Fire Season

[Catherine+twins]

I live on a mountain. A dry mountain. Between drought and bark beetle tree kill, there are more standing dead trees in the nearby forests than live ones. And the live ones have a lower percentage of moisture in them than kiln-dried lumber. We had one big storm in September (flood, we won't even go there now), instead of a rainy season from late June until September. After that storm, we had grass and weed growth. It's all tinder dry now.

We had a fire sweep through town in 2000 after a dry winter. We evacuated. We joked that it would never happen again because at that point we had a 48,000 acre fire break. Another fire got darned close in 2011, getting us on the northern side of town that hadn't burned in 2000. We evacuated. No homes were lost, but our local (club-owned) ski area suffered enough damage to their snow-making equipment that they have never opened for a full season since. They are broke and are trying to transfer their remaining assets (the land, lodge, and lifts, basically) to the county to be held as a park, with the club contracting to run the ski area if at all possible. Last summer there was another fire, but south and west of town on the other side of the mountain. We didn't evacuate, but things were tense for weeks.

We watch the network newscasts and have to listen to them rave on about "The winter that never ends!" Ours never started. We had a storm in November. One storm. One half inch of snow. It was gone, melted by noon. We had another in January, about the same amount. We had 0.67 of an inch of moisture this past weekend, combined snow and rain. Usually we would have cried about rain in March, as it would have damaged the snow on the ski hill. There is no snow on the ski hill. We celebrated what moisture there was and hope for more. We had a little mist this afternoon, but nothing measurable.

An article in the local paper on Sunday reported that during the winter of 2010-2011, our mountain had 50% of its usual snow pack. This year we may have 20%. We are unlikely to get any more at this point.

Fire season has started in the lower elevations. The Rio Grande bosque south of Albuquerque has already had a couple of outbreaks. (Bosque is the name for areas of gallery forest found along the riparian flood plains of stream and river banks in the southwestern United States. It derives its name from the Spanish word for woodlands. from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosque.) Fire season seems to start earlier every year.

And tonight there was another news story about "The winter that never ends."

Anyway, it's time to pack the boogie bags and make some plans for places to visit if we evacuate again.

Catherine

[MtnDon]

X2. We have recreational property at 8800 feet in the southern Jemez; south of Redondo Peak a few miles off in the forest. In a normal winter we get enough snow to prevent us driving the last 3 miles of forest road in to the cabin from mid December. We had an early snow that at the time led me to believe we were off to a good snow season. I was wrong. This year we have been able to drive in twice a month with no real issues. Snow that has fallen intermittently has melted except for north facing spots.

The only bright side is that much of the NF that surrounds us has been thinned over the past 3 - 4 years. We have thinned the trees on our land. But the situation will be precarious unless we get rains starting soon. We were a couple of miles from the ignition point of the 2011 fire, fortunately the winds were favorable for us. Last year we had a front row seat of the fire as it crossed west to east across Redondo. We hope and pray everyone in NM and the entire SW makes it through this year safely.

[Shadow Catcher]

And I could not hook up to the trailer if I wanted to, the coupler is buried under two feet of ice (snow soaked in rain and taken down to -13). Well if you need a place to go we have lots of water ...