Public comment closes on Chaco Canyon buffer proposal Wednesday

Public comment on a proposal to revoke Chaco Canyon protections closed Wednesday, July 29, giving the Bureau of Land Management one last round of public input before it decides whether to reopen about 336,000 acres of public land near Chaco Culture National Historical Park to mineral leasing. The change would reach far beyond a boundary line on a map, because the land around the park has long been treated as part of a sacred landscape by New Mexico tribes and preservation advocates.

The proposal would undo a 20-year mineral withdrawal tied to a 10-mile protective buffer around the park, a line drawn in 2023 to keep industrial development farther from one of the state’s most sensitive public-land sites. The Bureau of Land Management has framed the issue as a withdrawal revocation, but for many tribal leaders and archaeologists it is a test of whether federal land managers will continue to treat the area as a place with cultural limits, not just as open acreage.

That concern is rooted in what sits on the ground. The All Pueblo Council of Governors says ancestral Pueblo people occupied the Greater Chaco Region from about 850 CE to 1250 CE, and a Parks Podcast summary put the number of cultural sites in the area at an estimated 12,000. That same summary said only 15 percent to 20 percent of the region has ever been surveyed, a detail that helps explain why preservation groups warn that drilling or road building could damage resources that have never been fully documented.

National Parks Conservation Association, National Trust for Historic Preservation, the American Anthropological Association and the Society of Architectural Historians all moved to defend the buffer or submit comments. The National Parks Conservation Association said Chaco contains “a thousand years of history,” underscoring how widely the park is viewed as more than a local land-use dispute.

In New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office and lawmakers urged the public to weigh in before the deadline, while Laguna Pueblo and Diné community leaders pushed for the protections to stay in place. Critics also objected to the two-week comment window and the lack of a planned public hearing. For Santa Fe County readers, the practical issue is precedent: if a 10-mile buffer around a sacred site can be rolled back, the next fight over tribal heritage, archaeology and federal land use may not stay near Chaco Canyon.