Friends of the Sandia Mountains (FOSM)

Supporting Sandia Ranger District Since 1997

Whether you are a hiker, mountain biker, cross-country skier, trail runner, or you just enjoy being in the Sandias, you know that our mountains are one of nature’s special gifts.

Have you ever wondered what you could do to help protect our mountains? Do you want to learn more about the animals and plants you find there? Do you like to meet people who share your concern for the Sandia and Manzanita Mountains?

Welcome! Please explore our website to learn more about the goals and many activities of the Friends of the Sandia Mountains (FOSM). We likely have volunteer opportunities that match your interests and abilities.

Click image to check out this great video about the uniqueness of the Sandias (“…young mountains formed of old rock”) created by our friends at the Sandia Mountain Natural History Center.

*Technically, it’s Sandia Mountain (singular), but we often use the plural to recognize the existence of northern and southern peaks.

New to Albuquerque or just new to the Sandias? Explore the many recreational opportunities our mountains offer. Please carefully read the Safety section.

Please check out our La Luz Trail webpage if you are planning to hike this iconic but too often dangerous trail.

An easy way to get involved is to join Cibola Trail Rangers, an email group consisting of hikers, bikers, XC skiers, horsemen, etc., who frequent the trails in the Sandia Ranger District and are interested in exchanging information on trail conditions on both an immediate and continuing basis. The group includes FOSM members trained to correct reported problems.

Please report corrective actions as well as problems so the FOSM trail maintenance crew doesn’t hike to fix a problem that no longer exists.

Click above to learn about this auto tour guide to the Sandias.
Click above to enjoy an entertaining and educational video about the Sandias⏤mountains created by the Rio Grande rift only 10 to 20 million years ago but made mostly of granite 1.4 billion years old⏤produced by NMPBS in conjunction with Albuquerque’s tricentennial in 2006.
Click above to learn about this educational guide to the Sandias.

Sandia Peak Tramway makes the top of the mountain easily accessible and one-way hikes of La Luz Trail possible, but be sure to check their website before starting your journey.

Click image to access website. Chick here for live view from webcams.

October 10, 2024 – Ken Born, Acting Sandia District Ranger, sent the following message to Julie Padilla and FOSM members: Thanks so much for the “virtual” introduction, Julie.

I’ve heard so many great things about the Friends of the Sandia Mountains and look forward to working with you all. We are extremely grateful for your support of the Sandia Ranger District and this mountain range, which is a treasure to so many in our community and beyond.

October 9, 2024 – Julie Padilla, Sandia Ranger District Recreation Staff Officer, sent the following message to FOSM members: Hello Friends of Sandia, please see below and join us in welcoming new Acting District Ranger Ken Born!

October 4, 2024 – Heidi McRoberts, Cibola National Forest Supervisor, issued the following statement:

Please join me in welcoming Ken Born as our new acting Sandia District Ranger. Ken will begin his detail on Monday, October 6.

The following is a bit of background on Ken.

Ken kicked off his federal career in 1996 as GS-1 STEP student, serving as a fisheries biologist aide with the US Army of Corps of Engineers. After spending a decade working as a land use planner in various capacities with Monterey County, CA; the Central Pine Barrens Joint Planning and Policy Commission on Long Island, NY; and Multnomah County, OR – he made the jump to federal service permanently in 2010. Ken went to the Regional Office in 2018 from the Coronado National Forest, where he served as a District Ranger. Prior to that, he was on the Tonto National Forest, where he was the Forest Planner. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in environmental planning from Northern Arizona University, and a Master of Arts degree in public policy from Stony Brook University. Born and raised in Tucson, AZ, Ken lives in Albuquerque with his wife, two daughters, dog, and cat – and feels extremely lucky for the opportunity to continue to live and work in the Southwest.

We are very excited to have Ken join our team and look forward to working with him.


