By Tim Wright

As twilight fell across the peak of New Mexico's Cerro Grande mountain that May night in 2000, an ignition team for the National Park Service began setting small fires aimed at thinning the overstocked forest. But what began as a routine prescribed burn ended as a massive wildfire that destroyed hundreds of homes and buildings and damaged one of the world's most sensitive and historic centers of atomic research. Before the smoke cleared, more than 18,000 people had been evacuated from the town of Los Alamos and Los Alamos National Lab, birthplace of the atomic bomb.

What the U.S. Forest Service calls the Cerro Grande fire-popularly known as the fire at Los Alamos-was a flashpoint in a fire year that ranked as the country's worst in decades. When 2000 ended, the National Interagency Fire Council had counted 122,827 fires and 8.4 million acres of burned land.

At roughly 48,000 acres, the Cerro Grande fire doesn't even make it into that year's top ten. Yet, despite its smaller size, it was seared into the nation's consciousness because of the damage it caused, the damage it could have caused, and the fact that a federal agency was overseeing this prescribed burn-gone-awry.

In its wake, the fire left a landscape scorched by 3000-degree temperatures and a public outcry that prompted a year-long moratorium on federal prescribed burns. Ironically it was a backfire, set to contain the prescribed burn, that was caught by unexpected wind gusts and roared out of control.

Thanks in large part to mitigation efforts conducted by the Lab up to that point, no dangerous levels of hazardous materials were released when the fire swept across the grounds of what locals just call "the Lab." A total of 112 buildings were damaged or destroyed. In the pine-sheltered town of Los Alamos, however, the fire displaced more than 400 families and destroyed or damaged 280 homes. In its wake it left blackened forests and empty spots where neighborhoods had stood.

Seedlings Offer Hope

"Immediately after the fire, there was just shock," says resident Amy Lawrence, adding that things became tougher as time passed and townspeople had to deal with insurance companies, builders, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and endless paperwork. "FEMA gave out millions to help affected families recover, but there was a large part of you that was just angry."

Adds Liz Rutherford, who lost her family home of 50 years: "It's not like they're coming in here and just dropping money. They're giving back what they took away."

Look across the stark black hills and around at the empty dirt pads with front steps to nowhere, and it's not hard to understand residents' anger and frustration. With so much of their lives tied up in bureaucratic knots, residents couldn't begin the rebuilding process. So when the nonprofit group Tree New Mexico began distributing free seedlings in devastated neighborhoods, the response was overwhelming. People seized on the opportunity as a sign of rebirth and one of the few tangible opportunities they had to begin rebuilding their lives.

Using a grant from American Forests' Wildfire ReLeaf program, TNM organized a workshop on tree planting in the Los Alamos area. Officials from Los Alamos County and members of a local gardening group helped distribute 2,000 native trees along with tips for helping them survive. A second workshop in 2002 drew even greater participation and led to an outpouring of emotion.

"Many people were thanking me with tears in their eyes, talking about how the trees from last year were budding out and how much it meant to them to have us come back again," TNM's Executive Director Suzanne Probart says. "Everything they have had to do to recover meant filling out endless forms and more government bureaucracy. Our interactions were about planting and healing."

Ironically, the fire that started it all was part of an effort at healing-reducing the dangerous fuel load in forests surrounding Los Alamos, a situation brought on by decades of suppressed fire. The Los Alamos National Lab had begun its fire mitigation efforts two years earlier after an analysis of the Lab's vulnerability, which looked at weather patterns, existing fuel loads, and the projected path a wildfire might take. The report concluded that the fictional fire would release so much radiation that Three Mile Island would pale in comparison.

The Lab's fire mitigation efforts to that point spared the Lab and the town from that worst-case scenario. But when the fire roared into Los Alamos, simple single- and multifamily homes built when it was still a secret town in the 1950s and 1960s didn't stand a chance. With their flat roofs and wood construction, the homes were like stacked matches in a sea of ponderosa pine. Entire blocks of homes disappeared in a matter of minutes. Burning embers, rising in the heat and caught by winds, set spot fires across town, destroying individual homes in otherwise untouched neighborhoods.

When fire sweeps through a community, it takes more than just homes. Gone are familiar landscapes that form the boundaries of everyday life. And when catastrophic fire hits-like the wildfire that burned Los Alamos-the severity of the environmental damage stymies restoration efforts.

