ON JULY 31, 1903, VERNON ORLANDO BAILEY stood where very few people like him had stood. His aneroid barometer told him he was somewhere above 12,500 feet. A few wisps of grass poked through the lichen-covered gravels at his feet, and frost-cracked boulders formed mounds around him. The wind blew hard, a cool razor on his face. Bailey stood atop East Pecos Baldy, one of two summits of a usually snowcapped mountain that rises 20 miles north of the small, tough town of Pecos, New Mexico, in what is today the Pecos Wilderness. In 1903, however, wilderness had a less inviting meaning than it does today, and not many Anglo-americans had been bitten by the bug of recreational mountain climbing, although Bailey’s friend John Muir was trying to change that.

Bailey stood at a center point in the landscape of the Southwest and at a turning point in its history. The centrality of the mountain was a simple matter of geography. Pecos Baldy is the left heel of a north-pointing alpine horseshoe. In the inside of the horseshoe rise the headwaters of the Pecos River, just beginning their 800-mile journey southward to meet the Río Grande in the deserts of West Texas. From Pecos Baldy, Bailey could look

west and see the deep, broad valley of the Great River stretching north as straight as a compass needle, slashed here and there by the vivid green of the basin’s irrigated farmlands, the rest of the low country being dun and bare or stippled by dark pygmy forests of piñon and juniper.

What makes Bailey’s 1903 moment on the mountain a turning point in southwestern history is its connection to the tide of human activity then transforming the land he surveyed.

About 260,000 acres of the mountain sea of jagged peaks and dark forests he gazed upon, constituting what Bailey called the Pecos Mountains, had been designated the Pecos River Forest Reserve in January 1892. It was the fourth such reserve to be created in the United States and the first in the Southwest. The practical import of the action was to close the land to “entry and settlement” — meaning that no one might claim ownership of some portion of the land by filing a mining or timber or homestead claim, as was permissible on unreserved public domain. Overall, the high country was being overgrazed, its timber wasted, and its watersheds degraded by erosion. Downstream irrigators

and communities concerned for their water supply pply called for action. So did town boosters who foresaw a commercial future in hunting, fishing, tourism, “health-seeking” (a major concern in those tubercular days) and general recreation.

By 1886 in New Mexico, and especially in the territorial capital of Santa Fe, officials largely agreed that the Pecos Mountains should be set aside and protected as Yellowstone had been when it was made the nation’s first national park in 1872. Antonio Joseph, then serving as the territory’s sole delegate to Congress, sought passage of a bill to that effect, and the Santa Fe Daily New Mexican cheered him on, stating, “In a few years more the best hunting and nd fishing grounds in the picturesque valleys of the e Rocky mountains [sic] will be shorn of their wild beauty by the steady march of modern civilization, and it is a debt that congress owes itself and the people to establish these reserves that some trace t of their natural grandeur may be preserved to the coming com generation. Pass this measure, and Santa Fe will becom become even as great a resort for the tourist and healthseeker as any city one may name.”

In the Pecos Mountains of 1903, Vernon Bailey admired the scattered open grasslands that broke the continuity of the forests: “Since the [designation] of the forest reservation, sheep have been banished from the parks and the number of cattle and horses limited, so the grass and flowering plants have returned in apparently primitive abundance,” he wrote. With satisfaction he noted the profusion of tall grasses “full of ripening see seed,” blue columbines and red paintbrush, while he also acknowledged the loss for neighboring valley ranches of “an important free summer range” for their livestock.

Bailey w was an inveterate outdoorsman and a great admirer of natural systems. s Although he usually did not engage in the conservation battles of his day, his work kept him close to the battlefield. Since 1890 he had been chief field naturalist of the United States Biological Survey, a position he would occupy for 43 years.

The Biological Survey and Bailey’s roots

Vernon Bailey fully subscribed to the utilitarian vision from which the Biological Survey was born. In the introduction to his monograph Mammals of New Mexico, the foremost item among his 244 publications, he cites the progress that he and his colleagues had made in understanding the habits and characteristics of southwestern wildlife. The resultant beneficial knowledge of how best to limit the abundance of unwanted wildlife and simultaneously to protect desirable species made it possible, he says, “to solve many of the problems that will mean the greatest good to the greatest number of people.” In his choice of words he was echoing not only the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who formulated “the greatest good” argument, but also Gifford Pinchot, who made that concept an n organizing principle of the Forest Service. “The greatest good d for the greatest number” was an anthem of Progressivism.

Born in 1864, Bailey was a farm boy from Minnesota who had a passion for animals of all kinds. He also had a passion for capturing and classifying those creatures, but sometimes he lacked the resources to determine their species. While still a teenager, he wrote to a young medical doctor in upstate New York, C. Hart Merriam, who had just published Mam Mammals of the Adirondacks, to ask if Dr. Me Merriam might identify the specimens Bailey ho hoped to send him. Merriam responded w with an even better offer. He promised to pay the boy for all the specimens he might send — 25 cents for mice, and a dollar for woodchucks and skunks.

