VallesCaldera.com – The independent news source about the Valles Caldera

The 141-year-old Jemez Springs Bath House tweeted a valuable piece of intelligence today that many New Mexicans might not know: The area behind the Jemez Springs Plaza is the only place where most folks are legally allowed to swim, fish, walk, and submerge themselves within the Jemez River (except for private property).

Here is the Bath House’s tweet:

Did you know that you can fish & swim in the Jemez River directly behind the Bath House until the forest reopens??? Come on up & enjoy!!!

I played around in the river at the Plaza last weekend, and the hypnotic sound of the river rushing down the red rock canyon, the cold water flowing over my feet as I walked through the muddy bottom of the river, and the passing trout that played in the creek beside us refreshed our spirit tremendously, but particularly so in the midst of the largest fire in New Mexico history. It conjured up the lines of Norman MacLean:

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Good places in the Jemez like the Jemez Stage Stop, Los Ojos Saloon, the Laughing Lizard, the Ridgeback Cafe, and Amanda’s Jemez Mountain Country Store are also open for folks who come into the Jemez during this forest closure.

Meanwhile, ash from the Las Conchas Fire, which is now 90% contained, has now has inundated the Rio Grande, causing the city of Albuquerque to stop pumping drinking water from the Rio Grande:

From the Journal:

The Water Utility confirms it is ash in the Rio Grande. Plus, I went out and looked myself. It’s ugly! John Stomp, the utility’s chief operating officer, told me he is confident the water treatment plant could clean ash out, but that he decided to shut down the plant anyway just to be cautious.

Here is a video from the Weather Channel about the ashy Rio:

Meanwhile, the total number of fire personnel fighting the inferno has now decreased to 200. This is a dramatic decrease from the most intense days of the crisis, when over 2,000 professionals were battling the blaze.

The BAER team assigned to the fire has issued a document warning people about the dangers of walking through burnt forests, stating that they should be avoided for 1-2 years after the fire (however, the land will still remain dangerous for years afterward).

Here are the BAER team’s recommendations for responding to the burnt landscape.

The Land of Enchantment’s biggest blaze in recorded history has reached 150,041 acres in size, with 61% containment. Smoke still abounds in the Jemez Mountains; at the home of VallesCaldera.com near Sierra los Piños, Redondo Peak, which is three miles to the north, is completely invisible, having been enshrouded in smoke. This is due to the most active remaining front in the fire, which is burning roughly nine miles west of Jemez Springs and four miles southeast of here.

The following photo, by Pete Gomez , shows the Las Conchas Fire as visible from Albuquerque yesterday:

Fire managers issued the following summary of the blaze this morning:

A few areas on the north end of the Las Conchas Fire received precipitation yesterday. While most of this came as light showers, some locally heavy rainfall caused flooding on a few streams in the Santa Clara Canyon. There was no significant impact on the firefighting effort.

Except for these showers, the weather has been warmer and drier the last few days. This drying trend is expected to continue. Fire activity will continue to increase, resulting in more smoke. People living or traveling in the vicinity of the fire will notice this increased smoke, including at night.

Most of the Las Conchas Fire is contained and is in patrol status. The steep, inaccessible slopes on the north and southwest edges of the fire continue to be a barrier to containing the fire. Due to safety concerns, firefighters can’t work on these slopes.

On the southwest edge, the fire has been backing down the steep slope from Peralta Ridge toward Forest Road (FR) 266. Last night, firefighters conducted a low intensity burnout to reinforce the control line along this road. Burnout operations went well and mop-up and patrol will continue today. Fire managers plan for a continued low intensity burnout again this evening as long as weather conditions permit. The burnout will secure this portion of the line while minimizing impacts on the area.

While firefighters continue to battle the inferno, activists are focusing on the future protection of the burn area, with a coalition of organizations issuing a public call for the entire perimeter of the fire to be closed to motorized vehicles and cross-country travel indefinitely (with the exception of paved roads):

Members of WildEarth Guardians, the Sierra Club, the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance and other groups sent a letter to Santa Fe forest supervisor Maria Garcia this week, urging that she consider issuing an indefinite emergency closure order to motorized recreational vehicles and cross-country travel within the fire’s perimeter.

The groups also want the forest to issue a final decision on its travel management plan as soon as possible given the resources that will be directed toward recovery of the burned area in the coming months.

“We are concerned that the fire area must be treated with the utmost care in the period immediately following,” the groups said. “In particular watersheds are highly vulnerable post-fire as are wildlife populations. Unmaintained roads and trails can exacerbate the problems, especially if they are used under the current conditions.”

