I read today about Valles Caldera and thought I would put in my 2 cents worth, as I have thought about this place for a long time — since the late 1960s when I first went up there to gather vigas on Dome Lookout. I was just 17 or 18 years old and had just moved back to New Mexico after graduating from high school in Colorado. Although my family lived here, and I had also, off and on, I was not yet entrenched in this bioregion as I am now.

I remember vividly seeing the Valle Grande back then and passing by or cross-country skiing on the overlooking hills or just driving by and stopping to gape. That place is so amazing and so comprehensive the way it just lies there like a beautiful Southwestern-style oil painting; an enchanted and perfect valley ringed by forested hills. I thought then that it should be set aside as a state park or a national park, no doubt about it.

I subsequently went up the creek and fished there, near the lower end and camped out a night or two on what was then private land. I was in love with that place. Then a few years ago, I caught wind of the possibility that it might become part of the national park system.

"Oh, great, finally," I thought and was very excited. And William de Buys was involved, so even better. But then the ironies began to set in. Pete Domenici was involved, beloved to many, but not me, and he was riding that wave of privatization that was spearheaded by the same people who gave us the bankrupt "trickle-down" stuff and the deregulation that has nearly ruined this country, the guys who basically privatized the Army, the prisons, the forest thinning, the firefighting, health care and the list goes on and on. Everything "for profit" is their motto.

So, I watched this with some skepticism and saw that people would have to pay through the nose to even see it, except for the one time they opened it up to the public for free and the lines went all the way back to the top of the hill and they couldn't manage it. I could not get in, so I turned back, along with hundreds of other disappointed cars of people.

I love to fish, but the costs were too high. I hunt, but that was prohibitive and now the place was no longer a querencia, but a orchid-like resort for the ricos; not for the people. Everything was just too precious for the peasants to be a part of, like the old days of Europe where the dukes had the land and the poor were just potential poachers.

Then I read that the director was being paid $120,000 a year to manage the place. Gee whiz, what are they thinking? I know plenty of other people who felt the same, and yet nothing was done until now when the seed money is used up and the grabbers are jumping ship. It was a bad idea from the get-go; sounded interesting but no rancher can operate a ranch with a base salary of such big bucks for the foreman. And no one who had a lick of sense would hire an agribusiness honcho from a large corporation. It doesn't work in the real world of New Mexico.

So, in my life time, we have the chance to get it right again and I might get in there finally. I feel like my neighbor who rides a beautiful old red classic Harley "panhead"; a prize-winner that he has ridden all these years, but when he went down to the Harley gathering down in Albuquerque, they wanted big bucks to enter the arena with all those weekend Harleys. He did what any real vaquero would do — he snuck in!

So maybe it won't come to that now. Let the kids in, and their kids, and teach them not to wreck it and promote a "land ethic," Aldo Leopold style. And, by the way, everybody knows the place is called Valle Grande, so why don't you call it that again? I am thankful that it was bought and is now possessed by the people. Maybe we can get in there again sometime soon and hug some trees like weary travelers who kiss the Earth upon their return home.

Thor Sigstedt is an artist, landscape photographer and longtime resident of Santa Fe County.