Thus began a long relationship. When Merriam became the founding director of the Division of Economic Ornithology in the th federal Department of Agriculture, Bailey became one of his first field men — at the princely p salary of 40 dollars a month, which Merriam M supplemented with 10 more dollars from f his personal funds. When Merriam organized an expedition to Mount Shasta in California in 1888 to test his ideas about wildlife occupying specific areas he called life zones, Bailey went with him — and not incidentally

spent a good deal of time with Merriam’s sister Florence, another member of the expedition. The following year, Bailey accompanied Merriam on an expedition to Arizona to map the life zones of the San Francisco Peaks, and in 1890 and ’91 the two again joined forces for a much longer expedition to the deserts of Death Valley.

By 1903, when he stood on East Pecos Baldy, Bailey had already completed a biological survey of Texas, and at Merriam’s behest, he had begun a similar study of New Mexico. This was the work that had led him into the Pecos Forest Reserve clad in his customary field suit and knee-length gaiters, scanning the surrounding landscape through binoculars. Although for Bailey it may have been a usual day, he was an unusual man, known to travel at times with a live bat sleeping in his pocket or to turn loose jumping mice in his living room in Washington to entertain his guests. Bailey’s expedition was unusual, too. It included a woman. Waiting for him in camp 3 miles below the peak was Bailey’s equally trail-hardened wife, Florence Merriam Bailey, one of the most remarkable women of her time.

His notable scientist wife

They had married in December 1899, and now Florence, of delicate health and probably consumptive, found herself encamped in the rough, hail-battered mountains of Northern New Mexico. She and Bailey had already been on the trail for weeks before they entered the mountains, and they would continue their journey for nearly two months more.

Resourceful and adaptable, Florence made her own sleeping bag by dipping sheets in beeswax and coloring them green to hide the dirt. She also possessed deep wells of patience, developed early in childhood, to wait in the woods for birds to appear and then watch them closely, observing their behavior. Florence M. Bailey became one of the leading ornithologists of her day. She was the first woman associate and later the first woman fellow of the American Ornithologists’ Union. She became a popular nature writer, well known to readers of The Auk, Bird-lore, and The Condor. Urging her readers to use opera glasses and, as they eventually became available, field-ready binoculars, she advocated that birds be studied in the wild without disturbing or killing them, a stark departure from earlier ornithologists like John James Audubon and Elliott Coues, who blasted their specimens with shotguns and brought them home in game bags.

Florence Bailey’s most famous work is Birds of New Mexico (1928), a classic of southwestern ornithology, for which her time in the Pecos supplied scores of anecdotes and observations. Too hefty for a field guide — it ran to 807 pages and weighed more than 4 pounds — it stood for decades as the model for a state ornithology. Although essentially a work of science, the book at times waxes lyrical and bears the odor of romance. Like many after them, the Baileys agreed that the hermit thrush ( Hylocíchla guttáta aúduboni in her terminology; Hylocichla mustelina today) sang the sweetest of all the birds of the mountains. The thrushes abounded near what they came to call Hylocichla Camp: “From the woods above, below, and around

us came their beautiful songs, the first heard in the morning and the last at night. At sunset, as we walked through the cool, still, spruce woods, its pale beards lit by the last slanting rays, involuntarily treading lightly to make no sound, from unseen choristers a serene uplifted chant arose, growing till it seemed to fill the remote aisles of the forest.”

Wildlife in decline

While Florence made meticulous and sometimes rapturous notes of her bird observations, Vernon focused on mammals and their habitats. From atop East Pecos Baldy he overlooked the locations he would soon describe in his field report. To the north stood the Truchas Peaks, the tallest of which, South Truchas (13,102 feet), Bailey climbed on August 11. On a day he described as “windy and raw and cold” he came across tracks and scat of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep at 12,600 feet on the flank of the mountain. This would prove to be the last recorded evidence of the indigenous sheep of the range. Looking down from the mountain into a glade below, he saw a “huge blacktail buck” — a mule deer — but in his field notes, he added, “am not sure it was not an elk. Will go in a day or two to find out.” Bailey’s later entries are mute as to whether he later visited the glade, but it is fair to surmise that, had he confirmed the presence of an elk, he would have recorded it. As in the case of the bighorn, such a record would have marked the last trace of the native population of the species. Elk from Yellowstone and sheep descended from animals captured near Banff, Alberta, would eventually reinhabit the wilds of the Pecos Mountains, but already in Bailey’s time, elk had likely been absent for as many as 20 years.

