Chaparral Prescribed Burn

Cuba Burn, originally uploaded by craptastica.

Last week I was driving into work to spend another glorious Jemez day locked up behind my computer desk driving. As I pulled into the driveway, one of the fire guys began vigorously waving his hand at me. I rolled down the window, and John looked at me with a smirk and said, "you want to light some shit on fire today?" I had a few things to do, but after some back and forth I decided to go.

It's late November and the fire season is just about over, but until this weekend, things have still been warm during the daytime in the mountains. If there's good sunshine and a light wind, the fire will carry. By the time the sun begins flirting with the horizon at around 3:30 pm; however, the temperature takes a dive and the fire lays down.

It took us about a full hour and a half just to drive to the prescribed burn site. It was cold, but as the sun began to light up the pine-covered slopes the termperature warmed up to about 50 degrees.

We got there and Tom (the trainee burn boss) gave us a quick brief, handed John and I some fueled up drip torches, and told us to pick up some 'strips'. We joined about 5 others from the Cuba Ranger District, lined ourselves up about 30 feet apart (aka. a strip), and walked parallel up and down the mountain slopes spitting fire.

The fire burned suprisingly well. Even though there was so much tree cover that little sun hit the ground, and despite there was little grass cover to carry the flame, and regardless of the fact it was pretty damn chilly, things got burned.

The flames grew from the thin strips painted by our drip torches to a breathing orange and red blanket. It incinerated the young white firs and ponderosa pines that were recently sprouted from the soil, returning nutrients to the soils and opennes to the landscape. In some parts, whole trees even began to 'torch', sending white plumes of smoke into the air and crackling ominously in their death throws.

By 3:30 pm we had finished the area that had been designated for the burn. 44 acres. We hiked back to the truck, grabbed our lunch, and joined the others. The air quickly cooled and we donned our jackets to sit beside a giant downed pine tree that was burning vigorously. Lunch by the fire and then the long ride home.

Re-ups

Re-ups, originally uploaded by craptastica.

Car Wreck Canyon

Car Wreck Canyon, originally uploaded by craptastica.

A couple weekends ago I headed into the mountains to see the sights and walk the day away. I planned to finally get to the Dome Wilderness; the small, isolated wilderness area on the southeast portion of the Jemez District.

It was a long walk just to get to the Wilderness boundary. You see, I am quite handicapped when it comes to mountain travel - or at least my car is. The foot or so of clearance afforded by my Carolla will get me only up the most cared for mountain roads. The Dome road, however, is not one of these and I had to abandoned the low-rider at the first gully.

This left me with a sack full of food, a couple of eager feet, and a long, uphill dirt and gravel road. I walked for a few hours through pinon-juniper woodlands and a road strewn with old beer bottles, cheap beer cans, and other random metal car parts and food wrappers.

Eventually I had walked far enough that the junipers gave way to ponderosa pine and eroded rock forms towered above the road on either side. Trucks and motorcycles were passing me every two seconds leaving billowing dust clouds in their wake.

I usually don't see anybody on my hikes, and the trash that covered the sides of the road pissed me off. I can stand that shit, so I headed into the woods to get lost.

About a mile or so further up, after several hours. I saw an old car wreck and the Dome Wilderness boundary. Since the sun sets at about 4:30 pm so late in the season, I decided to forego my auto investigation and check out the Dome wilderness. After all, that was the plan.

The Dome Wilderness is a rather small wilderness area, which shares a boundary with the Bandelier National Monument. In 1996, a wildfire swept across most of the forests within the wilderness boundary and burned the living crap (literally) out of this area. This fire burned hot, and even many of the giant 'yellow pines' (thought to be fire resistant) were crushed by the relentless wall of flame.

Ten years later the evidence of this conflagration are still obvious. About a mile in the wilderness fire-blackened trees and 'snags' surround the trail. Where trees once dominated, there is now more grass and shrub cover and there are fallen giants covering every slope.

A small creek runs through this part of the Dome forming Sanchez Canyon. The canyon is a small and indescript one except for the fact that is harbors a hidden 120-foot waterfall. You can hear it on the trail, but it hides out of sight between giant igneous crags and behind towering pines. You have to risk breaking your neck to climb down the almost vertical slopes to the bottom of the canyon, then scramble back up over a boulder field (caused by the runoff after the fire). Just about at the point when you are just under the water, you can see it's 120-foot curtain waving from the rocks above.