From Bet Gendron: We are sorry to announce the passing on Sept 7 of Carl Smith, 86, a long-time friend and sawyer in the Friends of the Sandia Mtns for decades. In the words of Sam Beard, ” Carl and I were friends and colleagues for more than 45 years. We shared our love of the outdoors in the Friends of the Sandia Mountains and the New Mexico Cross Country Ski Club. A skilled photographer, Carl contributed many pictures to my Ski Touring in Northern New Mexico, and he used his chain saw to remove trees from ski trails in the Sandia and Jemez Ranger Districts. We also enjoyed working together using chainsaws to fell hazard trees, cut logs, and clear meadows in projects organized by the Friends.” A former physicist with Sandia Labs, Carl was also a climber and an avid mountain biker as well as a road biker with NM Touring Society. We all knew his sometimes exacting standards and we enjoyed hearing of his many world-wide climbing adventures, which he regaled with old-school amusement, no matter how harrowing it actually was. In addition to photographing for Sam’s book, he contributed to Robert Julyan’s The Mountains of New Mexico and others. Carl was laid up for a few years in the companionship of his wife, Marilyn.


Sign at top of our adopted mile of Crest Highway.
Volunteers Jamey Browning, Cliff Giles, Sim Cook, Mike Madden, Tim Kirkpatrick, Karen Greif, Sam Beard, Rav Nicholson, Pauline Ho, Richard Buss, and Don Carnicom ready to go to work. Missing Anne Hickman and Steve Roholt (photographer)
Karen Greif and Anne Hickman picked up a lot of trash!

October 15, 2024 – Steve Roholt writes:

Today, 14 FOSM volunteers participated in our semiannual trash pickup. This was a volunteer project for the NM Department of Transportation. Two main tasks were taken on.

  • First, our required trash pickup. This was completed today.
  • Second, brushing along both highway shoulders. The amount of brushing was impressive. The northern and southern 0.2 miles were completed today. The middle 0.6 mile was partially completed. We will have another project in the spring. The long-term goal is to provide sustainable visibility and prevent brush from encroaching on the highway right of way.

Volunteers were Tim Kirkpatrick, Sam Beard, Sim Cook, Dan Benton, Don Carnicom, Mike Madden, Cliff Giles, Rav Nicholson, Karen Greif, Anne Hickman, Jamey Browning, Pauline Ho, Rick Buss, and Steve Roholt. The weather was ideal.

Special thanks to founding FOSM members Don Carnicom and Sam Beard for helping out.


Canyon Young, Trails and Wilderness Program Manager, Sandia Ranger District

October 15, 2024 – Canyon Young writes: Another big thanks to everyone involved in what became one of the most major trail projects on the Sandia Ranger District this year.

As many of you are likely aware, the Ellis Trail historically followed an old road bed in the clearcut for what was originally going to become a spur road going north off the Crest Hwy decades ago. And thus, the trail had a lot of unnecessary, unsustainable, and rather unpleasant ups and downs.

Several years ago, Kerry Wood and the SRD Trails Crew, in conjunction with NM Volunteers for the Outdoors (and possibly FOSM, I don’t recall), completed a handful of reroutes that successfully bypassed some of these unnecessary steep sections. I and my old crew were a part of the construction of this first phase, back when I was the seasonal trails crew lead. However, I distinctly recall while hiking back and forth between the trailhead and those initial reroutes and realizing that more would likely be more necessary at some point in the future.

Fast forward to this year, I found “Ellis reroutes” on the Cibola National Forest’s Recreation Program of Work, and found out that the entire trail had a 30-meter archaeological clearance corridor as cleared through the 2018 Sandia Hazard Tree NEPA Project. With this knowledge, combined with knowing that other priority trails projects would be in limbo while awaiting approval from other resource areas, I saw a prime opportunity to keep my crew’s and FOSM’s Thursday trail construction crew’s momentum uninterrupted, all the while accomplishing meaningful work and continuing to whittle down Cibola Recreation’s currently-gigantic POW.