Another animal missing in 1903 was the beaver. The mountains had been heavily trapped during the heyday of the Rocky Mountain fur trade in the 1820s and ’30s, but in the later years of the 19th century the big rodents made a partial comeback. It was short-lived, however. Bailey found evidence of a flourishing beaver colony a few miles northwest of Pecos Baldy on the Río Medio. Its dam had backed up a pond 5 or 6 feet deep, in which there rose “several large stick and mud

FROM THE TOP OF EAST PECOS BALDY [VERNON BAILEY] WOULD BE SHOCKED TO SEE MANY TENS OF THOUSANDS OF ACRES OF SPRUCEFIR FOREST RIVEN WITH DEATH AND DECAY.

houses,” but “the dam had been broken several years before, leaving the houses dry, and these had been broken into and the beavers were all gone.”

In those days, big predators fared especially badly. Steep mountains are not prime wolf territory — the rangy canids do better in rolling, open country, where their speed and endurance are a greater advantage — but wolves were known to frequent the Pecos Mountains from time to time. A forest ranger, probably Tom Stewart (for whom Stewart Lake is named), told Bailey that he had seen a wolf somewhere in the Pecos headwaters shortly before Bailey went up there — this was another last report. Bailey, who was an expert tracker and trapper, found no sign of them. And none of grizzly, either. Looking east from Pecos Baldy, Bailey would have admired the open grassy expanse of Hamilton Mesa, a 10,000-foot-high tableland, where L.L. Dyche in the early 1880s encountered a “herd” of 11 of the big bears. Bailey had been told there might still be a few of them in the far reaches of the mountains, but their numbers were hardly what they used to be, and the last Pecos grizzly would be trapped and killed in 1923.

The role of fire

Bailey was interested in the quality of the land as much as the identity and quantity of its creatures, and one of the greatest transformations he observed — not just in the Pecos Mountains but throughout the high country of settled New Mexico — concerned the state of the forests. He wrote, “The forest (now included in the Pecos River Forest Reservation) has been sadly thinned by burning, fully three fourths of it having been burned over and a large part of the coniferous forest replaced by poplars [aspen] or kept open by repeated burning for grazing land. There seem to have been almost no fires for several years, however, andd the slopes are being slowly reforested, both with aspens and a young growth of conifers.”

A century later, the Pecos high country was a far different ent landscape. Until the year 2000, the percentage of burned land observable from Pecos Baldy was essentially zero. The scars of the Viveash Fire that year (29,000 acres) and d the Borrego Fire of 2002 (13,000 acres) perhaps lifted that number by a digit or two, but Bailey would surely have been impressed by the dense uniformity of the spruce and fir forest on the mountain slopes and by the conifers’ gradual displacement of the grassy parks and young aspen that he viewed in 1903.

Fire has since continued its return to the high elevations of the mountains — no doubt under the influence of a warming climate — but in Bailey’s time fire was often an acolyte of settlement. Herders set fire to the mountains to open new grazing land and to maintain the grass of existing ranges. Prospectors set fires to reveal aspects of geology that forest cover concealed. Loggers left behind piles of dried-out slash that burst into flame like tinder if a spark found them. Campers, hunters, explorers and travelers of all kinds warmed themselves at night with big fires — they had neither fancy sleeping bags nor insulated sleeping pads — and big fires left persistent coals that often smoldered for days after their makers had decamped.

In 1903 Bailey observed a Southwest in rapid transformation. Its flora and fauna were in flux, much of it in a lamentable downward spiral. The region was then wilder than it is today, and Bailey watched the wildness bleed out of it. He not only recorded but advanced the process, for he was an expert trapper who advised others on the “control” of wolves and other predators. He rued the changes even as he assisted them. He was a man of his time, and he saw such “progress” as unavoidable. His greatest asset, enviable in any time or place, was the quality of his seeing, for he was a keen, indefatigable observer.

If Bailey, who died in 1942, could come back to the world of the living and retrace his steps, he would be pleased to see that many of the barren cattle ranges he visited in the early years of the 20th century have improved their condition. On the other hand, he would likely find the condition of the forests ambiguous, even perplexing — wonderfully free of fire in some areas but overgrown and tangled in places he had known as spacious savannas. In the Jemez Mountains and other locations he would encounter giant, burned expanses devastated as badly or worse than any he had seen in his day. And from the top of East Pecos Baldy he would be shocked to see many tens of thousands of acres of spruce-fir forest riven with death and decay. The widespread mortality within the stands appears to be the work of insects and drought, which warmer temperatures have made worse.

In general, Bailey would see that the early decades of the 21st century are producing changes analogous to those he observed in 1903. Curious about all things, Bailey would be intrigued by the literature on global warming, and even more by recent research on the dynamics of land landscape change. After a thoughtful review, he might, like a number of scientists pursuing that research, draw the conclusion that the turbulence of his own days in the southwest, after a long absence, is making a comeback.