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

Bob Parmenter, the chief scientist at the Valles Caldera National Preserve, provided some insight today about our previous post, describing a blackened San Antonio River that smelled of ash this weekend, as well as a similarly dark and murky East Fork of the Jemez River.

Dr. Parmenter left the following voicemail with VallesCaldera.com today:

[The black flow coming out of the San Antonio] was an ash flow from a flash flood that originated up in Indios Creek Canyon. We had kind of hoped that we wouldn’t get hit that hard with a thunderstorm but we’ve actually had four floods come out of there since the 25th of July — which was the first one — and each one of those brings with it a large amount of ash and organic debris coming down from the burned areas of these watersheds. We’ve also had floods come off into the Rio San Antonio from Cerro Santa Rosa and Cerro Abrigo, and there’s been some ash flows into the Jaramillo Creek Area, which of course eventually will work its way down to the East Fork of the Jemez.

The areas that have not been hit are the upper East Fork of the Jemez in the Valle Grande and the Valle Toledo. The large expanses of grassland have mitigated that because the ash flows coming down the mountains spread out, and the grass filters it, and eventually stops the ash slurry from reaching the stream. So, at least at this point in time, those areas are OK.

But, yes, the Rio San Antonio has had major ash flows down that stream through the Rio San Antonio — through the Valle San Antonio — and we’ve noticed a lot of fish kills along the way, so that’s why we’ve pretty much closed fishing on the Preserve for the rest of the summer.

Joy tempered with significant fear echoed throughout the Jemez Mountains today as news spread that the Santa Fe National Forest has announced that it will be partially reopening its non-burned sections of the Jemez Ranger District to the public on Saturday for the first time since the Las Conchas Fire ignited, with the exception of Paliza Campground (Jemez Falls Campground will be open on Aug. 1). The Valles Caldera National Preserve will also resume its normal summer recreation activities in non-burned areas, except for fishing.

This news comes as moist and strong summer monsoons, though several weeks late, have been unleashed upon Northern New Mexico for the last week.

Although many Jemez residents were pleased to learn that they will allowed back into their forest, the news also concerned locals who once again now have to live with the prospect of an unwitting visitor illegally setting a fire that could grow into another catastrophic conflagration. However, this is simply reality for those of us who have made the choice to live in an alpine environment surrounded by a thick forest.

Despite the fact that much of the forest will be reopened, New Mexicans should be aware that stage 1 fire restrictions will still be in effect, which means that campfires are only allowed in developed campgrounds, smoking is only allowed in vehicles, and fireworks are not permitted.

According to the Forest Service’s official press release:

PARTIAL LIFTING OF FIRE RESTRICTIONS FOR THE SANTA FE NATIONAL FOREST

(SANTA FE, NM)— The Santa Fe National Forest is lifting fire restrictions for portions of the forest effective Saturday, July 30. “The recent arrival of monsoonal rains and other changes in weather patterns have brought a welcome relief from extreme conditions,” said Forest Supervisor,  Maria T. Garcia.

The Las Conchas Fire and the Pacheco Fire areas will remain in Stage III Fire Closures. The Jemez Ranger District, portions of the Cuba Ranger District and the Valles Caldera National Preserve will implement Stage I Fire Restrictions.The Valles Caldera will resume normal summer activities excluding those which normally occur in the burned areas.  Fishing programs remain suspended until further notice.

During Stage I Fire Restrictions campfires are only allowed in Forest Service developed camp and picnic grounds where grills and grates are provided. Smoking is permitted only in vehicles, in developed campgrounds, or in areas cleared at least three feet in diameter of all flammable material.  Gas and propane stoves, lanterns or heating devices are permitted providing such devices meet the fire underwriter’s specifications for safety. Possessing, discharging or using any kind of fire work or other pyrotechnic device is illegal.

The Paliza Campground on the Jemez Ranger District will remain closed while it continues to be used as a spike camp for firefighters from the Las Conchas Fire.  Jemez Falls campground will be closed this weekend, but opened on Monday, August 1.  The Holy Ghost Campground on the Pecos/Las Vegas Ranger District is undergoing facility reconstruction and remains closed.

