Fire Season Heating Up earlier than usual this year.
This winter produced the lowest snowpack in the New Mexico mountains since 1980, when agencies started keeping track of snowpack (near Hopewell Lake above Tierra Amarilla). Low snowpack means dry soils and low streams. Dry soils mean dry trees and high fire danger. The Santa Fe National Forest now only allows fires in “agency constructed” fire rings in formal campgrounds, starting today (Stage 1 Restrictions).
Forest Service fire fighters spend a great deal of their time patrolling and extinguishing abandoned campfires such as the one that started the 1996 Dome Fire in the Jemez Mountains that burned almost 17,000 acres and much of Bandelier National Monument in 1996. This week the Pecos District of the Santa Fe NF had 36 acres burned by an abandoned campfire.
Farther south and west in the Mount Taylor area, the Forest Service has had two fires this week that have reached about 1000 acres each. They don’t know yet how they started. Fire is a good thing in the forest when conditions are moderately wet. See above. The federal agencies in New Mexico and Colorado are allowing lightning started fires to burn if conditions are right to produce a low intensity burn. We won’t expect those conditions until later this summer if the monsoons come on schedule. Human caused fires (except prescribed fires) are always suppressed.
Be super careful if you are smoking marijuana outdoors and don’t park your car on dry grass as the hot muffler can set things ablaze. Its going to be a wild year with fire in New Mexico and Colorado until the rains start.
