Weather: We had rain through Tuesday, then nothing until Friday night. I have no idea how much fell. There was about 4" of water in the bottom of the trash bin on Tuesday, but the walls may have captured some moving at angles. That number may be too high.
On Wednesday, I used my moisture meter, which was designed for house plants, to record levels in parts of the yard. The probe is just over 6" long and the maximum reading is 8. In most places I checked, both in a watered bed and in the untouched yard, the reading at 2" was about 3. It didn’t reach 8 until 6". There was one place where the probe stopped at 4" with a reading of 8. Unfortunately, that was where I planted some raspberries that didn’t survive the summer heat. At least, I have an idea what happened.
I realized on Thursday that it didn’t matter how much water was reaching the roots of the native vegetation. What mattered for my seedlings was the surface, which had begun to dry almost immediately. I watered those areas alone until we got rain again Friday night.
Last useful rain: 7/3. Week’s low: 52 degrees F. Week’s high: 91 degrees F in the shade. Winds were up to 32 mph in Santa Fé on Friday.
What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, desert willow, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, fern bush, caryopteris, Arizona and red tipped yuccas, daylilies, red hot pokers, Russian sage, sweet peas, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, larkspur, hollyhocks, winecup mallows, Shasta daisies, cultivated sunflowers, lance leaf coreopsis, purple coneflower, yellow yarrow
What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, cholla, bush morning glory, bindweed, green leaf five eyes, silver leaf nightshade, alfalfa, white sweet clover, oxalis, hoary cress, nits and lice, toothed spurge, leather leaf globe mallows, buffalo gourd, Queen Anne’s lace, velvetweed, alfilerillo, Hopi tea, strap leaf and golden hairy asters, goat’s beards, common and native dandelions
What’s coming up beyond the walls and fences: Nebraska sedge; lots of unidentified seeds are up in the gravel with their first leaves; a few Russian thistles, pigweed, and ragweed are up along the road; someone was out Saturday with a string trimmer
What’s blooming in my yard: Miniature rose, yellow potentillas, cliff rose, tamarix cultivars, Asiatic and tiger lilies, daylily cultivars, Johnson blue geranium, Dutch clover, golden spur columbine, white spurge, sidalcea, ladybells, coral beard tongues, Maltese crosses, perennial four o’clock, blue flax, sea lavender, catmints, pink evening primrose, Saint John’s wort, tomatillo, Mexican hats, black-eyes Susans, chrysanthemum, chocolate flowers, plains coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, white yarrow
What bedding plants are blooming: Pansies, snapdragons; someone in the village has lisianthus in a pot
Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, western chickadees, geckoes, black and yellow swallowtail butterflies, hawk moth, lots of small bees, few bumble bees, grasshoppers, harvester ants tried a new hill closer to the house, sidewalk ants, earthworms; hear crickets
Tasks: Some unwanted plants only can be removed when the ground is thoroughly wet. Queen Anne’s lace and white sweet clover have straight, rubbery roots that will slide out when tugged. Things like dandelions break, no matter the soil condition, because the roots are less strong. I even managed to pull a 24" Siberian elm with relatively undeveloped roots. This week was also the time to pull wild lettuce, but mud clings to its roots that needs to be knocked off.
I spent time working under the flowering crab apple where garlic chives have come up between pavers that line the drainage ditch. These, too, are best removed when the ground is wet. They rise from bulbs, which have roots under them. I used a chisel to loosen them from the side. Like lettuce, I had to remove mud from the roots. Decent dirt is too valuable to toss in the trash.
Weekly update: The Forest Service, understandably, is a bit defensive about this year’s fires that were caused by controlled burns. The affects may not have been as dramatic as the Cerro Grande fire of 2000, which also was caused by a controlled burn. The lab closed, the city was evacuated, and the fire destroyed one neighborhood in Los Alamos. Those people lost everything. However, insurance companies set up temporary local offices, and the federal government made sure people had chances to file for compensation.
