Taos County watersheds among most at risk for wildfire
Mitigation plans bolstered by collaboration, new funding
Taos County Forest and Watershed Health Program Manager J.R. Logan delivered good news and bad news regarding local wildfire risk and ongoing mitigation programs to the Taos County Commission during its Jan. 24 regular meeting.
“For better or worse, Taos county is kind of in the bullseye of everything fire-related right now,” Logan said. “Taos and the [Sangre de Cristo Mountains] is one of the top 10 at-risk watersheds in the entire country. That’s obviously bad. But the good news is, because we ranked so high, we’re getting a fire hose worth of funding pointed at us right now. The federal government has essentially multiplied the amount of money coming into Carson National Forest by 10.”
According to Logan, Taos County’s economic reliance on the forest and acequias, as well as the many local traditions and cultures that depend on the land, also makes catastrophic wildfire risk reduction here a priority for the state.
“If you ask Laura McCarthy, the state forester, we are the number one place that she wants to see work happen,” Logan said. “It’s partly because of the risks involved with the condition of the forest but also the risks to traditional uses and the fact that this continues to be a landbased county, a land-based community with a lot of people who rely
on those forests and watersheds.”
Logan added that “the risk is not just hypothetical, as we saw last year.” In 2022, the impacts of the Calf Canyon–Hermits Peak wildfire came into focus amid massive fish die-offs in rivers and streams, flooding and erosion that essentially erased some acequias from the landscape, and the loss of domestic and agricultural wells and other water infrastructure.
Thanks to the 10-year Good Neighbor Agreement between Taos County and the Carson National Forest, the “firehose” of new funding
has a framework by which it can be distributed to entities that perform forest and wildland-urban interface (WUI) treatment projects around the county. Logan said he is currently in negotiations with the Carson for funding to add new items to the existing agreement, including “funding for volunteer fire departments to assist with prescribed fire,” and more long-term forest health monitoring by Taos Soil and Water Conservation District student crews, as well as new projects to benefit two acequias and a land grant.
“The Good Neighbor agreement is an instrument the Forest Service can use to transfer funds and to get project work done on Forest Service lands, but empowers, in this case, Taos County to do that work.” Logan said. “It’s a way for the county to have a say in where work happens and also how work happens, and maybe most importantly, it’s a way for us as a county and for the folks who are most vested in the health of these forests to help the Forest Service do what it needs to do but may not be able to [because of] funding limitations or capacity limitations.”
A $1.25-million U.S. Forest Service grant already awarded to the county has been split between forestry subcontractors assigned to treat 450 acres of forest, road work contractors who are assigned to complete several miles of forest access road improvements, and two 30-acre “forest mayordomo” projects near Chamisal on the Santa Barbara Land Grant and near Valdez via the Cerro Negro Forest Council. The county received about $200,000 for administration and project costs.
A Carson National Forest spokesperson told the Taos News that “This year we are allocating more money on top of the $1.25 million: $100,000 toward volunteer fire departments to assist with prescribed fire and another $75,000 toward collaborative efforts to prioritize and implement community wildfire protection plans.”
The Good Neighbor Agreement dovetails with the Taos County Community Wildfire Protection Plan, a “living document” that gives a wildfire risk rating to 62 communities within the county, develops plans for mitigating risk and prioritizes fuel reduction projects.
Logan emphasized the risk that catastrophic wildfire poses to watersheds, and said last year’s historic Calf Canyon–Hermits Peak Fire was “as bad as it gets” in terms of watershed destruction and degradation.
“That’s the kind of fire that destroys watersheds, destroys communities, [and] creates all sorts of erosion and hazards after the fire,” Logan said. “The devastation of watersheds in particular and the impacts on acequias has been really tragic.”
The Taos County Watershed Coalition provides a lot of input regarding wildfire-related project planning, implementation and effectiveness of completed projects. The group was formed in 2015, and is made up of over two dozen partners, including Taos Pueblo; the New Mexico Forestry Division; Taos County; Taos and other municipalities; Rocky Mountain Youth Corps and Amigos Bravos, for example.
Despite Taos County’s planning and coordination efforts, a lack of capacity limits what the county and federal agencies can do in terms of forest health and watershed restoration projects, regardless of funding.
There is a “limited number of local crews and trained workforce available to implement thinning projects,” Logan said, explaining that part of the protection plan is to educate and attract local residents to forestry work.
“Slowly but surely, we’re building the capacity of local contractors,” he said, while community-led groups like the Cerro Negro Forest Council engage residents to maintain the health of the forests in their backyards while at the same time allowing them to obtain forest products like latillas or firewood.
Logan said that the soil and water conservation district’s student forest health monitoring program is helping build capacity as well, by exposing young Taos county residents to forestry-related careers.
“This is a program that recruits local high school kids from across the county as well as students at UNM–Taos to get in the field as forest scientists. They work directly with Forest Service specialists, with state forestry specialists; Taos Soil and Water Conservation District has now hired a dedicated employee to run these crews. Of the 30 kids who’ve been through that program in the last couple of years, half of them have gone on to university to study something natural resourcesrelated; and most of them intend to come back to Taos for a job with an agency or figured out how to continue a professional career path, but do it locally.
“And the value of having people who’ve grown up in Taos County come back here and be those professionals helping design and implement this work is hard to overstate,” Logan added. “Too often, people come from the outside who are well-educated about forests and forest ecology, but they don’t really get Taos.”