The Invisible Made Visible; the Visible Made Invisible

Two weeks ago, on June 18, I was driving from Albuquerque when I saw smoke to the west. I was somewhere in the flat lands of San Felipe and San Domingo where the road is moving to the northeast to rise to Santa Fe.

Just before the bypass exit for Santa Fe the state had posted a sign warning visibility was poor between Raton and the Colorado border. The fire changed from side to side, was sometimes straight ahead as the road changed directions. Without a compass, one is never quite sure where one is pointed in this mountainous land.

Then as I was headed north the fire stayed to the east, until I passed it coming down the Tesuque hill into the valleys below Santa Fe.

When I got home, I checked the local forest service website, nmfireinfo.wordpress.com, and learned there had been a fire burning for some time near Raton, and that there was a new one in Pacheco Canyon northeast of Santa Fe.

The land there is rugged with few homes to protect. The fire continued to burn, but had little impact on our lives. I could always see the smoke when I was in some high place in Española and every day I could see it from the city limits to Pojoaque where it disappeared behind the ridges.

Sometimes I could see smoke, greyish white and diffuse, from my back porch.

It settled into something like the local tame erupting volcano, sometimes active, sometimes not. There but no menace. Only regretted for destroying recreation lands familiar to people I work with in Santa Fe.

Instead of obscuring the land, the smoke made it more visible. Unless it’s foggy, I see the landscape as three colors. Near are the uplifts of sand, clay and rock along the river. Behind them, nearly the same color, are harder rock. Behind them are the Jemez to the west and the Sangre de Cristo to the east, usually dark shadowy forms.




When the smoke drifted up from the Wallow fire in Arizona, it hid the mountains, then the ridges, then the bad lands. Everywhere people commented on losing the mountains, and would take pictures of what wasn’t there.

This fire was nearer. In the mornings I could see the smoke drifting through the valleys. Because the intervening ridges were different distances from the center of the fire, the density of the smoke varied. The detail that was normally hidden was revealed.

Top picture: The Pacheco Canyon fire, June 26 about 9:35am; taken a quarter mile from my house.

Middle picture: The Black Mesa, June 6 about 7:48pm; usually one can see the mountains behind Los Alamos, the ridges in front and the badlands. Visibility is down to about 2 miles.

The Year the Sun Turned Red

I’ve begun to see clouds differently.

In early June we started to get smoke from the fires in Arizona and, they said, Mexico.

At first it simply got hazy and the sun turned red. When we had dust storms when I lived in Abilene, Texas, the sun turned silver as the sky turned dark at noon.

I don’t know why the difference but suspect it’s in the particles in the air that are filtering the sun - that the dust storm is simply dirt, and all that’s picked up from the ground, while the smoke includes organic matter from burning trees as well as the chemicals used to fight the fire.

That’s when I began to question clouds. For they showed up every evening at about the same time.

I knew that no matter how regular the work of the fire fighters, we couldn’t be exactly the number of miles away from the fire that their smoke got to us at the right time to turn the sun red. I knew the fires were burning 24 hours a day, no matter how many hours the fire fighters were working.

I decided, based on no information, that the smoke was coming our way all day, but that it only became visible when the sun went down. This wasn’t just the disappearance of light, but a function of the sun itself.

During the day, its heat evaporated whatever moisture was in the smoke from the water used to fight it. When the water disappeared, the dust became lighter and fell to the earth. One day I came home to find an orange poppy petal splotched with white spots like someone had spilled bleach on it.

As the sun began dropping in the west, its heat intensity changed and more water remained in the smoke so it became visible.



The fire in Los Alamos began Sunday afternoon. The sunset was normal. Monday was the first day since Arizona filled the sky that the sun was red. The firefighters had begun work in earnest.




Top picture: Smoke from the Wallow fire in Arizona, looking west towards the Jemez, June 2 about 6:57 pm.

Middle picture: The first day of the Las Conchas fire near Los Alamos, before the firefighting began in earnest, June 26 about 8:14pm.

Bottom picture: Smoke from the Las Conchas fire near Los Alamos, looking at the Jemez a little more to the south, June 27 about 7:08pm.