National Park Service now has their own Visitor App with interactive maps. It can also be used offline, I suspect like the Forest Service App does. I haven't downloaded yet.
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Santa Fe National Forest To Lift Stage 1 Fire Restrictions June 30
Santa Fe National Forest To Lift Stage 1 Fire Restrictions June 30
SANTA FE, NM – June 29, 2021 – The Santa Fe National Forest (SFNF) will lift campfire, welding and smoking restrictions effective 8 a.m. Wednesday, June 30, 2021, based on the apparent early arriva…
nmfireinfo.com
alia176
SILVER Star
woohoooooo!!!!
I'm in Montana with record heat. 106 today and 30% humidity. Odd how it flipped as soon as I got here...should be 75-85. Though it looks like I'm camping every day...
What part of Montana did you move to?
He's damn near in Canada.
Troy, Mt. About 15 mins NE of town. It's 30 mins to Idaho and 1 hour to Canada.
Fire Restrictions will be lifted on the Lincoln National Forest beginning Friday, July 2, 2021 at 6 am. Fires, campfires, grills, and smoking will once again be permitted.
Gila National Forest lifts Stage 1 Fire Restrictions
Gila National Forest lifts Stage 1 Fire Restrictions
Silver City, NM. July 6, 2021. The Gila National Forest has lifted campfire, welding and smoking restrictions effective Tuesday, July 6 at 0800 a.m. based on the apparent arrival of the seaso…
nmfireinfo.com
Monument Valley Tribal Parks reopened on July 8, 2021.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Socorro Field Office is seeking public input on the proposed development and implementation of a Travel and Transportation Management/Recreation Area Management Plan (TTMP/RAMP) for the Johnson Hill (AKA Gordy’s Hill) Special Recreation Management Area (SRMA).
Thanks @pappy, I sent the BLM an email. Hopefully they don't limit OHV travel to a few designated routes only, I hate that about the National Forest.The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Socorro Field Office is seeking public input on the proposed development and implementation of a Travel and Transportation Management/Recreation Area Management Plan (TTMP/RAMP) for the Johnson Hill (AKA Gordy’s Hill) Special Recreation Management Area (SRMA).
Dumpolina
SILVER Star
Thank you for sharing this @pappyThe Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Socorro Field Office is seeking public input on the proposed development and implementation of a Travel and Transportation Management/Recreation Area Management Plan (TTMP/RAMP) for the Johnson Hill (AKA Gordy’s Hill) Special Recreation Management Area (SRMA).
@krazykat69 does NMFW'rs have a position on this?
I'm baffled by this "interactive" application
Several NM4W members are sending in comments on keeping this area open in its current form. As in , keeping all existing trails open for motorized travel. If any one has opinions about this area, you should take the time to send your thoughts to the mentioned address in this announcement.
I have been active in the past at trying to keep forest roads open for motorized access, but the national forest officials, in New Mexico, seem to have a predetermined goal of closing many backcountry forest roads to any motorized travel, thus severely limiting true backcountry camping in many National forests in New Mexico.
I am not sure if the BLM has the same restrictions in mind, so I think it is worth some public input. This increasing closure of our public lands to motorized travel does not seem to be based on which political party is in power, as many public lands have been lost motorized access under both the Democratic and Republican governments.
Bottom line, send in your opinions and we will see if we can keep Gordy's Hill open for multi-use off road activities. It is a great area for mild to extreme 4x4 recreation. I go there several times a year over the last 20 years and it is holding up well to off road activity. 4x4 folks come from all over the world to drive some of the trails in this area. Locals are lucky to have this area.
My 2 cents worth.
@krazykat69 this is troubling. Do you know who I should contact at the national forest to express my opinion on this? It kills me when a road on the MVUM ends on paper, but in reality keeps going, with no closure sign and recent tracks from other vehicles. It seems like half the people either don't know about the MVUM or don't care, so all these closures are not very effective. The forest service can't be bothered to put up road-closed signs or barriers on the roads they close, and often there is even a FS marker with the road number left on the closed roads. It also kills me when a road is on the MVUM one year, but then disappears the next year. It seems like the MVUM makes it way too easy for the FS to abuse their power to close existing roads to fulfil some agenda (they just delete it on a piece of paper), with little or no accoutability to the public. I'm not opposed to hiking--I've hiked up to 12 miles in the forest in one day with my wife and a baby, but I now have 4 young kids and it is a harder to hike as a family, so we do more driving. I'd like to express these concerns with the forest service, so at least they know not everyone supports their closing many of the backcountry roads.
Santa Fe Nat Forest 1-505-438-5300. You can call them.
I agree about the MVUM. Have heard many closures were related to lack of funding to maintain roads, and posting signage, also. Yes, many folks drive on into the forest on FR's that are not now legally open for motor vehicle usage. Some of the forest roads that were left open are overgrown roads, that nobody uses. The choices they made were probably done from a computer, and not actually going into the forest to check out these roads. I lost all of my favorite backcountry dry camping sites, when the MVUM came out. My wife and I loved getting way back into the Jemez Mts. for camping. And we were very successful in finding old logging forest roads to get us into a very secluded area to camp. We could be by ourselves for days. Just what we wanted. We would pack out any trash we found in the area. Now , finding a camp site is more difficult in a motorized vehicle. Dispersed camping is their term for crowding campers together in only certain areas of the more popular forest roads.