Amy Lawrence had just given birth to her second child when the fire destroyed her 1950s-era home. "It wasn't beautiful, but it was ours. We had big plans," she says. A master gardener, she volunteered to hand out trees when Tree New Mexico planned its workshops.

"It felt real good," she says of the experience, "because you were moving forward, taking steps to getting back to normal."

With only 4,000 trees distributed during the past two years, TNM doesn't expect a forest overnight, especially when considering as much as a 50 percent mortality rate for the young seedlings due to an ongoing drought.

"The healing doesn't start one day and end in a day or a year. It takes generations," says Probart. "We didn't rebuild a lot of forest. But we did rebuild a lot of healing."

The healing process is what brought American Forests to Los Alamos. "Four thousand seedlings is really not that much in the grand scheme of things compared to what they need to do," says Karen Fedor, vice president for American Forests' tree-planting Global ReLeaf program, which administers Wildfire ReLeaf. "But it was our way to help."

"With a tree planting," Fedor adds, "you have the environmental benefit, the ecological, the economic, and then you have the social benefit." The Los Alamos replanting "was focused more on the social, restorative value of trees versus the economic or environmental benefit. So we didn't go out and plant 10,000 trees in the Sante Fe National Forest. But what we did do is we gave people hope."

And just as people's lives need to heal, so too does the land. When fire rips the heart out of a forest the way the Cerro Grande did, the simple act of replanting isn't enough. High intensity fires kill microcrobes, insects, and other biological matter in the soil as deep as 12 inches below the surface. Says Lawrence: "Dirt is dirt is dirt. You don't think of it changing, but it does."

"Sterilized" soil makes it hard for groundcover to reestablish itself. In pine forests, needles burned on the ground form a resin that coats soil with a waterproof barrier. That barrier makes it difficult for seeds to germinate and prevents rain from soaking into the ground. The loss of vegetation combined with the resin barrier leads to huge increases in rainwater runoff. In mountainous regions, it means a leap in hillside erosion. Some areas face a dangerous increase in the possibility of mudslides and flash floods. With its nuclear legacy, Los Alamos's potential for erosion and flash flood problems take on a dimension not found elsewhere in the country.

Rehabilitation work takes years and is conducted in phases. Immediately after a fire, projects focus on stabilizing areas to lessen the impact of hazards such as landslides, flooding, and water pollution, says Joel Holtrop, deputy chief for state and private forestry. Then trees and shrubs are replanted, selecting appropriate species for the site and type of planting stock. A year later, the site is evaluated to see how well the seedlings have survived. If necessary, more work is done.

Holtrop, who recently toured the Los Alamos area as part of an internal Forest Service review, was struck by the high survival rate of trees replanted in one particular area of the forest. The reason: Local citizens had been carrying water up to the replanted area and watering the trees voluntarily.

"Rehabilitation after an event like the fires at Los Alamos is about restoring forest resources and restoring communities," Holtrop says. "The voluntary involvement of community members in watering the trees is a great example of how community involvement makes a difference."

"We're not out of the woods yet, but that first year was the gut check period," says Lab spokesman Kevin Roark. "If there's ever a time when a drought is a friend, it's after a big fire when there are runoff problems. But we're past that point now," he continues. "We're ready for the drought to be over."

Nowhere is the drought more visible than in the dying pinon pine forests in the southern areas of Los Alamos County and along the Lab's southern border. The bushy, slow-growing pinon, whose prized pine nuts make it an important tree economically, has fallen victim to invasions of bark beetles. After several drought years and the stress of massive fires, beetle outbreaks stretch from Colorado south to central Mexico. In their wake, countless thousands of dead and dying pinons add to the fire threat.

Extension agent Carlos Valdez monitors bark beetle damage in the burned woods.

Wielding a hatchet, Los Alamos County Extension agent Carlos Valdez chops into a 150- to 175-year-old pinon pine. Turning over a squarish piece of bark reveals a pattern reminiscent of a circuit board. Two 1/8-inch-long bark beetles dart about the grooves in an attempt to escape the sunlight. It's only a matter of time, he says, before the tree dies.

The drought exacerbates an already problematic situation. Fires are like a lure for beetles; infrared radiation released by flames attracts beetles and wood borers. "When the smoke goes up," says Probart, raising her hands over her head, "the signal goes out." Firefighters can hear the beetles attacking even though the trees are still burning. The beetles, she says, "reproduce like mad. And they're gonna go after the other stressed trees."