This marks just the latest plea for curbing the use of off-road vehicles in the Jemez Mountains. In 2009, environmentalists and some landowners petitioned the U.S. Forest Service to close nearly 70 miles of motorized routes in the area.

Fire managers also reported progress in preparing fire-ravaged Santa Clara Pueblo for possible flooding:

At Santa Clara Pueblo the following work has been completed: 3,000 feet of concrete barrier was placed, 30,000 sand bags filled and placed, three miles of channel cleaning and debris removal, two bridge box culverts and 15 other culverts cleaned, half a mile of fence removed from Santa Clara Creek, and over 10 miles of hazard trees were marked and felled on the road up Santa Clara Canyon. The Army Corp of Engineers reviewed work that has been done and suggested additional point protection be done around the Day School. The fish in ponds 2 and 3 will be shocked and removed and the ponds drained and cleaned.

Reviewing a completed fuel break, Bruce Bauer, Director of Forestry, Santa Clara Pueblo and BAER Team Liaison was able to see the results of an effective fuels treatment. “You could see where the fire made a good run and then just lay down when it hit the break. I’m really glad we did that project or we wouldn’t have seen that island of green.” In an area where the Santa Clara Pueblo has had 80% of its land base burned since the Cerro Grande fire, every sliver of green timber makes a difference to stabilizing soil.

Today wildlife specialists visited Forest Service land to check on Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout habitat. The creek the fish reside in is narrow and shallow with ash sloughing off into the stream. Unfortunately, the area around the creek has been severely burned and specialists believe the fish will not be able to survive. Written assessments for the Santa Fe National Forest will be completed today.

InciWeb also, for the first time, released a detailed analysis today of the amount of acreage that has burned in the fire for each jurisdiction in the area:

Indian Trust Land (18,829 acres)
Jemez Pueblo 2,238 acres
Santa Clara Pueblo 16,587 acres
Santa Domingo Pueblo 4 acres
Santa Fe National Forest 76,634 acres
Bandelier National Monument 20,810 acres
Los Alamos National Laboratory 133 acres
State of New Mexico 1,704 acres
Valles Caldera National Preserve 27,781 acres
Private Land 3,352 acres

Meanwhile, KOB-TV reported that non-violent prisoners were among those who helped battle the fire:

They’re serving time in prison, but that hasn’t stopped them from fighting the biggest wildfires our state has ever seen. And this special group of inmates in Los Lunas is getting a chance at a new career opportunity.

It’s called the inmate work camp program. It’s run by New Mexico State Forestry, and puts non-violent inmates in a setting that goes far beyond concrete walls and barbed wire fences.

When the Las Conchas fire hit its peak and posed the biggest threat to Los Alamos, hundreds of firefighters stormed the lines. One of them is serving a roughly two-year sentence at the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in Los Lunas.

“Pretty intense, there was a lot of fires up there, we were on structure protection at the Pajarito Ski Area, making sure that it didn’t burn,” said inmate firefighter Timothy Duncan.

Here is the most recent progression map of the Las Conchas Fire (click on the map for a detailed view):

In addition, you can view a Google Earth image of the fire here, and the overnight infrared image of the blaze here.

The Las Conchas Fire has now burned 149,240 acres (233 square miles) of the Jemez Mountains, with 57% containment, according to this morning’s fire report. According to incident managers, “most parts of the fire are considered contained and are in patrol status.”

Despite this positive pronouncement, Jemez residents are closely tracking the most active remaining front of the fire, along the inferno’s southwest perimeter. From InciWeb:

On the southwest edge, the fire has been backing down the slope from Peralta Ridge toward Forest Road (FR) 266. The strong, erratic winds from the forecasted thunderstorm could push the fire over FR 266. The current warming and drying trend is making the fire burn hotter, consuming more of the trees and shrubs. Working mostly at night and when the winds are calm, firefighters are gradually burning out this area, creating a low-intensity ground fire. The burnout will secure this portion of the line while minimizing impacts on the area.

Bandelier National Monument just announced that it will open the following sections of the Monument tomorrow: the Tsankawi Section, Juniper Campground and Amphitheater, Overlook Trail, and Burnt Mesa Trail.

Since burned ground becomes hydrophobic — or repels water like concrete — land managers across Northern New Mexico have continued to prepare for flooding that is expected to follow the monsoons that typically soak the region with afternoon thunderstorms (though there has been only one day of unchecked rain since the fire began, last Monday, July 11). The photo below depicts the Bandelier National Monument Visitor Center surrounded by sandbags to protect the beloved, CCC-built historic structure from a swollen Frijoles Creek:

On its Facebook page, rangers from Bandelier stated that the multitude of sandbags stacked at its Visitor Center are causing the building to look “like a fortress.”

