in a pristine, dark environment.
Because of that intrusion, last summer, the Park Service hired wranglers to round up any cows found in the preserve, catching 10 to 15 every week. The wranglers, often on horseback, nudge them into corrals, and ranchers are called to fetch them. Notices about violating the preserve’s rules have turned to warning letters.
This summer, with the fence up, the park will start issuing citations and fines. They’re also considering a virtual fencing system because the barbed wire has been cut in the past. “It’s a Sisyphean endeavor to spend millions of dollars building a fence and then it just gets cut,” says Silva-Bañuelos, who holds out hope that the efforts will limit the number of strays this year.
Meanwhile, a coalition of nonprofit environmental groups, who had threatened to sue the Park Service for failing to do more to keep cows out, plans to keep an eye on the results while pushing for more public input on the restoration and expansion plans.
“The caldera belongs to all of us. It belongs to the American people, and the Park Service works for us,” says Tom Ribe, executive director of Caldera Action. “Mostly, people just need to feel that it’s their place and take kids, so they take care of it after we’re gone.”
Although access without a permit has moved miles farther into the park, some still contend the National Park Service is being too restrictive. Only 35 daily backcountry permits allow vehicles to more distant trailheads and the most sought-after rivers for fishing. There’s no limit on biking, hiking, or skiing beyond the gates, but those modes could take most of the day to get to some of those trailheads and streams. That the preserve opens at 9 a.m. and closes at 5 p.m. shorts a visitor some daylight.
“If you’re way back in the Valle San Antonio fishing, it takes 45 minutes to get back [to the gate], meaning you can’t really have a whole day out there,” Ribe says. “You can’t watch the sunset.”
The closest camping is in the Santa Fe National Forest and Bandelier National Monument, but with those options nearby, the Park Service has no plans to add a campground. For years, the preserve suspended entrance fees, a concession to its limited services. As of January, a $25-per-vehicle charge was reinstated.
An aerial view of the Valles Caldera National Preserve.
Photograph by NMTD.
AS OUR TOUR curves along rolling mounds of lava domes, our driver Dave Krueger, public information officer for the caldera, tucks the truck into a small parking area at the mouth of Obsidian Valley. A trail winds between blocky shoulders of bluffs, where people dug quarries into the hillside for thousands of years to harvest the valley’s namesake hard, black rock.
Knapped into sharp points for spears, knives, and arrows, it was traded hundreds of miles across the continent. Now, the path underfoot glitters with scattered bits of shiny black. Krueger picks up a chunk with curved lines marking where the obsidian was struck with another stone, some human hand hewing it into a tool.
He drops it back for the next hiker to find. “It’s a special feeling,” he says, “when you realize you’re kind of touching and living in this history.”
