Rio Grande Valley Broadband • Entered by Susan Ostlie on May 1, 2022
Monitoring hike in the Sandia Mts.
April 7, 2022
Participants and Hours
| Pre Planning hours | 0.5 |
| Post Admin hours | 1.5 |
| Activity Hours | 3 |
| Participants | 1 |
| Total Hours | 5 |
Key Issue: Public Lands Health & Protection
Activity Type: Stewardship (monitoring, sampling, planting, etc.)
Key Partners: NM Native Plant Society – President
Landscape/area: Sandia Mountain Wilderness (37256 acres)
Short Description of Activity
Tom Stewart, NM NPS president and Sandia Collaborative member, and I took a monitoring hike in the Sandia Mts – westside area, and the ABQ Open Space to learn to identify and also to look for invasive Asian Poppies and Cheatgrass. The purpose was to set up an opportunity for the RGVBB and others – in the Sandia Collaborative, etc., to remove them before they had gone to seed.
Reflection/Evaluation
The hike was great – slow and detailed enough for me to keep up. Tom is a wonderful hiking partner because he is extremely knowledgable about plant identification, but also enjoys going slow enough to really be an excellent teacher. We did not find the early vestiges of invasive poppies or cheatgrass, but we did find an invasion of Tree of Heaven that needs to be removed ASAP before it gets any farther up the arroyo and into the Wilderness. We will definitely work with Open Space people on removal of those three invasives, although Tree of Heaven must be dealt with by those who are certified to use the appropriate herbicide. We llso were able to report on this information at the Sandia Collaborative meeting on the 19th of April.