Data from fires over the past several decades are guiding management decisions at Bandelier in order to best mitigate impending flood damage:

Following the La Mesa Fire of 1977 [Frijoles] creek flowed thirty-two times its usual rate, and destroyed 23 trail bridges, altered the stream bed, forced evacuations, and deposited 3 feet of silt behind the administrative buildings.

Looking back to June 26, the day the fire began, the owner of a private ranch at Las Conchas, Roger Cox, revealed that the fire began on his land when his caretaker was in Los Alamos running errands. The Associated Press ran an article Wednesday covering this news with the headline “Largest fire in NM history might have been averted.” Cox seemed to finger his caretaker by stating that “if there had been someone to attend to it when the power line got hit, there would have been no fire. It would have been a small burn, but there wouldn’t be a big fire.”

However, the web site Wildfire Today scoffed at the notion that this fire could have been immediately prevented, noting the weather conditions near Las Conchas when the fire started — the day’s relative humidity was 6%, the temperature was 90 degrees, and the wind was out of the west at 19 mph, with gusts of up to 41 mph.

Given the weather on June 26, Wildfire Today stated:

Under those weather conditions it is doubtful that a ranch caretaker could have detected, gathered fire suppression equipment, traveled to, and then put out a fire being pushed by 19 to 40 mph winds adjacent to an arcing powerline.

Meanwhile, the Valle Grande Staging Area on the Valles Caldera National Preserve has reopened to the public. The drive down to the middle of the Valle Grande at the base of volcanic ring fracture dome Cerro la Jara from near mile marker 39 on Highway 4 will cost members of the public nothing. However, no additional recreation activities will be offered to visitors to the staging area at this time, with the exception of visitors being able to get out of their car and take a look at fire damage across the six-mile-long volcanic valley.

Finally, management of the fire is being streamlined and consolidated. Once under the direction of three type-1 incident command teams, management of the Las Conchas Fire has been reduced to one command team.

Here is the most recent fire map of the Las Conchas conflagration:

Fire managers stated that they achieved “good progress” against the Las Conchas fire Thursday, including staving the blaze off of both Chicoma Peak in the fire’s north flank, as well as Peralta Ridge in the southwest of the fire perimeter.

Reuters ran a story this afternoon crediting the successful defense of 11,560 foot Chicoma Peak to decreased winds and greater humidity, noting that the mountain is “considered as the ‘center of all’ by many New Mexico Pueblo Indians.” Chicoma also boasts the distinction as the highest peak in the Jemez Mountains.

Fire managers indicated in tonight’s InciWeb report that 200 hot shot crew members prevented another active front of the blaze — the southwest flank — from advancing. Their efforts were bolstered by aerial ignition techniques and the treatment of retardant on Peralta Ridge to extend the fire line along the ridge.

In Los Alamos, a thunderstorm-caused downdraft caused a flareup in Guaje Canyon, causing a huge amount of smoke to settle on the town. Los Alamos was also covered on the New York Times’ website, where a story by Greenwire details how the Cerro Grande burn scar saved Los Alamos from a much more devastating disaster:

The mood among the city’s 18,000 residents as the Las Conchas fire smolders is far more sanguine than 11 years ago, when the last major fire to threaten the city and its namesake nuclear weapons laboratory, the Cerro Grande Fire, destroyed about 350 homes. This time, however, Los Alamos was spared — and residents have the Cerro Grande fire to thank for it.

The Cerro Grande fire helped save Los Alamos, because while this fire did burn across the landscape, it burned less severely,” said Rod Torres, chief of interpretation for nearby Bandelier National Monument and a spokesman for the interagency team working on the Las Conchas fire, which is now 40 percent contained.

The massive, fast-moving blaze — at 136,955 acres, the largest on record in New Mexico — burned in a mosaic pattern, scorching the treetops in some areas but bypassing other pockets of forest almost entirely.

The day the fire began, on June 26, unusually strong winds created “rolling vortexes” that barreled across the landscape “like rolling tornadoes,” igniting 30 acres at a time, Torres said.

But on day two, the old Cerro Grande burn areas, identifiable by their scattered, standing dead trees and a thick, green carpet of new undergrowth, acted like a speed bump, dropping the fire to the ground and slowing it down, Torres explained. That allowed firefighters to set backburns more easily to try to contain the fire.

