The Clarity of Fire

Sunday, June 26, I walked southwest into an arroyo between my house and the Black Mesa. The heat had built up so much in the past week, when the thermometer read 93 at 6pm, that the heat from the clay and sand soil burned through my shoes. For the first time it was uncomfortable to walk on what had become shallow dunes.

I also walked a quarter mile down the road to the northeast where the Pacheco Canyon fire was visible. There’s a break in the ridges of clay and gravel, and it looks like a flood might once have broken through. The area where I was standing is a flat, grassy prickly pear cactus field that edges another arroyo.

It was a normal fire morning.

The winds increased about noon. A few weeks ago I bought a portable wind gauge to learn exactly how severe they were when the locust and tamarix began to twist. Whatever it was designed for, it doesn’t work in New Mexico. I have no idea how severe they were, only that they’ve been much worse this month.

Around two I took a nap. When I awoke, the light coming through the east window of my bedroom had changed. The grass, usually brown, was silver.



I grabbed my camera to try to photograph the effects of light. When I couldn’t see enough grass from my back porch, I started to walk around the house.

That’s when I saw the huge mushroom cloud behind the Black Mesa. It looked like everyone’s worst fears of what could come from Los Alamos.

The New Mexico fire website, nmfireinfo.wordpress.com, said a fire had broken out behind the lab in the Bandelier National Forest. It didn’t have to tell me it was the most powerful fire we’ve seen - and in the 20 years I’ve lived here, they have been three large fires around Bandelier: the Dome Fire of 1996, the Cerro Grande fire of 2000, and this one. There was also one, the La Mesa, in 1977.

I talked to someone yesterday who lives in Los Alamos. He said he when we went into the local hardware store Sunday he saw the first wisps of smoke. When he came out, about 15 minutes later, the fire had grown huge.

At the time officials said the fire was 3,000 acres. When I went to bed they said 6,000 to 9,000 acres. It took the Pacheco Canyon fire a week to reach that size.

When I looked the next morning, they said it was 43,000 acres, much of it to the south and east of the hot spots near Las Conchas. It had taken the Cerro Grande fire two weeks to cover that much land.

One difference was weather. The Cerro Grande fire resulted from a controlled burn begun on May 4, in the spring of a relatively normal year, when the winds are high. This is early summer in the year of a severe drought when high winds have persisted longer than usual.

The other difference was that this fire was more visible than the Cerro Grande. The plume grew, fading to grey in the east where it mixed with whatever smoke was rising from Pacheco Canyon. To the west the edge was gilded by the sun. To the north, the sky was still clear.

When the sun went down, spots of orange became visible. They sometimes merged into a line, sometimes disappeared. Eventually the red warning lights around Los Alamos appeared below and in front of the ridge line of fire.

From where I stood on my back porch I didn’t know if I was actually seeing the fire, or just its reflection in the clouds.


On the one hand there was a sense of great clarity. For much of the day, the smoke had some form. In the night, it was reduced to a thin line of orange. Everything was visible, even if it was only effects of light and smoke I was seeing.

On the other hand there was a feeling no one yet knows what’s going on - that clarity will come in the morning after they’ve made their reconnaissance flights. Then the freefall will be stabilized.

But for now, any human in the area knew there was a fire and had a fairly good idea where it was. The rest was mystery.

Top picture: Las Conchas fire over the Black Mesa, June 26, around 4:46pm.

Middle picture: View to the east, June 26, around 4:43pm.

Bottom picture: Las Conchas fire through the lilacs, June 26, around 8:09pm.