Piñon pickers hailing bountiful harvest in Northern New Mexico

Sep. 19—Tlahuicole Morales Cortes was far up a piñon tree as a pack of people stooped over below him on the slopes of the rocky landscape northeast of Santa Fe, their heads lowered and eyes trained searchingly to the forest floor.

"Más arriba," or "higher up," a man called out to Morales Cortes.

Morales Cortes ventured further and then paused to assess his footing. With a firm hold on the conifer's limbs, he shook powerfully at the urging of people gathered in the tree's shadow, working the branches as edible piñon nuts rained down.

In the piñon and juniper woodlands around the region, the vehicles of Northern New Mexico's devoted piñon pickers can be found along the sides of the roads this week during prime foraging season for the nuts. They hauled blankets, buckets and other tools out to the native trees that carry both an ecological and cultural significance.

A group of six people — Morales Cortes along with family members Juan Pereida, who lives in Santa Fe — were fanning out on an embankment beneath a piñon pine offering an abundance of nuts, foraging as vehicles heading toward the mountains sped on Hyde Park Road.

"A lot of years, there's not a lot of trees that have them, but this year, there's a lot," said Pereida as he moved around feeding piñon seeds into a baseball cap. "There's a big difference this year."

Members of Pereida's family, both locals and relatives visiting from Los Angeles, were scrambling around on a steep incline, their vehicles parked with doors swung open.

One woman held a sock that was almost filled to the brim. Several baseball caps were heavy to hold because of the weight of so many nuts.

"It's a family thing where you [pick] together and you go back home and you sit at the table and play poker," said Veronica Sampedro, of Los Angeles. "They're like flower seeds."

As a part of a local tradition in communities in Arizona and New Mexico, people wait for the nuts to materialize on trees in the foothills before setting out to gather them in hats, cans and bags.

The seeds are used in New Mexican dishes, candies and are popular to eat seasoned like sunflower seeds or even raw. They are also considered a staple food for some Native American tribes who have picked them for centuries.

People are taking to TikTok and other social media platforms to share videos and photographs showcasing big grabs of this year's bumper crop. Sandwich bags of nuts have been listed on Craigslist for $50. By all accounts, it's a good year in the region. Hotspots for picking are being circulated online.

Sampedro noted that piñon seeds can compliment ice cream nicely. Pereida has a taste for them roasted and seasoned with lemon pepper, although paprika can spice them up as well.

Cycles of nut production — whether a crop will prove bountiful or sparse — are tied to rainfall. In 1949, the New Mexico Legislature officially adopted the piñon pine as the state tree.

Tracy Neal, a retired horticulturist, hopes a strong year for piñon nut production will help pinyon jays, a bird that plays a key role in the ecosystem by spreading the seeds of piñon trees around, thereby contributing to the health of native forests.

"Pinyon jays have been on the decline for years and they are very key to the piñon crop, and I am hoping that the good piñon crop this year will help stimulate the population of pinyon jays next year because they have taken a real beating in the last few years," Neal said.

"We're sort of teetering on this brink in this century because of the drought patterns, with a [piñon] bark beetle explosion and another giant piñon die-off, but so far we've been saved by rains coming at the right time, so let's hope that continues," Neal continued.

Earl Tenorio and some friends made the 40-minute drive from San Felipe Pueblo on Thursday morning and had paused their picking to enjoy a lunch near the Dale Ball Trails off of Sierra Del Norte Road. Running into some steep inclines, they had found some luck on the trail proper.

"Usually, with our culture, we usually come early in the morning. We start off early because it's a lot of work picking one by one," Tenorio said. "This year, everyone is talking about it — in Pecos, Jemez, Sandia."

"They don't produce every year," Tenorio added.

"It's every three or four years [that they produce]," said Clarissa Garcia, voicing a conviction that many of these pickers hold.

Mariah Coriz of Santo Domingo Pueblo said she hadn't picked much since she was younger but this year she was back at it.

"It brings my inner child back out," she said.

Garcia roasts the nuts and adds salt. Laying them across the hood of a car to let the sun catch them also helps to soften and mature them. Some locals have a sense of when the piñon trees will produce and the yearly cycles.

"As Natives, it's a must that we come," Garcia added.

The group was using the tarp method Thursday, getting the piñons rolling from the trees and picking them off a tarp below the tree branches instead of from the ground. Garcia, who works part time at Home Depot, said some people buy battery-operated vacuums to suck up piñons quickly, a modern spin on the beloved tradition.

"The higher you go, the closer you are to the creator," Garcia joked when discussing the tree-shaking techniques, prompting the group of friends to laugh. "The higher you go, you shake more piñons out."

"We pray to the Mother Earth, pray that we get more in the future, not only for ourselves but to everybody else that knows the tradition or the culture," said Tenorio.