The National Forests of New Mexico. 17 



Forest, most of the remaining agricultural lands have been listed to 

 homesteaders in 351 separate tracts. 



No other section of New Mexico is attracting so many summer resi- 

 dents as the Sacramento Mountains. This summer population centers 

 in the resorts at Cloudcroft and High Rolls which are located on the 

 crest of the Sacramento Range and are reached by a branch line of 

 the El Paso & Southwestern Railroad. Many people from El Paso 

 and the hot plains of western Texas spend their summers in these 

 mountains. With the continued development of transportation facil- 

 ities, there is no doubt that the region will greatly increase in popu- 

 larity and become fully utilized for the purposes of summer recre- 

 ation and public health. 



Good roads recently built by the Federal and State Governments 

 into portions of the Sacramentos and into the White Mountains have 

 opened up new areas for recreation. Among these are the beautiful 

 Ruidoso Creek area, now reached over an excellent road from the 

 Pecos Valley and through the Mescalero -Apache Indian Reservation, 

 and the area at the north end of the Capitans recently chosen by the 

 city of Roswell for a, municipal camp. Further road development 

 will soon make still other beautiful sections more accessible to El 

 Paso and other valley communities. 



THE MANZANO NATIONAL FOREST. 



(In Torrance, Socorro, Sante Fe, Bernalillo, Sandoval, McKinley, and Valencia Counties.) 



The Manzano National Forest has an area of 927,919 acres and 

 comprises six divisions located on the different mountain ranges of 

 central and western New Mexico. It is administered from head- 

 quarters at Albuquerque. The best estimates available place the 

 total stand of timber at 316,000,000 board feet of saw timber, mostly 

 western yellow pine, Douglas fir, white fir, and Engelmann spruce, 

 and at 1,200,000 cords of pinon, juniper, and oak wood. 



The Manzano- Sandia division is located on the mountain range 

 of the same name which lies to the east of the city of Albuquerque. 

 This division is topographically distinct from the remainder of the 

 Forest by reason of an uplift which exposes the rock strata on its 

 western slope in the form of a precipitous escarpment of about 

 4,000 feet, a prominent feature of the view from Albuquerque. The 

 long eastern slope, on which most of the timber is located, follows 

 the dip of these strata and thereby causes almost the entire precipi- 

 tation of the mountain range to drain eastward into the Estancia 

 Valley. This valley is approximately 75 miles in length and was 

 extensively settled about 14 years ago. Severe failures of the dry 

 farming methods in use resulted in a check in the development of 

 the region, but it has since been demonstrated that irrigation water 