It can be difficult in many scenarios to successfully design sustainable, quality reroutes with the standard 30-m corridor that we as USFS trails staff often have to deal with, given the steepness of our local mountain terrain combined with sustainable trail design parameters. However, I knew that in this case, with the sections I would want to bypass and how Ellis was laid out, I essentially had a blank slate to get the entire remainder of Ellis where I wanted it, so long as I put in some careful effort with my design and flagging. Two of the nine total reroutes did have to dip a bit outside the 30-meter corridor in order to make sense and be sustainable; however, Sandia’s archaeology staff was able to quickly and painlessly write an addendum for these since there were no known cultural resources in the area.

In addition to my ever-present objective for all SRD trails of making the entire length of Ellis more sustainable for our mountain ecosystem and more enjoyable for all trail users, the big-picture outcome I had with this project was to make Ellis more mountain bike-able, and thereby aid in better dispersing mountain bike traffic around the district as a whole. By replacing the old, steep, eroded sections with quality reroutes that ride well both ways, this effort will combine with the reroutes done on 10K North over the past several years to create a quality loop opportunity on an area of the district that was largely avoided by many cyclists in the past. And, this will hopefully result in a bit less hiker/mountain bike conflict on Challenge and other nearby. Even if as little as 5% of the bike traffic on the district is diluted through this effort, that’s a victory in the grand scheme of building SRD’s trail system into a network that can handle the ABQ area’s ever-increasing, multi-use recreational demand with minimized future management input from both the USFS and volunteer groups.

Again, thank you to everyone involved for being a part of this major project, and thereby part of SRD’s big-picture mission!

October 4, 2024 – Thursday crew leader Laura Leon provided this exciting report:

We did it! Ellis reroutes are finished! Twelve weeks of working on Ellis has been a treat. We’ve watched as the flowers bloomed, then the grasses and now, with the weather cooling, the aspens blazing. The most amazing crew ever gave it their all on Thursday and the 10 volunteers and the 3 SRD crew (Dorothy, Zay and Chris) pushed through a long day and a long hike out with tools. The last 2 reroutes, #8 and #9 were finished and the obliteration completed. We even managed a cranky hiker who “just doesn’t understand” why we were out there messing with the trail. Thanks to everyone who has participated over the last 12 weeks- you helped make this job a success!

Click to read Luis Cuadros’s outstanding summary of the project.
Click to enlarge map showing locations of 9 rerouted sections of Ellis Trail. Map credit: Luis Cuadros.

Laura’s 12 reports summarizing the project can be found here. In them you’ll find not only details about the project but also some wonderful photographs of Sandia wildlife.


Click to watch 2-minute video of the first Sam Beard Achievement Award ceremony. Shown above (l-r): Mike Madden, Tim Brown, Susan Gregory, and Jamey Browning.

October 1, 2024 – FOSM president Mike Madden presented the first Sam Beard Achievement Award, a plaque made by Jamey Browning, to Tim Brown commemorating his 15 years service as FOSM treasurer.


FY2025 Board members (l to r): Susan Gregory, Sam Beard, Jenny Blackmore, Cliff Giles (vice president), Joe Meade, Steve Roholt, Mike Madden (president), Silke Bletzer (secretary), Sim Cook, and Jeff Young (treasurer). Not shown: Jamey Browning and Byron Garner.

October 1, 2024 – Jeff Young was elected treasurer replacing Tim Brown, who stepped down after serving in that capacity for 15 years, while FOSM’s incumbent president, vice president, and secretary were re-elected. Susan Gregory was elected as an at-large board member replacing Eric Russell, who decided to step down after serving five years.