The Las Conchas fire has created significant safety hazards for anyone entering the burned area, including threats from flash flooding, falling trees and rolling rocks.  We are placing a high priority on assessing hazards that would potentially affect the public using Forest System Roads that access private land within the burned area.

For more information on the Santa Fe National Forest, call Bruce Hill, Jr. (505) 438-5320. For the Valles Caldera National Preserve information, call (866)382-5537.  For a copy of the Las Conchas and Pacheco Fire Area Closure Orders please visit:  http://www.fs.fed.us/r3/sfe/

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:

Due to extreme fire conditions, both the Santa Fe National Forest (which includes the Valles Caldera National Preserve) and Bandelier National Monument have moved to stage III fire restrictions, which have not been imposed in the Jemez Mountains since 2004. Read the SFNF’s official press release here.

This means that all National Forest System lands within the Jemez Ranger District in Sandoval County are restricted/off-limits except for the open areas listed below. The areas listed below will remain open under stage II fire restrictions, which forbid fires and smoking of any kind:

• Fishing is only allowed 75 feet on either side of the San Antonio and Jemez River from La Cueva Picnic Area South to La Junta Fishing Access
• La Junta Fishing Access
• Las Casitas Fishing Access
• San Diego Fishing Access
• River’s Bend Fishing Access
• Vista Linda Campground
• Spanish Queen Picnic Area
• The Bluffs Fishing Access
• Battleship Rock Picnic Area
• Rincon Fishing Access
• Spence Hot Springs and the access trail from Hwy 4 (about 0.25 miles) Dark Canyon Fishing Access
• La Cueva Picnic Area
• San Antonio Campground
• San Diego Overlook
• Jemez Falls Campground, Jemez Falls Group Area (reservation required), Jemez Falls Trail head and trail to Jemez Falls (less than 0.5 miles)
• Las Conchas Picnic Area
• Sandoval County Solid Waste Transfer Station Special Use Permit site (in Cañon)
• Forest Road 106 to Thompson Ridge Estates, Forest Road 105 to Sulphur Springs residential area, Forest Road 10 from Highway 4 to Sierra De Los Pinos residential development and Forest Road 134 to Vallecitos de Los Indios residential development

Local businesses within or around the Jemez Ranger District along NM 4 and 126 are OPEN for business. Fenton Lake State Park located off of NM 126 is also open. For a list of businesses, local attractions and activities for the Jemez area visit: http://www.jemezsprings.org/. For additional information regarding fire restrictions on the Jemez Ranger District, please call (575) 289-3264.

Additionally, all areas in the Valles Caldera National Preserve are closed, except for public access through the Valle Grande Staging Area, which will remain under stage II fire restrictions.

Bandelier National Monument managers also issued the following statement this week:

Starting Friday, June 24, 2011 only the visitor center, picnic area, Main Loop Trail, Juniper Campground, and the trail area of the Tsankawi section will remain open. All other areas will be closed to all entry. Closed areas include Alcove House, Ponderosa Campground, Cerro Grande, the Falls Trail, and many other areas. These closures are to ensure public safety in a summer of unprecedented dry conditions in which fire behavior has already demonstrated itself to be extremely severe.

The Santa Fe National Forest and Valles Caldera National Preserve will implement Stage 2 fire restrictions tomorrow, due to extreme fire danger caused by drought and high winds.

Stage 2 restrictions prohibit:

• Building, maintaining, attending or using a fire, campfire, charcoal, coal, wood or stove fire.
• Using an explosive.
• Smoking, except inside a vehicle or building.
• Possession, discharging or using any type of firework or pyrotechnic device.
• Possessing or operating motor vehicles, including cars, trucks, SUVs, motorcycles and ATVs, off National Forest System roads.
• Operating a chain saw or other tools or equipment powered by an internal combustion engine, between the hours of 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.
• Welding or operating acetylene or other torches with open flames.