The Santa Fe County Commission voted in March to pay $1.5 million for 468 acres in the Galisteo Basin, guaranteeing an archaeologically rich area with sweeping vistas will be preserved as open space.

Although the property was purchased with tax dollars, some planning will have to be done before the land is opened to the public.

The newly acquired land — and adjoining property also bought under the county's Open Space and Trails Program — contains archaeological sites that Congress has mandated be preserved and protected.

Santa Fe County is negotiating an agreement with the Bureau of Land Management that will guide the future uses of the land. The BLM has a $500,000 grant from the Legislature to develop a plan for protecting the area, which is expected to be finished within three years.

But County Open Space and Trails planner Beth Mills said the public will get some limited access before then. The county plans to build a parking lot on one of the newly acquired parcels and begin taking small groups (10 people or fewer) on guided tours of Petroglyph Hill — part of the earlier purchase — by the end of this summer.

"We're anxious to get people who want to be out on that land out there as quickly as we can," Mills said. "But we also have the responsibility to protect the archaeology and the landscape itself, so we want to make sure we've got the trails in the right places and can maintain things for the public before letting everybody loose out there."

The longer-term plan — one that could be realized in three to five years — is to develop a hiking, biking and equestrian trail on one of the old railway beds that runs through the property. Once easements through private and state-owned land are obtained, Mills said, about 13 miles of trail would connect Richards Avenue to the Petroglyph Hill area and the existing Rail Trail.

The Commonweal Conservancy — the nonprofit that sold the land to the county — has donated 12 percent of the purchase price back to the county to help develop and maintain the property.

An important place

"Some people consider (the Galisteo Basin) the richest archeological resource we have in the country," said Mills. "People always think about Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, but the extent and richness of the archaeology in the Galisteo Basin at least competes." Four of the sites, she said, date to the Spanish entrada.

According to local historian Bill Baxter, the Galisteo Basin was once home to more than 10,000 indigenous people. "There was a population florescence here in the 1300s," he said.

Ancestors of New Mexico's modern-day pueblos lived in nine "great cities" in the area. Bolstered by one of the wettest periods in 1,000 years, the pueblo people could hunt, gather and grow everything they needed for life within a few miles of their homes. "It was wet; people prospered," Baxter said.

The area's population is thought to have peaked at about 20,000 sometime between 1320 and 1360, he said.

Petroglyph Hill, the centerpiece of the county's holdings in the basin, served as a place for people from all of the pueblos to connect spiritually. "It belonged to everyone," he said.

Over the next few hundred years, as the area resumed its wet-dry cycle, the population fluctuated and gradually diminished. Some of the people moved to the pueblos that exist today. One group moved northwest to live with their cousins, the Hopi, in Arizona. Those people, who now live at Hano at Second Mesa, are the only ones who still speak the Tano language once common in the basin, Baxter said.

After the turmoil and disruptions of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the area was unpopulated for a long time. In 1706, after the reconquest, a Spanish governor ordered a forced re-population of the area, sending Tano people from the Tesuque area to resettle Galisteo. The second of the two churches at the Pueblo of Galisteo was built during this period, which lasted about 60 years.

But life in Galisteo in the 1700s was difficult. "This became a free-fire zone out here," Baxter said. "You couldn't really stay here very long because something bad would happen to you."

The current-day Spanish village of Galisteo was founded in the 1800s. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway won the race to build the railroad to New Mexico around this time. When other lines arrived, they found the company unwelcoming. At one point, the Santa Fe Central Railroad was compelled to build an elevated "flyover" to cross the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe tracks at an intersection that was located near the boundary line of the county's new acquisition because AT&SF wouldn't allow its competitor to share an at-grade crossing there.

According to Baxter, students at the Santa Fe Indian School helped build the rail beds where the tracks were laid in exchange for room and board at the school.

The schedules of the two competing train lines were often set so passengers who wanted to transfer from one company's train to another were purposely made to wait many hours between trains. That led to the development of a general store, a hotel and other such businesses. Ruins from some of those buildings still exist on the land purchased by Santa Fe County.

"It really encapsulates the robber baron days of the late 18th century here," Baxter said. "This is an incredibly important chunk of land. It has New Mexico (history) for centuries. It doesn't matter what sort of New Mexico you are looking for, you are going to find it here."

The fortunes of the railroads took a downturn during the Great Depression, and the area has remained relatively sparsely populated until very recently. "A lot of this land has seen a lot of footprints a long time ago," Baxter said, "but not many footprints in the last few hundred years."

Much ado about nothing

In the past decade, Santa Fe County voters have made it clear that open space is important to them. Since 1998, they've approved more than $20 million in bonds to protect and preserve undeveloped land. The county has used that money to purchase about 5,700 acres.

While the public is eager to use new open space, it is acquired for many different reasons, Mills said. One is simply the value of the land's emptiness.

"If you are going to ask people to live closer together (the new trend in urban planning), you need to provide open space and vistas," she said. "It's about preservation and protection of views and open space in the sense of nothing between you and the horizon, not necessarily that you can take your baby buggy out there. You are paying for it not to be developed."

Baxter said people should also realize the value the open space will have to future generations who will face a landscape much more populated than the one we have today. To put it in perspective, he said, think of the foresight of the people who set aside 800 acres of open space for New York City's Central Park.

Contact Phaedra Haywood at 986-3068 or phaywood@sfnewmexican.com.