After checking out more of Sanchez Canyon, I got back on the rough foot trail that wandered through the wilderness and headed back out. On the way down, the trash seemed even worse.

I also saw several car wrecks and investigated each one closely. What type of car is this? When did it happen? How did it happen (drunk driver or is ice the perpetrator?)? And why the hell wasn't any of this cleaned up?

The last one I saw on my way out, right before I reached the National Forest boundary, had fallen off the road and crashed on the slope below. The slope was littered with all sorts of trash, car parts, and a cross bearing an inscription with plastic flowers at its base.

It appears that a truck with a camper had slid off the road and everything but the beaten pulp of the truck itself had laid where it had fallen. A radiator there, the camper there, and the striking reminder that Justo Rosas Enriques had missed his turn.

Aerial Ignition

Aerial Ignition, originally uploaded by craptastica.

Last week was the Toledo Burn. The Valle Toledo is a large, open grassland in the middle of a great sunken volcano in northern New Mexico known as the Valles Caldera. A few years back Congress wrote some legislation to buy the Baca Ranch from private owners to turn it into the Valles Caldera Natural Preserve, which was to be managed as a working ranch while ensuring the preservation of natural systems and ecological services.

Fire is a natural part of this ecosystem. The great open grasslands, or valles, of the Caldera have been maintained for thousands of years by regular low-intensity fires that burned through the landscape every few years. These fires prevented trees from encroaching down the slopes into the valleys, and helped return important nutrients to the soil to promote vigorous re-growth of grass and other forbs. These grasslands are so dense and healthy that they are home to the majority of elk in the Jemez mountains and give any rancher or hunter a hard-on who passes by.

No large scale fires have visited the Valles Caldera since its purchase by the government in 2000. The Toledo Burn would change all of that. We planned to burn the whole valle over two days through hand ignition with drip torches and aerial ignition via a fire bomb-dropping helicopter.

We got out to the Caldera early in the morning where we met in the 'round house' for a morning brief. We had quite a crew: the Forest Service hot shots and other fire crew (such as me), the Bandelier National Monument Heli-tack crew, the Valles Caldera National Preserve science team, and managers from the Forest Service and Valles Caldera. Though it was November, grass fires move fast and it is because of this that they are where most of the firefighter injuries occur.

The plan was to burn the borders of the Valle first with the use of drip torches, slowly inching the fire down from the forested slopes of the nearby cerros (hills) into the valle. Then once a black border ringed the valle, a helicopter would fly over the site dropping hundreds of small 'ping pong balls' filled with potassium pomanganate. These would then explode in the interior of the burn area to carry fire over most of the interior. The last step is then clean-up with fire crews and drip torches to ensure no large, contiguous areas are missed.

The day turned out to be a beautiful sunny day and the burn went perfectly. The sunshine allowed the fire to carry in a slow yet continuous manner over the grasses turning the tawny shin-high grasses to charred mounds that covered the landscape. Like all fires, it burned in a patchy patter creating a giraffe-like pattern on the landscape and killing many of the smaller trees that had began to choke the forests.

I spent the day 'holding', which meant watching the fire to ensure it didn't cross the designated fire lines. Mostly these fire lines are dirt roads, but in areas where the fireline isn't a road we had to do a hose lay. In this situation you'll lay down some fire house hook it up to a tank and then someone will light a huge fire in front of you. You wait as it slowly crawls its way toward you and then 'lay it down' with the hose on full blast.

Shortly after the hose lay, we finished rining the valle in fire and the aerial ignition began. The helicopter made several passes over the valle and then on the 4th pass began to drop the ping pongs. The valle erupted in white smoke, which rose like a long-imprisoned ghost into the slowly darkening mountain sky. Soon it began to cool down and the fire layed down and began smoldering.

Clean-up was left for the next day. As the sun dropped below the horizon the temperature dropped at least 15 degrees. We donned our smoke saturated sweatshirts, jackets, and wool shirts and slowly drove home from the smoking volcano.

Valle Toledo

Valle Toledo, originally uploaded by craptastica.

Holding

Holding, originally uploaded by craptastica.

Ignition specialist Darcy keeping an eye on the fireline.