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

The now 100%-contained Las Conchas Fire transformed the Jemez Mountains’ normally clear and sparkling Valles Caldera-draining rivers into dark, ashy, and muddy waterways this weekend.

The San Antonio River was black on Saturday, and a witness stated that the creek “smelled like ash…like when you douse a fire with water.”

The Jemez’ second caldera-draining river, the East Fork of the Jemez River, did not emit such an aroma this weekend, but it was also much darker than usual. On Sunday, I walked from the home of VallesCaldera.com to the East Fork Box, and despite the dirty state of the river, I submerged myself in its cold waters for the first time since before the Las Conchas Fire ignited, which served as a joyful and refreshing homecoming to a river that had been off limits during this intense crisis.

The San Antonio rises in the charred Valle Toledo, while the East Fork’s headwaters are located on the far eastern side of the Valle Grande (which also burned). The confluence of both rivers can be seen at the tip of Battleship Rock, where the streams form the Jemez River (you can download a 360° panorama from the top of Battleship Rock here, and view all the rest of our panoramas here).

Below are a couple of photos of a darkened East Fork of the Jemez River running through the East Fork Box yesterday.

John Fleck of the Albuquerque Journal wrote an article Saturday on the impact of the fire on the watersheds of the Jemez Mountains. In the story, Fleck describes how ashy and muddy conditions in the Rio Grande (into which the Jemez’ streams flow) caused the city of Albuquerque to temporarily cease pumping water from the river for its drinking water last week. However, the city resumed diverting water from the Rio on Friday.

As an aside, the song “Black Muddy River,” by a well-known band from San Francisco, seems very appropriate for the state of the rivers that drain our sacred caldera. Click here to listen to the tune.

When the last bolt of sunshine hits the mountain
And the stars start to splatter in the sky
When the moon splits the southwest horizon
With the scream of an eagle on the fly
I will walk alone by the black muddy river
And listen to the ripples as they moan
I will walk alone by the black muddy river
And sing me a song of my own

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:

This photo of the Valles Caldera, taken by the Landsat 7 satellite on Wednesday, May 22, 2002, is today’s “Earth Observatory” image of the day by NASA. Read more from NASA’s web site here.

National Parks Magazine, the quarterly publication of the National Parks Conservation Association, features in its fall edition an in-depth profile of the Valles Caldera National Preserve and legislation currently in the U.S. Senate that would transfer it to the National Park Service. Read this article here. You can also click below to watch an accompanying video, which features some magnificent shots of the Caldera’s scenic splendor, as well as an interview with Bob Parmenter, the Preserve’s director of science and education:

Below are the first few paragraphs of National Parks Magazine’s profile of the Caldera:

Standing on Rabbit Ridge, on the southern rim of the Valles Caldera, two worlds unfold below you. Gaze to the north and you see a stunning, 14-mile-wide volcanic crater: Ponderosa-covered mountains ring a grassy basin so vast, you have to turn your head to take in its immensity. No roads or buildings mar these meadows.

It’s a profoundly calming landscape, yet occasional bits of glassy black obsidian embedded in the boulders at your feet hint at the volcano’s cataclysmic past. Magma once exploded from this yawning mouth in eruptions that molded the New Mexico landscape for miles around—including 33,000-acre Bandelier National Monument to the south.

In fact, Bandelier’s boundary sits just steps away from this hike-to viewpoint. A signed fence on Rabbit Ridge delineates Park Service land from Valles Caldera National Preserve, two separately managed parcels that have something in common: The ash spewed in one of Valles Caldera’s eruptive fits created Bandelier’s tuff, the chalky stone that ancestral Puebloans carved into dwellings. You can’t discern Bandelier’s ruins from here, but you can admire big swaths of tuff that give the whole panorama a rosy glow.

For now, barbed wire separates the two properties, but advocates seek to close that rift by bringing Valles Caldera under Park Service management. Not only would its inclusion recognize this corner of northern New Mexico as a geological treasure, it would expand access to it—something would-be visitors have long desired.

More than a century of private ownership and ranching kept Valles Caldera off-limits to all but a few. Even after 2000, when it was purchased by the federal government and became public land, access was limited. Valles Caldera sees just 17,000 visitors annually, compared with 212,500 at Bandelier.

An update on some recent news items regarding the Valles Caldera from recent weeks, from 8,200 feet high in the Jemez Mountains. Items from the Albuquerque Journal can only be read by non-subscribers by clicking on the “trial access pass” button in the lower left of the screen after clicking on links to the articles below:

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has denied federal protection for the caddisfly, which is found only in three locations, one of which is the Jaramillo Creek in the Valles Caldera (the prior link reveals a view from the sky of the Jaramillo Creek flowing into the East Fork of the Jemez River from below).

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Two Los Alamos High School students, Nathan Clements and Joe Abeyta, will be attending this month’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in San Jose, CA, as a result of their work in attempting to determine the effect of cattle grazing on riparian areas of the Caldera. According to the students, as measured by crayfish populations, cattle grazing is not having a significant impact on the Caldera’s streams.

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A free fly-fishing clinic, focusing on the unique challenges of fishing the streams of the Valles Caldera, will be held on May 8 in Los Alamos.

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Former state legislator Al Castillo penned an editorial in the Albuquerque Journal urging New Mexicans to refocus efforts on conservation of our state’s land and water, urging support for Sen. Bingaman’s attempt to fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which Castillo reminds readers was the source for the funds that purchased the Baca Ranch (which became the Valles Caldera National Preserve) in 2000: “Easily accessible from Albuquerque and Santa Fe, the preserve serves as a critical source for urban residents’ drinking water, as an outdoor laboratory for climate change studies, and as an extraordinary place to hunt, fish and hike.”

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The Los Alamos Monitor reported on a class conducted by Leadership Los Alamos that was recently held at the Valles Caldera National Preserve. Covering topics from global warming to struggles of Preserve management, a Monitor editor also wrote an accompanying editorial describing her emotional reaction to visiting the Preserve for the first time.

This week, the Valles Caldera and Northern New Mexico were socked by three consecutive winter storms.  Storm totals in the Caldera ranged from 16 inches in the community of Sierra los Piños (nestled within the Caldera outside of the National Preserve) to 28 inches at Pajarito Mountain Ski Area along the Caldera’s western rim (with 52 inches of base depth at mid-mountain).  Sleigh rides continued to be offered at the Valles Caldera National Preserve on Saturdays and Sundays ($30/person, $24/seniors, $15/youth), as well as snowshoeing ($10/adult, $8/seniors, $5/youth).

We hope you enjoy this video we created, which includes over 100 majestic views from the Valles Caldera, set to some glorious musical masterpieces.  All photos were taken by VallesCaldera.com, except for the photos from space, which were taken by NASA astronauts.  About 80% of the pictures were photographed from behind the gates of the Valles Caldera National Preserve (and all were taken within the rim of the Valles Caldera). To watch this video, click below.