Missteps fanned the flames of historic blaze

Apr. 22—GALLINAS — On a wooded hilltop in Northern New Mexico's mountainous backcountry, a gentle breeze blew through the pine trees and temperatures were mild as U.S. Forest Service fire crews prepared to light a prescribed burn.

On this clear morning of April 6, 2022, the weather seemed perfect for the task, despite strong gusts and dry conditions spurring red flag warnings for days in surrounding areas, including the nearby village of Gallinas. Across the way, Hermit's Peak towered majestically above tree-covered hills in the Santa Fe National Forest. Mountains sprawled across the horizon, offering a serene panorama of the Sangre de Cristos to anyone who looked.

But most of the Forest Service crew members' eyes were on the plume of smoke billowing gently from a test fire on a rocky knob. Some team members seared black lines on the ground to border the upcoming prescribed fire, and at 12:30 p.m., the burn boss gave the go-ahead to ignite it.

Nate Stafford, who owns El Porvenir Christian Camp south of Hermit's Peak, spotted smoke drifting from a hilltop near the camp.

"I was super surprised," he said in a recent interview. He didn't feel safe lighting campfires, so he couldn't imagine the Forest Service carrying out a prescribed burn.

The crew continued torching the area — long planned for a burn to clear out excess vegetation, smaller trees and other flammable debris — unaware of the part they would play in a wind-driven, runaway blaze that would become the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, the largest wildfire in the state's history. The relentless inferno, which devoured 341,000 acres and destroyed roughly 500 homes, disrupted communities across three counties and inflicted untold damage on ecosystems and watersheds.

A year later, the full extent of the damage is still being assessed, with many people struggling to recover.

El Porvenir Christian Camp was ground zero for the fire and heavily damaged.

The Forest Service has refused to identify any of the crew members involved in the ill-fated Gallinas-Las Dispensas prescribed burn — as it was briefly known before it raged out of control amid heavy winds on the day it was ignited — saying the workers have been threatened with violence.

A crew leader contacted by The New Mexican declined to be interviewed.

A Forest Service report released last year recaps the events leading to the wildfire and points out the agency's mistakes on the day of the burn, missteps that have been lambasted as avoidable and, in some instances, inexcusable by state and congressional leaders.

Stafford, too, can recount the fire's progression before he was forced to evacuate from the camp.

The fire burned a dozen of the camp's cabins, a gazebo, a workshop, equipment, a truck container and the forested area around the recreation sites, he said. The fire also destroyed a bridge necessary for the camp to operate, and the federal government will require at least another year to replace it.

The timing couldn't have been worse, Stafford said, because El Porvenir had a full array of activities planned through the summer and early fall for the first time since before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

"And we didn't get to do any of it," he said.

Mistakes and misfortune

Stafford and Seth Gabriel, the camp's activities manager, talked about the blaze on a recent day as they rode up a steep slope in a noisy utility terrain vehicle.

They parked the vehicle on a hillside just a short, steep hike away from the spot where the catastrophic fire began.

Stafford said he spoke with a burn crew supervisor ahead of the fire and learned a higher-up had given the go-ahead to conduct the prescribed burn, though it wasn't an ironclad order because conditions could turn unfavorable.

"He told us, 'We've been given the green light when we get a window of good weather,' " Stafford said. "The impression I got from the conversation was it would actually be unlikely that they'd do it."

He got a bad feeling when he saw the smoke, he said, and canceled a trip to attend a board meeting so he could watch over the camp.

The Forest Service report describes several teams scattered around a fairly wide area, including downslope. A prison inmate crew was unable to participate as planned, leaving the team shorthanded.

Two fire engines were on hand — one parked in the El Porvenir Campground and the other in a saddle not far from where one of the units was working.

Everything went as planned in the first hours of the burn, with a mild wind averaging 3 mph. A few spot fires flared up that crews quickly put out.

But by midafternoon, the wind was averaging 6 mph and gusting up to 15 mph, with more spot fires igniting. At a little after 4 p.m., crews were fighting multiple fires scattered through the area — some with flames at eye level — while a larger fire 300 feet above the others was growing.

By 4:15 p.m., the spot fires were continuing to multiply, with some merging into bigger blazes. Meanwhile, the winds had turned erratic and were blowing in different directions, whipping up the flames even more.

Crews struggled to keep up with the fires, and the burn boss ordered them back to the vehicles to regroup.

By 4:30 p.m., a fire was spreading north toward Hermit's Peak and the Pecos Wilderness.

A little before 5 p.m., forest officials declared the planned burn a wildfire and named it the Hermits Peak Fire.

Stafford, standing on the prescribed burn site, turned toward a rocky slope and said the flames had spread that direction. The fire also made it to Hermit's Peak, he said.

