Valles Caldera Fire Fuels Optimism
VALLES CALDERA — During another summer of fire in the Rocky Mountain West, it is worth a drive up the back road to Los Alamos, along the edge of the great grass-filled volcanic hollow of the Valle Grande.
There’s a tension between the valley’s greening grass thanks to an early dose of summer rains and the Forest Service fire lookout posted in a pickup truck in one of the State Route 4 pullouts, facing an afternoon thunderstorm, wary for the trouble a lightning strike could spark.
The elk, hundreds happily grazing in the
valley bottom, are a sign of what can go right. The tops of the ridges encircling the valley’s southeastern flank, burned in the inferno of the Las Conchas Fire a year ago, are a sign of what can go wrong.
I promised a friend I would be optimistic and, in search of good news Sunday afternoon, I turned south down Forest Road 289 into a patch of woods burned during those first few days of Las Conchas.
The fire had burned through this mixed conifer forest low and easy. We saw burn scars at the base of pines and aspen, but most of the trees had survived. Aspen shoots poked through the litter on the forest floor, a reminder of the ecosystem’s fire adaptations.
A team led by Don Falk at the University of Arizona just published a fascinating study of the woodlands that ring the Valles Caldera’s grassy valleys. Using fire scars and tree ring dating, Falk and his colleagues went back over the past 600 years and found that fires burned somewhere in the Caldera’s valleys, out of the grasslands and into the neighboring woods, nearly every year before humans began intervening and putting the fires out.
The report by Falk and his colleagues to the federal Joint Fire Science Program, which funded the research, is a reminder in this summer of fire that we have choices in how we think about our fires and our forests going forward. The natural fires that once burned here “can be returned,” the scientists wrote.
In a summer when fires have seemed so destructive, returning fire to the mountains of the West seems like an odd goal. But without the sort of natural, low-intensity, healthy fire I saw the remnants of along Forest Road 289, our forests are headed on a very different trajectory.
In a paper this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jennifer Marlon of the University of Wisconsin described the problem we face in the western United States as a “fire deficit.”
Marlon did the same sort of thing as Falk, but on a far larger scale, looking at rate of burning over the past 3,000 years across the West.
Since humans began intervening and putting out forest fires, the amount of fire has dropped steeply. But the woody biomass in the forests just keeps growing. All that buildup of unburned fuel, according to Marlon, amounts to a fire deficit that is coming due, being paid back by massive conflagrations.
“Large fires in the late 20th and 21st centuries have begun to address the fire deficit, but it is continuing to grow,” according to Marlon.
But recall I promised to be optimistic. The drive up State Route 4 into the heart of the Jemez passes through mile after mile of unburned forest. In some areas, Marlon’s deficit is obvious — woods thickly overgrown with fuel just waiting for another downed power line or dry lightning strike.
But there are miles where crews have begun to try to fix things — clearing the thickets, carefully reintroducing fire through prescribed burning. And then there are patches like the woods I drove through down Forest Road 289, where wildfire just did what it is supposed to do, clearing out the undergrowth and leaving a healthy forest behind.
Efforts are under way to expand that work through the Southwest Jemez Mountains Landscape Restoration project. Led by the U.S. Forest Service, the project hopes to tackle more than 150,000 acres of the landscape through manual thinning, prescribed fires and “managed natural fires” (wildfires allowed to burn because they are burning in a low-intensity, healthy way) in an effort to restore some semblance of health to the woods and prevent the sort of conflagrations that have caused so much damage.
The downside is that those acres represent just a fraction of the forest lands in New Mexico and across the West that need help and are at risk of going up in flames catastrophically if we don’t find a more graceful way to return fire to the system.
One way or another, fire will be back. Here’s the optimistic message I promised my friend — we still have some choices about how that will happen. Upfront is a daily front-page opinion column. Comment directly to John Fleck at 823-3916 or jfleck@abqjournal.com. Go to Abqjournal. com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.