In the meantime, activity within the Valles Caldera National Preserve seems to be settling down, according to InciWeb:

Crews patrolled from the southern border of the Valles Caldera Preserve to the junction of Valles Caldera Road 9 [the Pipeline Road]. Mop up continued from Valles Caldera Road 9 to the junction of Valles Caldera Road 12 [the Garita Peak Road] and Forest Service Road 144. Progress has been excellent and that portion of the fireline is expected to be in patrol status by the end of tomorrow’s shift.

Crews worked to reinforce the fireline near Forest Road 144 to Rito de los Indios and additional preparation continues along Forest Service Roads 144 and 27 for potential burnout operations. Efforts continue to keep the fire out of the Canones watershed since numerous cultural and resource values remain at risk.

In Bandelier, crews successfully secured the fire perimeter and completed mop-up operations. The fire’s effect on the Monument was touched on by BirdWatching magazine’s web site today. The site quoted Bandelier research ecologist Craig Allen:

It’s a very ugly fire, now over 130,000 acres, the worst I’ve ever seen by far. Way too much crown fire. It burned 43,000 acres in the first 14 hours, all very hot. Over half of Bandelier burned, and the Capulin and Alamo upper watersheds and riparian areas took huge hits, as did parts of Frijoles Canyon.

We’ll likely remain evacuated from our offices until October (due to the threat of floods, as the rains are now about to finally come). I am feeling quite sad at times. Some of my very favorite lovely forests were completely consumed this time. Of course some ‘good’ fire occurred, too, but much of this fire was not. It either had unnatural stand-replacing intensities or reburned too soon into earlier fire-scarred areas.

New West magazine recently published an article on the Valles Caldera National Preserve, entitled “The New Future for Valles Caldera Depends on Action by a New Congress.” Click here to read the article.

Focusing on the increasing unlikelihood that the Preserve will achieve financial self-sustainability by 2015, the article examines two options for the taxpayer-owned 89,000 parcel of land in New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains: a transfer of management to the U.S. Forest Service, as the current legislation stipulates will happen if the Preserve is not able to achieve profitability; or an inclusion of the Preserve into the National Park Service, as legislation introduced last year in Congress would have accomplished.

Prospects for passage of a similar bill this year are unclear:

Bingaman spokeswoman Jude McCartin said she can’t guess what the bill’s chances of passage would be with Republicans wielding more power in Congress and when the time might be right to move forward.

“All I can say is the bill has had bipartisan support in the past, and we’re hoping it has bipartisan support in the future,” she said.

That support included the Republican-dominated Los Alamos County Council and the Republicans for Environmental Protection.

Convincing budget-minded Republicans of the necessity of the transfer shouldn’t be a tremendous challenge, Ribe said, because managing Valles Caldera under the NPS may not cost any more than it does today.

The NPS would plan to consolidate the staff of both Bandelier National Monument and Valles Caldera, creating a more efficient operation, said Bandelier Superintendent Jason Lott, who sits on the board of the Valles Caldera Trust.

“Both parks, they’re neighboring areas, they have a common boundary,” he said. “It’s one large ecosystem here.”

If Congress doesn’t act and the Valles Caldera Trust never reaches self-sufficiency, the law calls for the experiment to end in 2020, when the trust may be dissolved and the popular Valles Caldera may become part of Santa Fe National Forest.

Ribe said that would be a worst-case scenario.

“Managing the public is what the Park Service does,” he said. “The Forest Service never had the funding or the mandate to do that sort of thing.”

Legislation that would have ended the Valles Caldera Trust experiment and replaced it with National Park Service leadership, an objective that won broad and bipartisan support throughout New Mexico, appears dead today as Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office confirmed that he has abandoned plans to pursue passage of the America’s Great Outdoors Act of 2010, an omnibus lands package which included the Caldera bill as its keynote item.

According to Reid’s spokeswoman, Regan Lachapelle, the fault lay with Republicans: “Critical bipartisan bills for all regions of the country are included in the America’s Great Outdoors Act of 2010. Unfortunately, certain senators have made it clear that they prefer delay over bipartisan action on non-controversial bills.”

Though Reid’s staff indicated today that he would attempt to pass some of the measures in this omnibus bill that Republicans in the Senate were willing to support, the spokeswoman for Sen. Jeff Bingaman, Jude McCartin, told VallesCaldera.com that the Caldera legislation would not be included in this group of bills because it had not gained GOP backing in the U.S. Senate, effectively killing the bill for the hyper-partisan 110th Congress.

