‘You can see it in the trees’: New Mexico foresters adapt to wildfire amid a changing landscape, climate

TAOS — J.R. Logan was working as a local journalist when he first learned that every forest — and every tree within it — retains a detailed record of its past.

It was 2016 when Logan trekked into Capulin Canyon, a few miles east of Taos in Carson National Forest, where he watched as forester Jim Arciniega pulled a long, cylindrical core sample from a ponderosa pine.

Arciniega noted how each curved band in the sample showed not only the evergreen’s age, but the events that had taken place in the surrounding forest over the hundred years since the tree’s first sprout poked through the ground. The bands narrowed during periods of overgrowth, when the tree was starved of water, and then widened after a lumber crew had removed competing flora 40 years prior.

“You could see in the growth rings how that thinning had just made that tree so much more vigorous and so much healthier compared to a tree that was being stymied by all the competition literally a stone’s throw away,” Logan recalled.

It’s one of several stories Logan tells about what inspired him to pivot from a career in journalism several years ago to enter forestry work for himself.

Now, like so many other foresters throughout the West, Logan’s work as Taos County’s forest and watershed health program manager centers increasingly around one particular event, which is part of every forest’s story in the state: wildfire.

Climate patterns and seasonal outlook

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that “climate change has already led to an increase in wildfire season length, wildfire frequency, and burned area” throughout the West.

“Quantitatively, average precipitation has been very low over the last quarter-century,” said David Gutzler, professor emeritus of climatology and meteorology at the University of New Mexico. “That can be compared directly to either instrumental records through the 20th century or tree-ring records that go back centuries.”

Gutzler said historic climate patterns show significant cyclical drought periods at least twice every hundred years. But the current drought impacting New Mexico and the Southwest since the 1990s, he said, “has been exacerbated by a long-term climate change tendency toward warmer conditions, which dry out the soil.”

The size and intensity of wildfires in New Mexico have increased in recent years, according to a study published in October in Science of the Total Environment, an international peer-reviewed scientific journal. New Mexico recorded its two largest wildfires in its history in 2022: The Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire, which burned 341,735 acres in northern New Mexico, and the Black Fire, which swept through 325,136 acres northeast of Silver City.

Gutzler believes that trend will continue as climate change, driven by the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels, adds “a long-term tendency toward aridity, which will make the drought episodes, when they do happen, more severe.”

This spring in New Mexico, the confluence of a meager monsoon season last summer and a lack of snowpack this winter has led to tinder-dry conditions that have set foresters and wildfire agencies on edge. So far, however, the sustained gale-force winds that drove the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire and the Black Fire across the landscape three years ago have yet to materialize.

But the name of the game in springtime, Gutzler said, remains caution.

“People who are in vulnerable areas need to do what they can to mitigate their own risk in terms of fire-proofing their house and yards and trying to keep brush under control and being very, very careful with outdoor fire,” he said. “As a community across the state, we’re quite vulnerable to fire this time of year — and this year somewhat more than any other year.”

Strategic fire mitigation

Logan and several of his peers hosted a panel discussion at Bataan Hall in Taos on April 17 to discuss how Taos County can prepare for what most experts see as an inevitable catastrophic wildfire in the Carson, whose southeastern corner was scorched by the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire.

“The goal of the panel was twofold: One was to describe quantitatively and qualitatively the condition of the forests and how it got to this place,” Logan said, “and then secondly to discuss some of the management actions that not just the Forest Service but the county and Taos Pueblo and other partners have taken, as well as the Legislature. We’re trying to address those forest concerns, which are just ubiquitous across the state — we’re not unique up here.”

Logan said decades of forest mismanagement by federal agencies squelched low intensity, naturally occurring fires, like those sparked by lightning strikes, causing fire fuels to accumulate. Combined with the effects of climate change, which has extended drought periods, forest managers now work year round to remove flammable debris that can cause otherwise mild fires to grow into disasters.

In rare cases and under the wrong conditions, fire mitigation strategies that put fire on the ground can also lead to catastrophic wildfire; the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire, for example, was caused by a prescribed burn and a pile burn that merged in the Santa Fe National Forest, leading to a moratorium on burning that year.

Owen Burney, superintendent of New Mexico State University’s John T. Harrington Research Center, estimated that it would cost billions of dollars to thin the entirety of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range, which hems in many communities in north-central New Mexico.

Knowing such funds are out of reach, however, Logan said foresters opt for a more surgical approach to thinning projects, aiming to protect the most at-risk communities and watersheds.

“Long term, most of my work over the last five or six years in Taos County has really been focused on breaking up the continuity of fuels in the most strategic places possible so as to create forest conditions that are healthier and more resilient and less likely to burn at that most severe intensity,” Logan said.

Managing fire mitigation projects requires navigating an intricate patchwork of local, state, federal and tribal boundaries, each with their own sets of stakeholders and public officials.

“It’s very much a symbiotic relationship with both Taos and Picuris pueblos,” Logan said. “There’s no hierarchy there. Everyone’s needs are just as important to the others.”

“We try to be as objective as possible when we look across the entire county, across the entire Sangre de Cristo Range,” he added, “to determine based on the data what is the highest priority and how we can address those concerns — regardless of which side of the fence that happens to land on.”

Communities at risk

The day of the meeting in Taos, George Ducker, wildfire prevention and communications coordinator for the New Mexico Forestry Division, was on scene at the Rio Grande Fire, which burned 59 acres on the edge of Bosque Farms, a village of about 4,000 people 18 miles south of Albuquerque.

“It was a small fire footprint that caused major damage because of the wind driving embers out of the fire,” Ducker said. “Those embers can lodge in other trees, on the ground or on top of houses or near houses.”

Ducker said the number of wildfires in New Mexico so far this year is more than double those recorded by the same time last year, four out of five of which, on average, are caused by humans.

The Rio Grande Fire, while small in comparison to the 15,000-acre Mogote Hill Fire that burned south of Wagon Mound in March, underscores the need for humans to guard against wildfires that spark near their homes, Ducker said.

“I think that humans need to be reminded that they really have the power to stop wildfires from happening in the first place,” he said. “I know that sounds like Smokey Bear and what not, but just being cognizant of what you’re doing outside on a warm, windy day can really pay off down the line.”

According to Logan, Taos County homeowners pay anywhere between $2,500-$4,000 an acre for professional fire mitigation work on private property. Most of the labor that protects a home can be done over a weekend, however. He said cleaning out rain gutters, raking up loose pine needles, pulling dry weeds and moving wood piles at least 30 feet from a home can all go a long way toward preventing a residence from catching fire due to an ember spit from a nearby blaze.

‘The one through line’

Late this month, Logan has been conducting recon work for a thinning unit in Chamisal, a tiny community of less than 400 residents near Peñasco and Picuris Pueblo in Taos County.

As he drives into the mountains to conduct thinning work every year, centuries of wildfire patterns are visible on the hillsides. Aspen stands and fire scars are part of the record the forests keep. “It’s fascinating that you can see it in the trees,” he said.

Being a reporter in Taos introduced him to different communities that diverged on many topics, but the land, he said, has always been the “one through line.”

“Whether you have been here for a millennia or you showed up here yesterday, the health of the forest is important to you,” he said. “How you feel about that and what values you bring to it are very different, but I observed that it was the unifying thing in a place where people disagree about most things.”