'It was a livelihood.' Wildland firefighter's family ties to nature go back centuries

The relationship Eddie Misquez and his family sustain with nature spans centuries.

As a child, his grandma played with paper dolls beneath the hindquarters of an elk that hung from the ceiling of her grandparent’s home in Chiz, a village on the east side of the Black Range in Southern New Mexico. Days before, that elk had been grazing in the neighboring Gila National Forest.

“My grandpa would tell me stories about them packing into the Gila. They’d hunt for deer, they’d hunt for elk and fly fish,” Misquez said. “It wasn’t so much of a recreation thing. It was a livelihood. Their whole existence was based off the land.”

Misquez, 23, was born of an ancient mestizaje of Hispanic and Apache people whose ties to nature remained unbroken across the generations. The ruggedness of their homeland in and around the Gila helped spare it from the rapid urbanization that followed the railroads further south. For Misquez, hunting and butchering his own meat is as normal as going to the grocery store. News in his family travels faster around a campfire than it does on a smartphone.

But the landscape Misquez and his family cherish is now being transformed by climate change.

As a wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service, Misquez is an up-close witness to that transformation. Significant swaths of old growth forest have been incinerated by megafires, the most recent being this summer’s 325,000-acre Black Fire. Misquez’s lifelong intimacy with the natural world means he feels the loss and understands the consequences more acutely than the majority of Americans, who make their lives in urban spaces.

Early memories of growing up in the outdoors

“I've been in the outdoors since I could probably crawl on the ground,” Misquez said.

His memories begin around age 3 or 4: watching his maternal grandfather saddle horses and load leather packs full of camping and hunting supplies on the backs of mules; cleaning leaves and brush from earthen irrigation canals near the Rio Mimbres with his paternal grandfather. At home, Misquez would dive into stacks of National Geographic magazines. Family vacations were more often camping trips to hidden swimming holes than road trips to Disneyland.

Growing up, he heard stories of his father and uncle fighting wildfires for the U.S. Forest Service. The details in those stories struck Misquez: sleeping outdoors, slogging up mountains, adrenaline-fueled confrontations with flame. He worked his first summer as a Forest Service firefighter after starting college at Western New Mexico University in Silver City. This summer is his fifth season working for the Forest Service.

“Once I started fighting fire, I developed a love for the thrill and the adventure of it, but also the camaraderie and the crew and being outdoors,” Misquez said. “Firefighting is a way of expressing that passion for the outdoors.”

Misquez will start his final year at Western New Mexico University in Silver City this year and expects to graduate with a degree in Forest Wildlife Science. His future plans are undecided. He may stick with the Forest Service or pitch his photography skills to National Geographic magazine.

America's first designated wilderness area

The Gila is unique among America’s national forests. In 1924 it became the country’s first designated wilderness area — a span of 871 square miles where permanent human infrastructure, mechanized tools and motorized transportation are prohibited. The neighboring Aldo Leopold Wilderness area, named for a conservationist who advocated for the creation of wilderness areas, adds another 315 square miles of undeveloped terrain to the Gila.

The landscape had been “wilderness” long before Leopold came west in 1909 to work for the Forest Service. What’s known today as the Gila is part of the “Northern Stronghold” of the Apache or Nde people. Geronimo and Mangas Coloradas were among their leaders.  For generations, the Nde lived off the land in its natural state, constantly roaming, without establishing permanent settlements. Their word for the Gila was huuli which means “where things originate, or come from.”

Misquez has an intrinsic understanding of huuli.

“There’s a deeper relationship than just going on a trail and walking or hiking,” Misquez said. “In the modern age, we're losing a lot of wild places at a rapid rate. When you better the relationship with those wild places … you understand why those places are so important and that once we lose them, we start losing humanity as a whole. Essentially it’s all a big network in a web of ecology.”

Some creeks born in the Black Range of the Gila feed into the Rio Grande and recharge underground aquifers, both of which are important water sources for cities like El Paso and Las Cruces. Farmers growing pecans, onions and New Mexico’s famous chiles rely on this same water. Centuries-old conifers in the Gila clean the air, absorbing carbon and releasing oxygen. Forests are home to innumerable species large and small and bring relief to humans escaping the hot desert summers.

'Wildfire activity continues to get worse'

Fire has always been a healthy part of the forest ecosystem, serving as a form of clean up and regeneration. But more recent megafires, precipitated by decades of fire suppression and climate change, are taking an extra toll on forests. These fires are killing old-growth forests, including in the Gila, which typically survived fires in the past. Ecologists aren’t certain that those trees will grow back in a hotter and drier environment.

“I’ve definitely noticed … wildfire activity continues to get worse every year, the frequency of fires, the intensity of fires,” Misquez said. “We’re seeing a lot more heat, less rain, less snowpack in the mountains.”

Misquez remembers watching tears slide down his maternal grandfather’s cheeks in 2013, after the Silver Fire burned more than 138,00 acres in the southern half of the Black Range. The Gila is home to the second and third largest wildfires in state history.

Misquez recently began using his social media accounts to share the beauty of the Gila. His Instagram posts flaunt sunset-tinged clouds above a purple mountain ridge and close-ups of claret cups blooming on cacti. Other photos show wildfires in progress and the charred tree skeletons within a burn scar.

“If we don't turn things around now, we won't have a sustainable Earth in the future,” Misquez said. “So, bringing as many people to appreciate and understand the natural world is very crucial to the future.”

Mónica Ortiz Uribe can be reached at monica.ortiz@elpasotimes.com

This article draws from essays contained within the book "First and Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at 100," published by Torrey House Press in 2022.

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Wildland firefighter watches climate change transform Gila forest