Otero Mesa, south of the Sacramento Mountains and east of the Guadalupe Mountains, is home to a majestic desert grassland and a sportsman’s public-land paradise.

Managed by the BLM, Otero Mesa’s breathtaking landscapes are home to New Mexico’s only remaining native pronghorn antelope herds, a healthy mule deer population, oryx, a complex ecosystem full of native plants and more than 1,000 species of wildlife. It’s also the perfect place to reintroduce bighorn sheep.

Despite its natural beauty and unique hunting opportunities, Otero Mesa is in danger of becoming an industrial oil and gas field.

We ask you to join us on Thursday, Dec. 15, from 5:30 to 7:00 pm, on the NMSU-Alamogordo campus, to help us identify critical backcountry areas for protection. We’ll be meeting in room Science Center Room 135 (SC-135), check the campus map.

We want to help protect the backcountry hunting areas that matter most to Otero County and New Mexico sportsmen.

At the Backcountry Areas workshop, we ask for a short moment of your time to help identify the areas in Otero Mesa that matter most to you. The workshop is completely free and all you need to bring are the memories of the places where you like to hunt in Otero Mesa.

We will record your results on a computer and focus on these special areas to help designate them as backcountry conservation areas in the upcoming BLM Tri-County Resource Management Plan.

Please do your part to help sportsmen conserve their critical hunting areas in Otero Mesa — WE NEED YOUR HELP! RSVP today!