GONE NUTS.

Byline: STACI MATLOCK

Margaret Swazo sat on the ground underneath a large pinon tree Friday afternoon along Old Las Vegas Highway, her earth-brown hands gently moving aside needles. Every so often she uncovered a plump pinon nut, plucked it up and dropped it in a red, plastic Folgers coffee can.

"We're looking for what's left," Swazo said. "This has already been picked over. You can tell by the trash people leave behind."

Swazo, 69, and her son, Stevie Swazo, 20, had driven from Tesuque Pueblo to hunt for the tasty, nutritious nuts.

Since the beginning of September, cars and trucks have lined roads near Santa Fe as their drivers and passengers spend warm, sunny fall days collecting the nuts. The Pecos Valley from Glorieta to San Jose and up on Rowe Mesa has had a particularly good crop this year, the pinon trees loaded with cones.

Some people carry tarps to lay out under the trees and shake the branches, sending down a shower of fresh pinon nuts. Many of them are collecting nuts to sell out of their cars or at roadside stands.

Others, like the Swazos, carefully search the ground for the nuts, filling cans and bags to eat themselves. "This is for the winter; when we're sitting around watching television, we snack on these," Margaret Swazo said, a smile crinkling her face under a shock of white hair.

Pinon trees are slow-growing and so are their seeds, what people call nuts. "People say there's a bumper crop about every five to seven years," Swazo said, plopping a few more nuts in the can.

Pinon nuts fetch a good price. Some reports out of Las Vegas, N.M., put the price at $10 to $15 a pound. A blog post on City-Data Forum by "Pintada Kid" estimated that outside New Mexico, a pound of clean pinon could fetch $30.

They're expensive to buy in part because no one has invented a mechanical way to gather them. It's still labor-intensive and gooey work from all the sap.

Pinons are most abundant in five Western states covering some 36 million acres. In Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, most are the hard-shell pinon, or Pinus edulis, according to PinonNuts.org, a Web site managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Colorado Office. In Nevada and Utah, the soft-shell, or Pinus monophylla, is more prevalent. The PinonNuts.org Web site publishes a pinon outlook report each year, and September was this season's beginning.

For centuries, pueblo and other Indian peoples gathered the nutritious little nuts all over the West as an important winter food supply. When the Spanish entered the picture, they followed suit.

Packed inside their diminutive, sometimes hard-to-crack shell is substantial protein, fat and minerals. Eighteen of the vital amino acids that make up proteins are packaged in the pinon "seed."

Pinons became big business before World War II. In an interview archived at Northern Arizona University, former trader John W. Kennedy talked about the days in the early 1900s when the Ilfeld Co. shipped train-car-loads of pinons to New York. "They were consumed down there on the Lower East Side where the immigrant villages were ... tens of thousands of immigrants leaning out of the window, drinking cheap wine and eating pinons."

In 1936, Kennedy worked for a wholesale house estimating pinon crops. He predicted

4 million pounds one year, and a New York nut company borrowed $500,000 to buy up the crop. "When the dust settled the next spring, there were

8 million pounds," Kennedy told his interviewer. "And these pinyons were stored in Santa Fe and Las Vegas, Magdalena, the wool warehouse here in Albuquerque, Gallup, and Flagstaff. And I went to Flagstaff four years later and shipped the last of those pinyons. It took four years to clean up the crop."

Some national forests require a permit to harvest pinon nuts, but not the Santa Fe National Forest, according to spokeswoman Dolores Maese. "We do ask people to make sure they know they are on National Forest land and not on private when picking, and to respect fences," she said.

For some, pinon picking is a serious business. Eldorado resident Lawrence Catanach, 57, was arrested earlier this week on charges of battery against a household member after he argued with the victim "over the picking and giving away of pinon nuts," according to the sheriff's report. Catanach allegedly grabbed the woman by her throat and attempted to drag her out of the house.

For Swazo, pinon picking has always been much nicer. "I love picking pinon," she said. "It's relaxing. My mind wanders, kind of like daydreaming."

Contact Staci Matlock at 470-9843 or [e-mail].

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