However, Bingaman’s office asserted that he will certainly attempt to pass a similar bill next year. Bingaman, who co-sponsored the legislation along with New Mexico’s junior senator, Tom Udall, continues to chair the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, making it a simple proposition for him to reintroduce a like-minded measure.

Although Republicans took control of the U.S House of Representatives in November, presenting an additional challenge for future passage of a Democratically-sponsored Senate bill, a majority of New Mexico’s House delegation supports the move (Reps. Ben Ray Lujan and Martin Heinrich), as well as both aforementioned U.S. Senators from the Land of Enchantment. Additionally, significant local support for this move exists in the area, as the state’s major newspapers have endorsed the measure, along with the governors of Jemez and Santa Clara Pueblo, the Los Alamos Chamber of Commerce and City Council, and a slew of grassroots organizations that run the ideological spectrum (from Republicans for Environmental Protection, to the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, to the Sierra Club). See a partial list of endorsers here.

Today’s news from Capitol Hill leads to questions about the prospects of the Valles Caldera Trust’s long-term viability. A Government Accountability Office study of the Preserve from last year stated that “according to current Trust officials, becoming financially self-sustaining, particularly by the end of fiscal year 2015 when federal appropriations are due to expire, is the Trust’s biggest challenge.”

Unfortunately, Preserve management has concluded that this goal of financial self-sustainability cannot be attained. Specifically, the chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust, Stephen Henry, has explicitly gave up hope of the Preserve ever achieving profitability, writing in an Oct. 9, 2009, letter to the Government Accountability Office (PDF) [on p. 37]: “Simply stated, the Valles Caldera Trust can never achieve financial independence under this legal regime.” The Preserve’s Executive Director, Gary Bratcher, also dismissed any possibility of the VCNP ever paying its own way on Oct. 19, 2009, in a letter written to Sens. Bingaman and Udall (PDF) [on p. 5]: “[The Valles Caldera Preservation Act] is defective… The requirement that the Trust be financially self-sustaining is impossible to achieve.”

Unless Congress fails to take action, the U.S. Forest Service will take the reigns at the Preserve if the Valles Caldera Trust fails to achieve the requirements of the Valles Caldera Preservation Act, including that of financial self-sustainability. Since the two top-ranking leaders of the Preserve have declared the goals of the experiment unattainable, it appears likely that, without Congressional action, the Valles Caldera National Preserve will eventually become national forest, possibly extending the overuse of resources common in areas of the Santa Fe National Forest to the scenic crown jewel of New Mexico.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid officially introduced on the Senate floor on Friday an omnibus public lands bill containing legislation to transfer the Valles Caldera to the National Park Service, as well as approximately 100 other measures, entitled the “America’s Great Outdoors Act of 2010.”

A former boxer, Reid appeared eager to fight to push this act into law. “I want to get this package done before Congress adjourns,” Reid said. “These are bipartisan bills. There is nothing divisive about protecting historic battlefields, improving our most critical water sources, or making sure that our best wildlife habitat remains wild and healthy. These are things that people in Nevada and across America want, and they expect us to work together to achieve them. I sincerely hope that the delays and obstruction we are seeing from my Republican colleagues will not prevent us from taking up this critical legislation.”

Reid has stated that he will keep the Senate open into the new year in an effort to secure passage of his key legislative priorities, including this omnibus lands bill.

Reaction by the media to prospects of success for this new piece of legislation has run from optimistic (“Public Lands Bill May Yet Pass Senate,” Salt Lake City Tribune), to downbeat (“Senator Reid Introduces Massive Lands Bill, Though Opposition is Plentiful,” National Parks Traveler).

Reid’s office also stated the following with regard to the America’s Great Outdoors Act of 2010:

For decades, the U.S. Senate routinely considered non-controversial legislation dealing with natural resource protection issues. But over the past six years, members of the minority party have intentionally and methodically obstructed normal consideration of these bills. As a result of this breakdown in comity, the Senate has been forced to group large numbers of these bills into omnibus packages to break the ongoing filibusters. This was the case with the Consolidated Natural Resources Act of 2008 and the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, both of which passed with overwhelming bipartisan votes.

Among other important provisions, the legislation introduced today designates new wilderness areas in three states, adds 4,600 miles to the national trail system, preserves important Revolutionary and Civil Wars sites, increases resources for protecting the worlds remaining marine turtles and great cats, restores critical waterbodies like Lake Tahoe, the Columbia River and the Long Island Sound, slows the decline in the world’s rapidly dwindling shark populations, and permanently authorizes the Land and Water Conservation Fund.