A few days after the fire started, he recalled the wind had finally eased enough for an air crew to drop retardant on the rocks, though it remained a stubborn foe that refused to be extinguished.

Still, the Hermits Peak Fire never got bad enough to force anyone to evacuate, Stafford said.

"We were hanging out," Gabriel said. "It was spreading pretty slow."

Both men noted many of the trees on this hill, where the wildfire started, were lightly charred or untouched, evidence that crews were able to combat it.

Within two weeks, crews had the Hermits Peak Fire close to contained.

Then the Calf Canyon Fire struck.

It had started nearby a few days after the prescribed burn sparked the Hermits Peak Fire. It was ignited by a "sleeper fire" that had smoldered all winter under snowpack following a Forest Service slash-pile burn.

Stafford said he had overheard at a briefing during the first week of the Hermits Peak Fire a plane had detected a burning slash pile in Calf Canyon. A crew was sent to extinguish it, he said, but apparently it ignited again.

Officials reported the second ignition around April 19, in a week when crews were bracing for some of the fiercest winds they had battled — with gusts of 60 to 80 mph in the forecast for the fire zone.

Those gale-force winds propelled the Calf Canyon Fire from the Pecos Wilderness over a ridge on the west side of Hermit's Peak, Stafford said.

Stoked by the unprecedented winds, the two blazes combined April 22.

Stafford motioned to Hermit's Peak's craggy face, then pivoted and swung his arm left to illustrate how the fire swiftly spread across a huge expanse toward Las Vegas, N.M. Part of the fire ran up and over Barillas Peak, he said, pointing to the distant mesa.

The fire threatened the United World College USA campus in Montezuma, west of Las Vegas. Fire crews battled to keep it at bay.

"That night was the night you could just see flames from town," Stafford said.

Two days after the mammoth fire formed, he and his wife evacuated and lived in a recreational vehicle for six months.

The Calf Canyon Fire wasn't the first sleeper fire to ignite in the canyon, Stafford said, adding another one started in that area a few years ago.

"What would it have been like if the Calf Canyon Fire never started?" he wondered. "That's a good question."

Fire ends, new threats emerge

The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire became a juggernaut.

Driven by persistent late-spring winds, it raged for almost two months and at times seemed unstoppable. It scorched mountain communities, hillsides and forests in San Miguel, Mora and Taos counties, burning a 534-square-mile area.

Federal agencies deployed 3,000 personnel at the peak of the battle.

By mid-May, an estimated 26,000 people had evacuated, some living in temporary shelters and many others permanently displaced.

As summer approached and warmer temperatures loomed, fire managers grew worried the fire would continue to wreak havoc for months, straining personnel who would be needed elsewhere as fire season got underway in other parts of the country.

The only hope of vanquishing this fiery monster was a healthy monsoon to douse the flames and wet the landscape, but those seasonal storms don't typically arrive until well into July.

Then the rains came early.

With the help of Mother Nature, crews subdued the fire by late June, and in August it was officially contained.

But the collective sigh of relief was short-lived as the next tribulation emerged: The monsoons that helped quell the wildfire were now flooding the blackened hills bereft of trees, washing ashy sediment, debris and other contaminants into rivers, streams and acequias.

Las Vegas became a stark example of these after-effects.

The ash and debris polluting the Gallinas River caused a severe drinking water shortage in the city because its treatment plant isn't equipped to handle this level of contamination. The city is installing supplemental treatment systems as a stopgap while it pursues funds to overhaul its plant, which could cost $100 million.

New Mexico's congressional delegation obtained $4.5 billion in federal funds for fire victims. The money was approved not long after President Joe Biden made a stop in Santa Fe in June 2022, vowing his administration would do everything possible to help New Mexico recover.

But so far, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is in charge of dispensing the money, has been slow getting it to affected residents.

It's yet another sign that recovering from such wide-scale devastation will be long and arduous.

At the same time, the Forest Service is undergoing what it says is soul-searching as it looks to revamp its prescribed burn methods to avoid future catastrophic fires. The agency's chief, who ordered a review of how the Las Dispensas planned burn went amiss, also halted all prescribed fires until policies were revised to consider how a changing climate, insufficient personnel and flawed data collection were increasing the risk of runaway blazes.

Much of the report on Las Dispensas zeroes in on procedural missteps, such as managers using outdated information, incomplete modeling and narrow weather data.

But it points out that prescribed burns have been given lower priority, with no full-time crews formed for this task.

In the report's foreword, agency Chief Randy Moore laments the fire's devastation and calls for managers to better understand how climate change will intensify droughts, make the landscape more fire-prone and cause erratic weather patterns.

"I cannot overstate how heartbreaking these impacts are on communities and individuals," Moore wrote. "We must learn from this event and ensure our decision-making processes, tools and procedures reflect these changed conditions."