Locating the Continental Divide Trail in New Mexico

Carrie Cannon

Background

• 1968 National Trails System Act

• 1978 Continental Divide Trail Officially Designated PL 90-543

• “extended trail located to as to provide for maximum outdoor recreation potential and the conservation and enjoyment of the nationally significant scenic, historic, or cultural qualities of the areas through which it passes.”

Land Holding Agencies and Interest Groups

• United States Forest Service• National Park Service• Bureau of Land Management• Continental Divide Trail Society • Continental Divide Trail Alliance

Challenges in New Mexico

• Sovereignty of Indian Tribes

• Hispanic Land Grants

• Other local private property rights

• Opposition to Federal Control of Public Lands

• Avoiding major roads and highways as trail routes

Seeking Solutions to Challenges in New Mexico

• Students at the University of New Mexico’s Department of Geography proposed use of GIS and GPS technologies to identify potential routes

Seeking Solutions to Challenges in New Mexico

• Using fine-resolution framework data for land use and ownership, topography, roads, and trails.

• Establishment of prototype database to attempt to locate best possible routes

Prototype Database

Contains data layers:

• Topography

• Existing roads

• Land ownership data

• Land use data

• Proposed Routes

Seeking Solutions

• “With sufficiently detailed data on land ownership, state roads, and topography, finding an appropriate route for the trail becomes a relatively simple task”

• Yet thus far all parties have worked independently and sometimes with cross purposes

New MexicoFrom the rugged Rocky Mountains to the desert grasslands of the Chihuahuan Desert, the CDT extends for 770 miles through New Mexico.The CDT meanders through some of New Mexico’s most spectacular natural and historic landscapes: San Pedro Parks and Chama River Wildernesses with dramatic mountains, mesa tops and canyon lands, thousand year old Zuni-Acoma trade routes, the El Malpais National Monument badlands: one of the nation’s best examples of recent volcanic landscapes, the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, the Gila Wilderness—our nation’s first—and ending at the Big Hatchet Mountains Wilderness Study Area, the stomping grounds of Geronimo.Trail Status—January 2009Out of the estimated 770 miles of the CDT in New Mexico, 194 miles still need to be completed.

“It is said that to know a person, one must walk a mile in his shoes. Perhaps footprints are good enough. If they are, I know something of Lewis and Clark, and James Fremont and Jim Bridger and Kit Carson. I know something of Coronado, who searched the New Mexican desert for the Seven Cities of Cibola; of Chief Joseph, who tried to escape across the Divide from the US army and the Nez Perce War; and of gold miners, in whose ghost towns I slept, high in the Colorado Rockies. I know something of the ancient Mogollon and Anasazi, because I have heard the wind blow through their homes, and I have dipped my canteen into their springs.

Theirs are the voices I hear, murmuring in the empty spaces, where the CDT follows in history's footsteps and, sometimes, in its wheel-ruts.”