Fire threatens resort

Firefighters hold a briefing in the Black Lake area north of the Calf Canyon Hermits Peak wildfire in northern New Mexico yesterday.

The firefighters laboured under an apocalyptic orange sky, and vehicles streamed out of the ski area of Angel Fire as winddriven flames from the state’s secondlargest blaze on record roared closer to the mountain resort.

With winds gusting beyond 80kmh through dense, droughtparched forests, exhausted crews were at loss to stop a wildfire that has raged across the Sangre de Cristo Mountains for more than a month, destroying hundreds of homes.

Spreading through the rugged, tinderdry landscape with explosive speed, the springtime conflagration has displaced thousands of residents while raising fears that the entire American Southwest was in for a long, brutal fire season.

The Sangre de Cristo mountains, soaring to over 3960m, have usually seen spring storms bring more than 60cm of snow. But climate change has diminished the snowpack and brought summerlike temperatures earlier in the year, biologists say, drying out the region and leaving communities more vulnerable to fire.

At Angel Fire’s airstrip, strong winds grounded firefighting helicopters. Eleven kilometres to the south at Black Lake, firefighters huddled around a map and discussed which properties they could try to save.

In immediate danger was the village of Chacon, where locals faced flames on two sides after they stayed behind to defend centuriesold ranches, firefighters said.

To the north, residents of Taos Canyon cut down their own trees to create fire buffers around homes.

The blaze, dubbed the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire, has burnt over 95,885ha of land.

In addition to climate change, a century of strict fire suppression and court bans on logging since the 1990s have helped transform New Mexico’s northern forests into overgrown, highly combustible fuel beds, scientists say.