Vibrant, Green Life Stands Out Amid the Burn

DOME ROAD, SANTA FE NATIONAL FOREST — Retreating last week from the devastation around St. Peter’s Dome, we stopped in a stand of surviving ponderosa pine.

The dome itself, a high point on the southeastern flank of the Jemez Mountains, anchors a moonscape. The land around it burned in a firestorm June 26, the first day of the Las Conchas Fire. The Dome Road passes through miles of this, with barely a live tree in sight beyond little Gambel oak squeezing out leaves from burned stumps.

U.S. Geological Survey forest ecologist Craig Allen was giving Journal photographer Adolphe Pierre-Louis and me a tour of what we’ve come to call the burn scar.

There is good reason to visit the moonscape, and to talk about what happens next to the ecosystem there — the subject of a future story, and the main reason Adolphe and I asked Allen to show us around. But there is something misleading about the way journalists cover disasters. We are drawn to the worst of the worst — the most devastating flooding, the epicenter of the earthquake damage zone, the moonscape around St. Peter’s Dome.

Remember this as you watch us going into disaster mode. The situation is likely not as severe as the parts we’re showing you.

Driving back up St. Peter’s Dome Road, we pulled off to the side of the road among the surviving ponderosa to look around.

Fire had been here, but only a low-intensity ground fire burning through a healthy, open forest, leaving the big, fire-resistant pine trees standing, intact and healthy. With the monsoon rains we’ve seen over the past few weeks, the grass was greening up.

The thing I noticed most was the smell. It smelled like the woods, like the Scout camps of my childhood.

Back in July, in the heat of Las Conchas when I was in disaster mode, University of Arizona forest fire scientist Don Falk counseled me to remember that large areas within the boundaries of Las Conchas and the other fires then burning across the Southwest were burning with only low to moderate severity: “These fires are not unmitigated landscape-scale catastrophes.”

Falk is not trying to minimize what happened at Las Conchas. He is one of those who believe that, in the areas most severely burned, we could be seeing a fundamental change in the mountain forests we’ve grown accustomed to. He agrees about the importance of paying attention to the St. Peter’s Dome moonscape, because at its worst, these fires mean we could be losing forest forever. “I’ve never seen anything like that, on that scale,” Falk said of the area around St. Peter’s Dome, the mesas and canyons that burned in the firestorm during the first days of the Las Conchas Fire.

His point is that not all the fire zone is like that.

By one estimate, a burn severity analysis done by the Forest Service in late July as firefighting efforts were shifting to post-fire rehab, 28,470 acres of the 150,628-plus acres within the boundaries of the Las Conchas Fire at the time — about 19 percent— had burned at “high severity.”

Because of the criteria used, it is possible that a lot more than that would seem like a “high-severity burn” to you and me, and more important, could see major ecosystem changes because of the fire.

But as you travel the landscape of the post-fire Jemez Mountains, it is worth noting the places that didn’t burn, or that only burned lightly, what people like Allen and Falk call good fire.

Drive State Route 4 along the southeastern edge of the Valle Grande to see what I mean. In the first days of the fire, the iconic grassy bowl was half-blackened, a sickening image. But we were wrong to be sickened. The grass burned lightly, and today has come back greener than the parts of the valley that did not burn. The elk love it. Fire is a natural part of grassland ecosystems like this. It is a good thing.

Up the road, there is devastation where the firestorm jumped the road and headed north, toward the mountains where it tore through headwaters above Santa Clara Pueblo with devastating fury. But there also is good burn along the saddle between the Valles Caldera and the headwaters of the canyons that drain past St. Peter’s Dome.

“Remember,” a friend who is a forester by trade wrote on my Facebook page, “fire burns in a mosaic pattern. … Forest will come back in many places.”

The sweet-smelling, healthy woods at the head of St. Peter’s Dome Road are a reminder that my friend is right. Within the boundaries of the Las Conchas Fire, there was much destruction, but all is not lost.

UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. Comment directly to John Fleck at 823-3916 or jfleck@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal