A century of fuel for fire

“When the fire hit this,” said Parmenter, lead scientist at the Valles Caldera National Preserve, “it just exploded.”

Nearby, Parmenter pointed to a forest where the outcome was remarkably different. Its overgrowth thinned several years ago, it too burned during the massive Las Conchas Fire. But instead of a forest-destroying blaze, the fire hugged the ground, clearing out the duff on the forest floor and leaving the big trees intact. A month after fire burned through the area, new blades of oatgrass were poking their heads out of the blackened forest floor.

Across New Mexico, poor forest conditions mean 4.8 million acres are at high risk of wildfire — the same sort of blaze that exploded in the first days of the Las Conchas Fire, threatening Los Alamos and destroying vital watershed forest in Santa Clara Pueblo.

The causes are complex, but scientists say the biggest reason is a century of successful firefighting. “Everyone’s put out all the fires for a hundred years,” Parmenter said.

That deprived the woods of the natural fires that used to clear out undergrowth. The mountains have been left in jeopardy of more fires like Las Conchas, Wallow on the Arizona-New Mexico border and other major fires that darkened the Southwest’s skies and blackened its hillsides this summer.

Efforts are under way to clear old clogged forests, with logging, manual thinning and controlled burns. Last year, federal agencies cleared 145,000 acres of land in New Mexico by cutting down trees and controlled burning. But that is only a tiny fraction of the land that needs help.

“What these fires demonstrate is that we’re not working at a big enough scale yet,” said Laura McCarthy, a fire policy expert at the Nature Conservancy.

The government is devoting far too little money to the problem, given the vast areas at risk, said Robert Berrens, an economist at the University of New Mexico.

“The amount of money that is put in at the federal level for thinning is trivial,” he said in an interview. “We have nowhere near the budget to be able to thin the acres that need to be thinned.”

One of the most ambitious New Mexico efforts is the Southwest Jemez Mountains Restoration Project, aimed at some 210,000 acres.

As Parmenter drove up N.M. 4 recently past the area where the fire ignited, he pointed to the cluster of mountain homes known as Las Conchas, where the fire started June 26 when a tree fell on a power line.

The area was due to be thinned as part of the Jemez project, something that could have slowed the fire’s spread, but wildfire got to the overgrown hillsides first.

Giant factories

You could think of forests as giant factories for converting the sun’s energy into plant material. Sunlight hits tree leaves and needles, which use photosynthesis to convert the energy into the building blocks of life — the cells that make up forest plants.

Eventually, that accumulation of plant matter and the energy locked up inside it has to go somewhere.

In colder, wetter climates, it builds up on the forest floor, and decomposition takes care of much of the buildup, explained Don Falk, a fire scientist at the University of Arizona.

In the mountains of the arid Southwest, the energy stored in that buildup of leaves, needles and wood is most often released in fire. “In a fire, that energy — all that energy — is being released at once,” Falk said.

Scientists say that before we started fighting fires, the woods here burned every three to 25 years, depending on location and forest type. Some fires hugged the ground, clearing needles and small trees and leaving large, fire-hardened trees to survive. Some fires were patchy, destroying one clump of trees and leaving others nearby intact.

In dry years, fire would sometimes roam across the landscape for months at a time, burning millions of acres, far more than we see today, Falk said. But it would burn lightly, leaving behind healthy open stands of forest.

Fire was a natural part of that system, he said. “Fire is something forest ecosystems do. It’s not something that happens to them.”

Putting out fires allows fuel to eventually build up to unsupportable levels. In addition, smaller trees create a pathway for fire to climb up into the tops of trees, which forecasters call a “fuel ladder,” allowing fire to take off. Something has to give.

Spotted owl

Some argue increased environmental regulation, especially protection for the endangered Mexican spotted owl, has compounded the problem. The owl’s listing as an endangered species and subsequent lawsuits by environmentalists coincide with a substantial decline in logging in New Mexico.

“It basically shut down a business here that provided $14 million a year,” said Michael Nivison, a former Otero County commissioner who argues that spotted owl restrictions throttled an industry that could otherwise have economically thinned the forest and reduced fire danger.

John Fowler, a professor of agricultural economics at New Mexico State University, said environmental policies “regulated our sawmills out of existence.”

But others say the spotted owl was not the only reason for the decline in New Mexico’s logging industry.

Changes in the forestry business played a major role, including a lack of market demand for the small trees left on much of the forest land and an increasingly international wood products market.

“It wasn’t just the spotted owl,” said Dennis Dwyer, a Forest Service timber sales planner who oversees work on New Mexico and Arizona forests. “The whole style of forestry turned around.”

“The forest products industry was changing on its own,” said UNM’s Berrens.

Experts also say logging in many cases compounds fire risk. “Logging often emphasized the large pines, leaving the smaller and less fire-resistant trees of the understory (the firs and spruces) to become more dominant,” Congressional Research Service analyst Ross Gorte wrote last year.

History grove

Winding down a dirt road on the Valles Caldera National Preserve, Parmenter stopped his pickup in a stand of trees they call “the history grove.”

The Ponderosa pines are big and widely separated. Parmenter puts the density at 40 to 60 trees per acre. It is one of the few areas in the Jemez Mountains that has never been logged.

Across the valley, the volcanic nob known as Cerro del Medio is a different story.

Criss-crossed with logging roads, it was clear-cut when what is now a federal preserve was privately owned land. Much of the forest land on the preserve was logged the same way, with all the big timber gone, left to grow back into what foresters call “doghair.”

Where the natural “history grove” has at least 40 trees per acre, doghair can have 1,500 or more. If you put fire into a forest stand that thick, “it will literally explode,” Parmenter said.

Fixing doghair left behind by past logging and fire suppression is laborious.

Near the southwest corner of the Valles Caldera, Parmenter pointed out a forest, once doghair, that has been thinned to 150 to 200 trees per acre. This fall, a prescribed fire is planned for the area, the next step in clearing out the clogged understory.

Experience shows the effectiveness of the approach. As Las Conchas blazed, some of the areas that previously were cleared did not burn disastrously, with the fire dropping to the ground and burning slowly through pine needles and small plants.

The effects were especially noticeable around Los Alamos National Laboratory, where thinning efforts over the last decade helped protect the lab and neighboring community from the fire.

“We saw it working,” said Manny L’Esperance, the lab’s head of fire operations.

But forest thinning is costly — from $300 and $600 per acre, according to Eytan Krasilovsky of the Forest Guild, which works with loggers and community groups on forest-clearing projects.

Current economics require a government subsidy because there is little market for small-diameter trees that dominate doghair thickets. Most of the economically attractive big trees were logged long ago, Krasilovsky said.

“It’s just very, very slow. It has been for a long time. There’s a glut of lumber everywhere,” said Matt Silva, whose family-owned Rose Springs Timber company has logged on land in western New Mexico for generations.

The lack of a market for wood is one of the biggest issues the Forest Service faces as it tries to scale up its forest thinning efforts, said timber sales planner Dwyer.

Developing an industry in New Mexico to handle the vast quantity of wood products that would be generated by scaled-up thinning and logging would be particularly difficult because of the distance between New Mexico’s national forests and the high cost of trucking logs, Dwyer said.

“New Mexico’s too splintered and fragmented,” he said. “There’s too many miles between the sky islands where there is product.”

For now, that is a moot point. The scale of forest thinning efforts in New Mexico, even with the expanded work in the Southwest Jemez Restoration project, remains small. And that, advocates say, is cause for concern.

“This problem is growing away from us,” said New Mexico State University’s Fowler. “If we don’t manage it, Mother Nature will.”
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal