On a late June day in 2011, Collin Haffey was sitting in a boat in Cochiti Lake, watching billows of smoke curling from the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico. The smoke suggested a fire that was growing at a pace Haffey previously thought impossible. “All my fire training and ecology training was saying, ‘No, it can’t be … there’s no way it could be that big,’” he said.
Haffey and his wife raced to pack a few things from their home in Los Alamos before evacuation orders clogged the narrow highway out of town. Next, Haffey, who was working for the National Park Service at the time, went to Bandelier National Monument to pack up the administrative offices before that canyon was burned over.
The blaze, dubbed Las Conchas, eventually consumed 156,000 acres, and it changed New Mexico’s relationship with wildfire. Eight years later, its lessons continue to shape the state’s fire preparation and mitigation work. For one coalition, that means making it easier to return controlled fire to the landscape. Since fall 2018, the All-Hands All-Lands Burn Team, which is run by the Forest Stewards Guild in cooperation with land management agencies, has been conducting prescribed burns with a crew of staffers, contractors, and volunteers that are called upon as needed.
“All-Hands All-Lands is both the end of an arc that got started a long time ago, as well as the beginning of a brand new arc,” said Dave Lasky, director of fire management for Forest Stewards Guild. “It’s a model for how we start cost-effectively working on a landscape scale.”
For most of a century, American forests were managed under the philosophy that fires were catastrophes to be curtailed. Ecologists have since recognized that wildfire plays a critical role on the landscape. Trouble is, a forest that hasn’t been allowed to burn in a century burns more intensely, threatening people who live nearby.
“We just need to let nature run its course,” said James Melonas, supervisor of the Santa Fe National Forest. “It’s an ecological debt.”
Fire managers are hoping to pay off that debt not with infernos like Las Conchas, but with smaller fires. The Southwest’s monsoon season, which brings afternoon storms to tamp the flames down before conflagrations spread, offers a good window for that, but there’s a staffing problem: The monsoons typically come in late summer, when fires in northern states are ramping up. “The rest of the West is burning, so our firefighters are off helping with that,” Melonas said.
The Burn Team was built to fill those gaps by training more firefighters and “burn bosses” who don’t work full-time. These local teams of 10 to 40 certified firefighters can be quickly convened when conditions are right, and then disbanded when they aren’t needed.
“We’ve reached out [to land managers] and said … ‘You’ve got basically an orderable resource,’” said Lasky, with the Forest Stewards Guild. “That’s why the team exists — to make a fire happen that wouldn’t otherwise happen.”
The Burn Team receives funding from the Rio Grande Water Fund, a collaboration between dozens of government agencies, nonprofits, foundations, and private interests that the Nature Conservancy started in 2014. The goal is to treat 600,000 acres of forest over 20 years to protect drinking water supplies, homes, and human lives. In 2018, the fund’s mitigation projects topped 30,000 acres — up from 3,000 its first year. It has leveraged $4.55 million in private dollars with $40 million in public funding.
The RGWF started, in large part, because of what came after Las Conchas’ flames. Heavy rains hit the fire-scorched earth and washed whole hillsides into the Rio Grande. While the river ran black, the cities of Santa Fe and Albuquerque had to shut off their water intakes.
“That’s when you really start to say, ‘OK, this isn’t something that’s far away from home. These types of fires have significant downstream impacts,’” said Haffey, who is now a conservation coordinator for The Nature Conservancy. “It was one of those catalyzing moments when people realized, oh my gosh, this is how bad it could be.”
The Burn Team is one example of how RGWF participants are rethinking fire in New Mexico. The young program is diversifying fire crews in more ways than one. The Burn Team trains people to use and encourage fire rather than immediately suppress it. Administrators are also recruiting more women, minorities, and young adults from cities through other nonprofits. Everyone on the Burn Team undergoes training consistent with National Wildland Coordinating Group standards. They study wildland fire behavior and incident command systems, and must pass a fitness test that requires hiking three miles with a 45-pound pack in less than 45 minutes. For firefighters who already have the required certification, the Burn Team invests in additional training.
So far, the Burn Team has treated 5,000 acres on National Forest and Bureau of Land Management land, and has helped the State Land Office and the Picuris Pueblo on a shared project. The team helps land managers collaborate when the landscape calls for an approach that doesn’t match jurisdictional lines.
“Particularly in prescribed fire, the political boundaries are not the right place to start or stop a burn,” said Jeremy Bailey, who runs prescribed fire trainings with The Nature Conservancy. “You want to use rivers, ravines for control lines. You want to use natural features or manmade features [like roads] that already exist, and those things don’t exist on property lines.”
The Burn Team was inspired by, among others, the Nature Conservancy’s program and fire management in Florida and Georgia — states that conduct more prescribed burns each year than in all of the West. Talk of starting similar programs in California and Colorado is underway.
In New Mexico, part of the job is coaxing people to make peace with a mosaic landscape. Instead of uniform forests that — as Las Conchas showed — can function as giant tinderboxes, folks in the Southwest can expect a patchwork of meadows and trees — some of them crisped and charred by the slow-moving, low-intensity fire that’s been allowed to run its course.
