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.