The Sandia Ranger District on the Cibola National Forest is a local treasure rich in natural resources and exceptional beauty. It includes multiple cultural and historic settings and recreation sites valued by many communities in the Albuquerque region.  But the Sandia Mountains are threatened by overuse, wildfires, watershed degradation and under-resourced federal management agencies. We need to do a better job caring for this place we all love.

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In the Fall of 2020, at the request of the USFS Sandia Ranger District(SRD), the Sandia Collaborative was asked to identify six areas of interest or concern as a prescoping effort to the USFS formal scoping of their La Madera Project. This was done as a totally independent and parallel path effort to USFS formal scoping. Through all of 2021, the six teams worked on their items, each concluding with a deliverable set of recommended actions. These recommended actions were presented to the USFS at the end of the year, along with a final document. Due to an unanticipated reduction in USFS resources, as of the Spring of 2023, the scope of the La Madera project has disappointingly been reduced to forest thinning and fuels treatment only.