"We have the same thing happening to the ponderosa pines but with different beetles," Valdez adds. He predicts 30 to 40 percent of the ponderosas and 80 percent of the pinons will fall victim to insects by next summer.

Back at the Lab, while the short-term outlook for its forest remains bright-the area thinned before the fire is already showing signs of improved health-it faces the same issues that daunt the blackened hills above town. How will future management of the forests proceed?

"We're in a ponderosa pine ecosystem, and we've got to face it," says Patrick Valerio, the Lab's forest ecologist. When the rains come again, "regeneration will be a problem in 10 to 20 years and they'll be right back where they were. We'll always have fires. You can't get away from that." Lab managers and officials in Washington, Valerio says, must commit to a regular program of thinning.

"Trees are killing our forests" agrees New Mexico urban forester George Duda, who proffers cross-sections of two different ponderosa pines to drive his point home. One, 16 inches in diameter, is 70 years old. The other, diminutive by comparison, is 5 inches across but 104 years old. The difference: The small one comes from an overpopulated forest.

Duda has an evangelical zeal for thinning forests, but don't confuse that with a lack of concern for the trees. "There is something I love more than trees," he says, "and that's the forest." An overpopulated forest, he insists, is an ecosystem gone wrong-a disaster for wildlife and plant diversity, a drain on watersheds, and a firestorm waiting to happen. It's Duda's goal to see New Mexico's dense forest return to the open, grassy forest that existed before humans threw things out of balance. He is a man bucking popular beliefs.

"A mentality exists," says Carlos Valdez, "that there can't be too many trees. This community has lost its forest, and they can't come to grips with the idea of cutting down trees."

Suzanne Probart (left), of Tree New Mexico, is among those rebuilding resident's lives and ecosystems. Urban forester George Dude (right) shows how overcrowding has stunted the growth of the regions's ponderosa pines.

Standing on the grassy slope at Ashley Pond in the heart of Los Alamos surrounded by the usual collection of gas stations, restaurants, and hotels, it's hard to imagine this spot as the center of nuclear activity some 60 years ago. The water towers and fenced buildings of the modern day lab are visible just across Los Alamos Canyon, a little more than a stone's throw away. As one local says, "the town is the Lab and the Lab is the town." An estimated three-fourths of the county is directly employed by or under contract to the Lab. (American Forests chose Ashley Pond as the site for its 20 millionth Global ReLeaf tree planting. See Clippings, page 13.)

Employees of Los Alamos historically have looked to the woods as an outlet for hiking, camping, skiing, and horseback riding. Sixty years later, that feeling is still strong. "That's what makes the fire so terrible," says one woman over lunch. "There's always been very little to do up here, especially for the kids. Now we've lost all that."

The forests looming along the western side of town are no longer green and inviting, and the hillsides are bare except for innumerable 50- to 60-foot black sticks pointing toward the deep blue sky. Signs along the border with Sante Fe National Forest warn all who enter of the danger of falling logs.

"Every time we have a windstorm, you can hear them falling," Amy Lawrence says, looking out the window of her newly rebuilt home. "It's really dangerous out there. We stood here with our coffee the other day and just watched them fall."

Despite the danger, mountain bikers, joggers, and hikers can seen darting through the forest remains. Others, like lifelong resident Patrick Rutherford, have given up. "When I wanted to go hiking, I could walk right out my door," he says of life before the fire. "It's not the same forest anymore and I just don't have the stomach for it."

Rutherford, too, lost his home but plans to remain in the neighborhood. His house used to face what are now the blackened hills beyond town. Looking southeast, Sante Fe is visible in the distance, spilling down the plain. The mountain at Albequerque looms further in the distance.

"Fifty years ago when I first moved here, you could see all that. Over the years, with all the trees growing up, you couldn't. Now you can."

As the setting sun falls, it paints Sante Fe and the western sky with a pallet of yellows and pinks. Across the valley, on a nearby mountain, a thunderstorm drops snow in the higher elevations while reflecting the golden sun and displaying every color of blue that one can imagine. Watching it, Rutherford adds, "I'm gonna face my house this way." AF

Tim Wright is a freelance photojournalist in Richmond, Virginia. He last wrote for American Forests on the Great Dismal Swamp. [TOP]