BANDELIER NATIONAL MONUMENT — Towering pine trees and colorful songbirds once thrived atop Apache Mesa.
A dozen years ago, before the last wildfire, the landscape was filled with ponderosa pines, tassel-eared squirrels and western tanagers.
Once a forest, it now looks wide open.
Dotted with the occasional tree — dead but still standing after the 2011 Las Conchas Fire — the mesa is now green with shrubs and grasses. Spotted and canyon towhees chirp out the soundtrack.
Apache Mesa sits within the Jemez Mountains.
But it also offers a peek at one possible future for parts of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east — where last year’s Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire burned 534 square miles of national forest, private land and wilderness.
The chunks of forest incinerated last spring may never look the same. But Apache Mesa demonstrates the landscape isn’t destined to remain a burned-out scar.
“The story isn’t over yet,” retired ecologist Craig Allen told the Journal last week.
In interviews this spring, Allen and other scientists outlined a host of potential scenarios for how mountainsides torched in the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire might heal.
The answers aren’t easy to hear. Amplified by climate change and other factors, the high-severity fires now hitting the Southwest can wipe out a large forested patch in a day.
The land isn’t likely to come back on its own — at least as a forest — without extensive help.
But what comes next isn’t predetermined.
A coalition of public universities in New Mexico is launching a reforestation center to help find the right trees for replanting.
Preventing another high-severity wildfire in the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak burn scar also will influence its future. Often a subsequent fire inflicts more damage than the first.
And last year’s fire, strange as it may sound, wasn’t entirely bad, ecologists said. Parts of the burned area survived the flames and may emerge healthier than before.
“This is the largest wildfire in modern history in New Mexico,” said Thomas Swetnam, a University of Arizona tree ring expert and professor emeritus. But “it doesn’t mean all of the burned area is toast.”
‘Under stress’
Fire was once a healthy, routine part of forests in New Mexico. Ponderosa pine trees, for example, are well-adapted to the kind of fire that clears out low-lying plants.
But firefighting strategies over the last 120 years changed the landscape.
Fire suppression throughout the 1900s was so effective, ecologists say, most forests in the Southwest grew extra thick, creating plenty of fuel for high-severity wildfires.
Climate change exacerbates the risk. Warmer temperatures and drought suck the moisture out of plants and soils.
“It’s putting all the vegetation under stress,” said Allen, a retired research ecologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. “It’s making the fuels drier. It’s making the fire season longer.”
Over the last 40 years, the state’s wildfires have grown more difficult to suppress.
Allen easily moves through a list of high-severity fires in the Jemez Mountains over the last 45 years. Examples include the 1977 La Mesa Fire, the Dome Fire in 1996, Cerro Grande in 2000 and Las Conchas in 2011.
Climate change is altering ecosystems in surprising ways, outside of past experience.
The Calf Canyon part of last year’s massive wildfire began as a U.S. Forest Service pile burn in January. It somehow smoldered underground for months — even amid snowstorms and freezing temperatures — before growing into an wildfire in April and merging with the Hermits Peak fire.
“We have to learn from this,” Allen said of the changed conditions
Converting landscape
Some of the forested terrain burned in last year’s wildfire is gone for generations, if it ever comes back.
Scientists and forest managers call it “type conversion.” A stand of trees may burn so severely that a new type of vegetation dominates afterward.
“Because of these fires,” Ellis Margolis, a research ecologist for the U.S. Geological Survey said, “forests are converting to shrub fields and grasslands, and the forests will not come back in our lifetimes.”
Replanting can help, he said, but even then, it’s a challenge.
Apache Mesa in Bandelier National Monument is an example of the early stages of “type conversion.” Burned in the Las Conchas Fire — and others before that — it now looks nothing like a forest.
Dead trees dot the landscape like needles. Shrubs and grasses are sprouting up along the mesa top.
It’s one possible future for parts of the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak burn area.
Swetnam, the University of Arizona professor emeritus, put it this way: “Probably big patches of the landscape on the east side of the Sangre de Cristo (Mountains) are going to go to shrub land and grass land unless there’s extensive reforestation.”
‘Lost habitat’
For wildlife, the changes produce winners and losers.
The pine trees that once filled Apache Mesa offered a nice home to tassel-eared squirrels, named for the tufts on their ears. The area also provided habitat for warblers, hermit thrushes, western tanagers and other birds.
Spotted owls, too, like old-growth forests.
“Those species have been harmed” by high-severity wildfires, Swetnam said. “They’ve lost habitat.”
But some birds — woodpeckers, for example — like dead trees, at least while they’re still standing the first, say, 10 years after a severe fire.
On a recent afternoon in Bandelier National Monument, four turkey vultures sat atop the skeleton of a dead tree. Elsewhere, spotted and canyon towhees called out.
Elk and deer will return to the open areas, too.
Big horn sheep prefer it. Preyed upon by mountain lions, they like escape routes.
State to spend on reforestation
New Mexico is developing a $65 million reforestation center that could sharply expand the state’s capacity to replant trees and other vegetation.
A coalition of public universities and state agencies — including New Mexico State University; the state Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department; Highlands University; and the University of New Mexico — are participating in the project.
The goal is to have it running at full capacity in about four years. The state can now produce up to 300,000 seedlings a year, a figure that would climb to 5 million tree seedlings a year.
Even then, it’d remain a fraction of what’s needed to replant areas burned in forest fires.
Knowing what to plant is also a question. New Mexico State University operates the only forestry research center in the Southwest, said Claire Montoya, director of communications and reporting at NMSU’s Agricultural Experiment Station.
The center “has been really key in finding varieties of trees that are going to last as the climate continues to change,” she said.
New Mexico lawmakers and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham this year also approved bipartisan legislation establishing a long-term source of funding for land and water conservation. Some of the money is dedicated to the Forestry Division within the state Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department for projects that include forest conservation and restoration.
The state budget authorized $100 million in immediate funding to support the legislation, Senate Bill 9.
Regrowth from the ashes
More than 20 years ago, following the Cerro Grande Fire, Allen and his two sons helped replant trees along a foothills trail above Los Alamos.
It was part of a huge blackened area, with pine trees killed by fire.
But now some of the newly planted pines stand 6 to 20 feet high.
“I still feel loss,” said Allen, now a research scholar at the UNM Department of Geography and Environmental Studies. “I don’t know if numb is the word, but humans are adaptable. You learn to appreciate the things that are here now.”
Still, he said, he misses the old forest.
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