Santa Fe National Forest's efforts to involve the public early in the process to designate a road and trail system for motorized vehicles backfired on Glorieta Mesa.

More than 18 months ago, the U.S. Forest Service staff began holding public meetings and soliciting comments from the public on the plan, known officially as a Travel Management Plan. They held more than 100 meetings and received more than 5,000 comments about off-road use.

The formal National Environmental Policy Act process doesn't start until the Forest Service releases a proposed motorized vehicle map in April.

An early map released by the Forest Service last fall for public comment showed existing roads blanketing Glorieta Mesa and set off a firestorm of protest from off-road vehicle opponents and ranchers. Ranchers said they hadn't been consulted by the Pecos/Las Vegas ranger about the off-road issue. Others said the Forest Service was out to make the whole mesa into an off-roaders paradise. They convinced state legislators to pass a memorial during this year's session asking the Forest Service to protect "traditional users," meaning ranchers, from off-roaders.

"People were worried we were proposing an (all-terrain vehicle) park on Glorieta Mesa," said Dolores Maese, Santa Fe National Forest's longtime public information officer and acting district ranger for the Pecos/Las Vegas Ranger District, "An ATV park was never planned for the mesa or anywhere else."

Forest Service staff have spent the last five months pouring over public comments and their own staff's recommendations. Under the federal Travel Management Rule, they have to identify the minimum number of roads needed to manage the forest and provide public access. They also need to designate roads for special uses such as accessing weather stations, range improvements or telecommunications towers, said Julie Bain, NEPA coordinator for the Santa Fe National Forest.

The Proposed Action map due out in April is only a suggestion, based on comments from the public and from forest staff. After the public comments in the coming weeks, the Forest Service will revise the plan and create a set of maps showing various alternatives for more comment. "The draft map is our first try at saying, based on what we heard the public say and based on our professional judgment, this would be a good system of roads and trails for motorized use," said Bain.

"I think there's concern that we've already made our minds up because we've been working on this for so long," Bain said. "That is absolutely not the case."

Map challenges

One big problem in creating the designated road system maps is figuring out what roads — official and unofficial, used and abandoned — are on the Santa Fe National Forest. At least 7,100 miles are official roads. No one knows for sure how many other roads and trails have been created by woodcutters, rock haulers, hikers and off-roaders in the last decade.

Kiernan Holliday, an engineer with the Santa Fe National Forest, spends several weeks each summer "ground checking" roads shown on Forest Service maps. A laptop mounted in his truck, hooked into a Global Positioning System on his dashboard, help him determine if the lines on the official map are roads, cow trails or a swath of hillside shredded by a rock slide. "We've got loads of roads," Holliday said.

The existing maps are based on aerial photos taken from the 1970s through the 1990s, according to Julie Luetzelschwab, resource information coordinator for the Santa Fe National Forest. "From an aerial photo, it is hard to tell if something is a road or a cow trail," she said.

And until Holliday or other staff have a chance to drive each road, they don't know if what the map shows is correct. "The maps we have and the database, neither are perfect," Holliday said. "Aerial photo interpretation is difficult at best."

Last year, he and Luetzelschwab went to check eight roads shown on the map around the forest. "Of those, six did not exist and never had existed," he said.

Holliday is given a limited amount of time to survey roads each year around other duties. "We couldn't possibly survey every road every year," he said.

This summer, he has 15 roads to check, from 200 feet to nine miles long. But he doesn't survey trails, official or unofficial. That is up to the Santa Fe National Forest recreation staff and volunteers.

Contact Staci Matlock at 470-9843 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com.