Bureau of Land Management buys private land adjacent to Organ Mountain-Desert Peaks

LAS CRUCES — For years, hikers had to cross private land to reach the Achenbach Canyon Trail, which leads into the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument.

Although the land was undeveloped and the trailhead accessible, the entry area has not been maintained and lacks established parking areas, maintenance of its trailhead, trash receptacles and other amenities.

There was also the prospect of future development. The trail’s entry point is on Ladera Canyon Road, a winding, unpaved road close to the Organ Mountains sporting million-dollar luxury homes and open lots for sale. There was a risk the trailhead would be “landlocked” by private development, closing off an increasingly popular path into the monument.

The problem was solved this summer, at least for the time being, when the federal Bureau of Land Management purchased the land, paying $780,000 for 111 acres using money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

The LWCF was created by Congress in 1964 and is funded by royalties from oil and gas offshore production. President Donald Trump permanently authorized the LWCF in 2019 and then, in 2020, he authorized permanent funding for it under the Great American Outdoors Act.

Yet some public land advocates worry the Achenbach Canyon transaction might be the last of its kind, at least for a while, due to changes to LWCF programs.

The Achenbach Canyon purchase was years in the making. First, the nonprofit Wilderness Land Trust purchased the land from a private owner for an undisclosed sum in 2021, with plans to sell it to the BLM when and if the agency was ready.

Acting as a private-sector intermediary, the trust made the purchase and then held the land nearly four and a half years as the federal process unfolded, including application for LWCF support as well as federal procurement processes.

“The BLM can nominate specific areas that they want to purchase, to better manage their public lands,” Patrick Nolan, executive director of Friends of Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, told the Journal. “We worked with them to make sure that Achenbach was a high priority for them.”

Nolan said his nonprofit would work with the BLM’s Las Cruces office next on the agency’s management plans.

Margosia Jadkowski, a spokesperson for the Wilderness Land Trust, said the organization offers fair market value to landowners holding property adjacent to wilderness areas, working to take lands off the market and preserve wildlife migration corridors, watersheds and other features essential for natural systems.

The purchases also protect access from the possibility that a new landowner might bring an end to longstanding informal permissions for recreationists to cross their property into public land.

“We’ve actually seen whole trail systems on public lands get shut down just because they crossed a section of private property where access was taken away,” she said.

A 98-acre property north of Achenbach Canyon, acquired by the trust in 2020, is still awaiting transfer to public hands. If it goes through, it would bring the total of New Mexico lands that have passed through the trust to just about 5,000 acres.

But that might not happen soon. The White House Office of Management and Budget has recently directed the BLM to curtail land acquisitions; and on Thursday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued a new departmental order rolling out new restrictions on using LWCF funds for expanding recreational or conservation areas on lands under BLM management.

Burgum’s order also adds a requirement that acquisitions like the one for Achenbach Canyon receive written support from states’ governors and the local county — a measure critics quickly characterized as a local veto.

Unless these actions are reversed, “we won’t see any more projects like this,” said Amy Lindholm, national coordinator of the LWCF Coalition, which advocates for the fund.

“President Trump has been a friend of conservation,” Lindholm said in an interview. “It was President Trump who requested a bill that permanently funds the LWCF and stewards our national parks.”

But in the second Trump administration, Lindholm said some influential figures and Republican members of Congress “are not on board” with protecting and preserving public lands, despite broad bipartisan support for them. In June, a federal budget proposal to sell up to 3 million acres of public lands in 11 states, including New Mexico, was dropped following opposition from Democrats and Republicans.

Nolan acknowledged that if new proposals to sell off public lands surface, it is conceivable some of the territory around national monuments, like the OMDP, could be open for sale to private developers after all. At any rate, further acquisitions seem to be off the table for now.

“I do have some optimism that we’ll be able to work with the administration and with Congress to fix some of these problems,” Lindholm said.

In the meantime, Jadkowski said the Wilderness Land Trust will hold on to its remaining acres near Achenbach Canyon — and advocate for land purchases and community programs funded by the LWCF.

Along with his order, Burgum announced Thursday that the LWCF would deliver a record distribution of $437 million across the U.S.

“Outdoor recreation is part of our national heritage, and these historic investments will help communities across the country expand access to green spaces, restore natural areas and create more opportunities for people to get outside,” Burgum stated in a news release.