That one threatened the national laboratory, but the ones this year have been more serious to many who have land in the Sangre de Cristo. The Hermit’s Peak and Calf Canyon fires have destroyed ranch buildings and homes that are not insured. In many cases, people have week-day homes from which they commute to work, and ancestral holdings they visit on weekends to check on their cattle. Since the second are not considered to be primary residences, they may not qualify for compensation by FEMA. Regulations written for modern, urbanized life can’t deal with the destruction of a rural life style that has survived for centuries among families whose ancestors spoke Spanish. [1]
Publicity surrounding the Pecos fire led the Forest Service to stop doing controlled burns until more research is done. [2] This has left some lower level employees feeling helpless, because such tactics are all they’ve ever known. One person writing about the El Rito fire, which was caused by lightening, wanted to make sure people realized:
“Yesterday, during an extreme fire weather day, firefighters’ suppression efforts were aided to the north and east by previous fire scars and fuel treatments (thinning and other tactics) that had been completed by the Carson National Forest.” [3]
Spokesmen for the Santa Fé National Forest have been more defensive. They’ve learned, no doubt from telephone calls and media footage, to explain the causes of visible smoke. They also have been careful to distinguish between containing and extinguishing a fire. A few days after President Joe Biden visited the fire area, an unnamed spokesman warned:
“Although wetting rain has immediate moderating effects on light fuels, larger logs can take much longer to absorb moisture and will continue to produce smoke until a season ending event.” [4]
The Forest Service also defended why it uses airplane surveillance to judge when a fire is contained, since one part of the Sangre fire was caused by a winter burn that everyone assumed was out.
“With a total fire perimeter of approximately 680 miles, firefighters would have to ‘cold trail’ – i.e., carefully inspect and feel for heat with a bare hand – about 6.8 miles of perimeter to add just 1% to containment.” [5]
This is not an attack on individual firefighters or the individuals supervising close to 3,000 people [6] working on a 341,735-acre site. [7] Many have inhaled smoke for days, and probably will have health problems in the future that will not be recognized by insurance companies.
The fires are unprecedented in their extent. People will bring out their hobby horses to explain the root causes, but the mere fact the fire has been so massive may mean traditional explanations are as limited as the fire prevention tools that are being questioned.
The full extent of the Sangre fire became obvious Tuesday, June 28, when I was in town. Smoke from dowsed logs and steam from water falling on warm surfaces combined to create a cloud over the mountain range that stretched the full extent of the conflagration.
The clouds had the same shape as the earlier ones caused by flare-ups, but those were small areas. When those clouds grew longer, one understood it was the consequence of wind dispersing smoke.
These clouds, and they’ve reappeared every day about 11 am, are of a different order. They tend to lose form in the late afternoon and become generalized cloud banks. I don’t remember seeing these kinds of clouds after the Cerro Grande or other past fires in the Jémez. They simply are evidence of 341,735 acres cooling down all at once.
The clouds also have been appearing above the Jémez Springs and El Rito fires, but they are not so impressive, simply because the fires weren’t as large and the interiors didn’t get as hot. On Wednesday, even with the dampening effects of the rain, firefighters could only work in the valleys of the Sangre because “higher elevation areas remain inaccessible due to recent rains and soil conditions.” [8]
Of course, it’s smoke and steam from the higher elevations that are most visible in downtown Española, which is on the other side of the mountains. It’s when the fire first climbed the mountains that everyone knew something was going on, and the Forest Service had to explain what suddenly had become so visible.
Notes on photographs: Taken 1 July 2022 in my yard.
1. Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta).
2. Black-eyed Susans with their more-cultivated form marketed as gloriosa daisies.
End notes:
1. Associated Press. “Wildfire, Residents’ Fury Facing Biden on New Mexico Visit.” NBC News website, 11 June 2022.
2. Santa Fe National Forest Public Information Office. “Fire Investigators Determine Cause of Calf Canyon Fire.” NM Fires website, 27 May 2022.
3. Carson National Forest Public Information Office. “Midnight Fire Update June 15, 2022.” NM Fires website, 15 June 2022.
4. Santa Fe National Forest Public Information Office. “Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fires June 18, 2022, Daily Update.” NM Fires website, 18 June 2022.
5. Santa Fe National Forest Public Information Office. “Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fires June 23, 2022, Daily Update.” NM Fires website, 23 June 2022.
6. The peak reported personnel was 3,009. Santa Fe National Forest Public Information Office. “Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fires, May 27, 2022.” NM Fires website, 27 May 2022.
7. Current known acreage. Santa Fe National Forest Public Information Office. “Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fires June 29, 2022, Daily Update.” NM Fires website, 29 June 2022.
8. Santa Fe National Forest Public Information Office. “Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fires June 29, 2022, Daily Update.” NM Fires website, 29 June 2022.
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