Our last membership meeting of 2024 began with recognition of Tim Brown for his 15 years of service as treasurer followed by election of officers and board members for FY2025. (See above.) New treasurer Jeff Young then educated and entertained us with his presentation of the history of “…people, places, and things of the Sandia Ranger District, how the Sandia Ranger District came to be, history of recreation in the Sandias, hunting and wildlife, and other historical events.” The well-attended meeting was made especially enjoyable by the goodies including a delicious apple dessert provided by Silke Bletzer.

Slides from this as well as previous meetings are available here.


Sam Beard and Silke Bletzer have done another amazing job with the annual newsletter. In the words of FOSM president Mike Madden, “Thanks also goes to Sam Beard for assembling this Annual Newsletter, and to Silke Bletzer for formatting it. Sam has been producing it faithfully since 2003, and believe me, it’s a mountain of work! Back issues are found on our website. All the great work that was done by our volunteers over the past year is described by the respective leaders in the pages that follow. Please take the time to read it.”

FOSM vice-president Cliff Giles added: “Congratulations and thanks to Sam and Silke for another professionally crafted and impressively comprehensive Annual Newsletter. Impressive doesn’t do justice to the work described in the document—in terms of both quantity and quality. Thanks to all of you who volunteered throughout the year. By my calculations, FOSM efforts during the past fiscal year as reported in the newsletter supplemented the Sandia Ranger District workforce by approximately 5 full-time equivalent positions.

Previous editions of the newsletter can be found here.

Thank you, Sam and Silke!

Click to read FY2024 newsletter.

FOSM volunteers contributed over 9,000 hours of service in support of the Forest Service mission in fiscal year 2024. Weekly crew activities accounted for 6,600 of these hours. In addition, individuals reported another 2,573 hours of service. (Undoubtedly, lots of other individual efforts go unreported.) Using 1,880 hours per employee per year (allowing for holidays and vacation time), FOSM volunteer services equate to about 5 full-time equivalents (FTEs)⏤a substantial augmentation of the Sandia Ranger District workforce.

Click to see hours reported by FOSM volunteers

Albuquerque, NM, September 27, 2024 – The Cibola National Forest and National Grasslands (NF&NGs) has issued an area closure order (Order 03-03-05-24-13) for the Cedro 4 Project Area north of Forest Road 462 on the Sandia Ranger District of the Cibola NF&NGs, described below and shown on the attached map.

This Order shall be in effect from October 7, 2024, at 0600 through May 3, 2025 at 0600, unless rescinded.

The purpose of this Order is for the protection of public health and safety during mechanized thinning work in the Cedro 4 project area north of Forest Road 462 as shown on attached map.

Click to read full order.
Click to enlarge map.

Those of us who work on one (or more) of the weekly crews are very appreciative of the neatly organized building in which we store our large collection of tools and supplies. Some have heard old-timers like Sam Beard tell the story of how the building itself was a gift and how Sandia Ranger District provided the land upon which it is installed. Joele Hertel and Sam recently brought electical power into the building and added new racks to better organize the many valuable tools that are stored within it.

Not many of us, however, know the story of why we call it a Guard Station rather than a tool shed. Lou Romero has captured this story in a 5-page document that you can read by clicking on the image below. He also has provided a very personal account of why the term means so much to him.


Thanks, Anne Hickman for your years of faithful service as leader of the paint crew. Anne has stepped down due to other commitments. Please use the form on the referenced pages if you would be interested in assuming this leadership position.


Welcome, New FOSM Members!

Glen Clement – October 15, 2024

Peter Rhyins – October 4, 2024

Scott Christenson – September 3, 2024

Janet Simon and Mark Weber – September 2, 2024

Eric Messerschmidt – August 16, 2024

Chuck Logan – August 12, 2024

Courtney and Svetlana Conte – August 12, 2024

Tom Spross – July 20, 2024

James Epps* – July 18, 2024

Lisa Blackford – July 14, 2024

Jeff and Jan Kokos – June 4, 2024

Neil Alessio – May 30, 2024

Tim Kirkpatrick – May 7, 2024

Marianne Randall – April 2, 2024

*Life sponsor