Located south of Alamogordo, Otero Mesa covers 1.2 million acres in New Mexico, much of it managed by the Bureau of Land Management’s Las Cruces District Office. What makes it rare is not one species or one site — it’s that the whole landscape still works together. It holds the largest remaining continuous black grama grassland in the Chihuahuan Desert. Black grama is a native grass that takes decades to recover once disturbed. The volcanic Cornudas Mountains, including Alamo and Wind Mountains, rise from the grassland near the Texas line. Less than 2% of this landscape has formal protection.

Its petroglyphs are at least 8,000 years old, and its rock shelters were used for thousands of years. The Mesa holds the history of the Mescalero Apache and other tribes. It also carries traces of Spanish colonial and Mexican travelers on the 1600s salt trails that fed the Camino Real, passengers on the 1850s Butterfield stagecoach route, and the Buffalo Soldiers.

The Mesa is also home to one of New Mexico’s healthiest pronghorn herds, black-tailed prairie dogs, and rare plants found in few other places. As many as 200 bird species use it, among them the endangered Aplomado falcon at the northern edge of its range. The National Audubon Society lists the Mesa as a globally Important Bird Area. A 2023 landscape assessment ranked the heart of the Mesa above 98% of comparable BLM lands in the West for reptile, amphibian, and mammal diversity. It ranked just as high for habitat connectivity — the room wildlife needs to move, migrate, and adapt as the climate shifts.

The Mesa’s greatest value is that it remains whole, and fragmentation is its greatest threat. Oil and gas drilling, rare-earth and hardrock mining, groundwater export, unmanaged off-road use and dumping could each carve it apart, one road and one well pad at a time. Each new development makes the next disturbance easier. Advocates have defended Otero Mesa for more than 20 years. In 2009, the State of New Mexico and conservation groups, including the Sierra Club, won a federal court ruling that struck down a plan to open the Mesa to oil and gas drilling.

How can we protect the New Mexican part of Otero Mesa into the future?

The BLM’s Tri-County Resource Management Plan for Sierra, Doña Ana, and Otero counties has been in draft since 2013. That draft analyses an Otero Mesa Grassland Wildlife Area of Critical Environmental Concern as one option. In 2014, the BLM said it had closed the Mesa to new oil and gas leases while the plan remained unfinished. Yet through that process the agency has twice declined to add protections for Otero Mesa. More than a decade later, the plan is still not done, and the Mesa still has no permanent protection, with none on the horizon from the BLM.

The Rio Grande Chapter is part of the Coalition to Protect Otero Mesa, which in 2024 asked the BLM to designate the heart of the Mesa an Area of Critical Environmental Concern. We work alongside Tribal leaders, conservation and sportsmen’s groups, and local communities toward permanent protection for the Mesa’s grasslands, water, wildlife, and cultural sites. That work needs your support as the coalition explores every available path to lasting protection at the federal and state levels.

Learn more at OteroMesa.org and message Antoinette Reyes to get involved at Antoinette.Reyes@sierraclub.org or 575-342-1727.

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Otero Mesa

October 21, 2026

Located south of Alamogordo, Otero Mesa covers 1.2 million acres in New Mexico, much of it managed by the Bureau of Land Management's Las Cruces District Office. The Rio Grande Chapter is part of the Coalition to Protect Otero Mesa, which in 2024 asked the BLM to designate the heart of the Mesa an Area of Critical Environmental Concern. We work alongside Tribal leaders, conservation and sportsmen's groups, and local communities toward permanent protection for the Mesa's grasslands, water, wildlife, and cultural sites. That work needs your support as the coalition explores every available path to lasting protection at the federal and state levels ...

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Otero Mesa bore hole defunded

September 5, 2017

Many Otero County residents breathed a sigh of relief in May when the U.S. Department of Energy withdrew its proposal to drill a 3-mile borehole in Otero Mesa to research the storage of radioactive waste.  The DOE had identified five potential sites for its test site, one in Otero County. The other possible locations were in Quay County, New Mexico, Pecos County, Texas, and two South Dakota counties.  The test would require drilling a 8.5-inch-diameter hole down 16,000 feet. If that were successful, they would attempt an 18-inch hole — also 3 miles deep. The object of drilling the larger borehole would be to determine if the hole is straight enough to accept nuclear waste canisters all the way down.  ...

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El Paso Group, Latest News, Southern New Mexico Group

Many Otero County residents breathed a sigh of relief in May when the U.S. Department of Energy withdrew its proposal to drill a 3-mile borehole in Otero Mesa to research the storage of radioactive waste.

The DOE had identified five potential sites for its test site, one in Otero County. The other possible locations were in Quay County, New Mexico; Pecos County, Texas; and two South Dakota counties.

The test would require drilling a 8.5-inch-diameter hole down 16,000 feet. If that were successful, they would attempt an 18-inch hole — also 3 miles deep. The object of drilling the larger borehole would be to determine if the hole is straight enough to accept nuclear waste canisters all the way down.

While the promoters of the project (TerranearPMC, the developers of the drilling technique) said it was only a test, would be fully remediated and would never be used for the storage of actual radioactive waste, their assertions were widely questioned. The location in southeast Otero County is privately owned.

Activists, believing the environmental and cultural impacts on Otero Mesa and concerned that despite promises, the “test” site would end up being a nuclear-waste disposal site, filled the Otero County Commission Chambers for the April and May meetings to voice their concerns.

Then, on May 23, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it will no longer support the Deep Borehole Field Test nationwide due to constraints in President Trump’s 2018 budget proposal.

This is not likely to spell the permanent end to the borehole test in Otero County. Peter Gram of TerranearPMC, quoted in the Alamogordo Daily News, said “I believe it will happen. It’s just a matter of the timing of it.”

Featured image from Concerned Citizens for Nuclear safety.