Taxpayers pay for better than Capulin offers

When you have hundreds of thousands of people living near the base of a ski area, and it snows, it is inevitable that a bunch of those people are going to pick up a sled, or an inner tube, or a sheet of cardboard, and drive up the mountain just so they can slide down.

In the case of the Sandia Mountains, a whole lot of somebodies.

Throw in a three-day holiday and it’s a powdered-sugar-covered invitation to play in the snow.

Unfortunately, on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, the U.S. Forest Service once again underestimated both the appeal of snow-covered public land when there’s no work or school, and the human capacity to ignore “No Sledding” and “No Parking” signs.

So when carloads of adults and kids showed up along N.M. 536 and found the gate to the popular Capulin Snow Play Area locked, they did the predictable thing. They parked along the road and pulled out their sleds.

And so drivers like Nick Heine, in the Sandias to cross-country ski, encountered “100 plus” vehicles parked illegally along the two-lane highway, along with children on sleds flying past a “No Sledding” sign and onto the snow-packed road.

Crystal Powell, district ranger for the Cibola National Forest’s Sandia Ranger District, says Capulin’s three sledding hills were closed because of insufficient snow and opening the two parking lots would have encouraged folks to sled there.

But having them sled between parked cars across a slick two-lane highway is an even worse option. Complicating things further is a Byzantine system of communicating closures with the public — Facebook, a phone line manned between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. weekdays only, an off-hours recording that can’t be updated and a website that requires five clicks to find the Capulin Snow Play area, but isn’t updated on weekends.

Taxpayers have plowed more than a million bucks into the Capulin play area, and deserve more than a locked gate and the dangerously bad option of bushwhack sledding.

— Albuquerque Journal