I see it as a response to the population lacking personal responsibility. It's a bigger issue than the SFNF. Not only are people nationwide willing to go out and abuse the land, it's more acceptable to bureaucrats to just close roads on a piece of paper so they can show they're doing "work" by closing more roads. 40 years ago I went camping north of Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino NF and it was nothing but trees and dust. I don't blame them for closing that since the off-roaders had trashed it. However, they have taken the position, no doubt pushed by the Sierra Club et al to determine all NF needs "saving." Recreating for the 20 million people caught up in that high wage concrete jungle differs from the idea of recreating in New Mexico. The biggest problem I see is the people making the big decisions are back east in *those* concrete jungles and generally have no long term experience with the FS in rural areas, where people do things like get wood to heat their homes and go camping on a typical weekend rather than flying somewhere for a week long vacation to get out of the rat race.
What's the solution? Get vocal, take some personal responsibility for future generations, and demand they show damage before closing roads maybe. OPen roads that don't show real damage. I don't know. There are people here closer to NF management, maybe they have some ideas. The end result will be squeezing recreation into tighter and tighter areas that will themselves then become overused, so the Sierra Club et al who primarily are the ones e.g. flying in to rural NF's for a week to escape the environment they themselves have chosen to *live* in will be able to say "see what happens when you allow off road vehicles onto 'our' forest."
What's the solution? Get vocal, take some personal responsibility for future generations, and demand they show damage before closing roads maybe. OPen roads that don't show real damage. I don't know. There are people here closer to NF management, maybe they have some ideas. The end result will be squeezing recreation into tighter and tighter areas that will themselves then become overused, so the Sierra Club et al who primarily are the ones e.g. flying in to rural NF's for a week to escape the environment they themselves have chosen to *live* in will be able to say "see what happens when you allow off road vehicles onto 'our' forest."
My $0.02
I don't like all the road closures on NF land either, and as bad or worse is having designated dispersed camping corridors. That is an oxymoron to me--created concentrated, not dispersed, camping areas. However, the travel management rule, passed under GW Bush administration, requires all national forests to designate open roads, trails, and areas. This ended cross-country travel and open-unless-closed policies that were common in NM (many other NFs had already stopped, or never allowed, cross-country travel and many had closed-unless-open policies.
Add on top of that the NFS manages 380,000 miles of roads nationally with an insufficient budget to maintain or repair the roads and prevent erosion, sedimentation, and mass wasting. There are a bunch of other considerations affecting individual roads--riparian and meadow damage, habitat fragmentation, access or impacts to archaeological sites, etc. From a management perspective, it makes sense to close roads. There is no right answer to how many and which ones; that depends on your interests.
The best hope is to get involved, but of course there are no guarantees that will produce your desired outcome. The TMR came out of DC, but the decision on each forest depends on local leadership, management, and the public. And now that the TMR decisions have been made on most or all NM forests, they are not likely to change significantly.
I don't like all the road closures on NF land either, and as bad or worse is having designated dispersed camping corridors. That is an oxymoron to me--created concentrated, not dispersed, camping areas. However, the travel management rule, passed under GW Bush administration, requires all national forests to designate open roads, trails, and areas. This ended cross-country travel and open-unless-closed policies that were common in NM (many other NFs had already stopped, or never allowed, cross-country travel and many had closed-unless-open policies.
Add on top of that the NFS manages 380,000 miles of roads nationally with an insufficient budget to maintain or repair the roads and prevent erosion, sedimentation, and mass wasting. There are a bunch of other considerations affecting individual roads--riparian and meadow damage, habitat fragmentation, access or impacts to archaeological sites, etc. From a management perspective, it makes sense to close roads. There is no right answer to how many and which ones; that depends on your interests.
The best hope is to get involved, but of course there are no guarantees that will produce your desired outcome. The TMR came out of DC, but the decision on each forest depends on local leadership, management, and the public. And now that the TMR decisions have been made on most or all NM forests, they are not likely to change significantly.
I don't want them to repair all the roads, I want to challenge my rig and I intentionally seek out bad roads, that is the fun part to me
Not sure I agree with this since the NFS keeps closing more roads over time. I agree that much damage to our access is already done now since the NFS probably won't open any roads that they already closed. I'm 100% for staying on existing roads and not creating new trails, but seeing our public access ever shrinking over time gets me worked up.
And let's be honest, the roads are only closed to those who know/respect the MVUM, so a ton of people still use some of the "closed" roads, which defeats the purpose of the closure (if there was one) in the first place (e.g. as was mentioned preventing "riparian and meadow damage, habitat fragmentation, access or impacts to archaeological sites, etc."). Some of these roads even still have a NFS marker with the road number of them! If the NFS put out just one "road closed" sign/barrier per week, then in the last 10 years they could have closed hundreds of roads--in reality, not just on paper.
If I-25 or I-40 was supposed to be closed but all the NMDOT did was update some obscure online map, without posting signs or adding barriers on the actual road, how many people do you think would actually know about or respect the closure? If you can't tell, I 100% despise the MVUM
. It makes it way too easy for the NFS to "close" roads from a computer, without even having to drive out to the road.Anyway, rant over, I will contact the NFS and express my concerns/give my input, and I hope others do the same.
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Here is the other reality: sooner or later, a fire (probably started naturally by lightning) is going to come through that part of the forest and cause 1000000x more impact than driving on existing roads in the forest ever could. In the Jemez, I've seen the heat from a forest fire even crack and break up the soft volcanic rock over a huge area. Fires lead to extreme erosion and washouts. Fires in Bandelier have damaged/destroyed countless archaeological sites. And after a fire, the NFS is going to come in with heavy machinery to clean it all up, probably driving on the same roads that are "closed" to the public, or just create new temporary logging roads.
Keeping more roads open/clear acts as a fire break, and also helps fire fighters access new burns to put out the fires faster. 
