Interesting Commutes Home

NM is on fire again. Its been dry as a dry thing this year and windy too, mercifully cool though so it has not been the tinderbox it has been in past years. However, combination of lightning and powerline fires have been spreading throughout the area. One fire, the Thompson Ridge Fire, is reasonably close to Los Alamos, probably not a worry for reaching our town, but it is at 7500 acres and threatening some local towns. It has made for some interesting commuting the last few days.

Fire started Friday, but started the weird light on Saturday night

During Monday's commute home in an early twilight due to intense smoke, my teeth felt like they were being coated in ash. I got rained on for a bit, then tiny balls of ash rained down on me for a while. Then the sky cleared just enough to allow me to enjoy a blood red circle of a sun on the rest of the ride home.

Missed the red sun, got the weird smoke over the mountains

Tuesday night's commute was accompanied by a light rain of charred pine needles, some blowing ash and a nice garter snake on the trail, sunning itself in the smoke apparently.

Smattering of charred pine needles covering pretty much everything

Tuesday night's mountain smoke

Anyhow, the Thompson Ridge fire is up to nearly 7500 acres, with its pal the Tres Lagunas fire over in the Pecos up at 9000 acres. Both a far cry from the two huge fires in NM over the last two years, but still big enough and close enough to make things genuinely suck for some people nearby and to worry the rest of us.

If you want to see what is going on the best site is really the NM fire info website has been providing spectacular coverage, images and maps. NMfireinfo.com.

Other resource and coverage dump:

LANL has a pretty good air quality data site here. Some other interesting local takes over at La Bikes: here and here. Local photog goes picnicing at the caldera when the wind blows the other way here. LA Daily Post is the easiest online accessable local Los Alamos news source, has had good coverage and photos. Outside Magazine (based just down the road in Santa Fe) posted this interesting little vid on the the Tres Lagunas Fire in Pecos:

Pecos On Fire from Outside Magazine on Vimeo.

and here is what the two local fires look like from nasa images

Update: Really nice post on the fire and the Jemez over at terry wallace's blog.

Major media ski sensation and other activities

I made it on the front page of the ABQ journal a few weeks ago with my allegedly excellent ski form:



In an article promoting the Chama Chile Classic:



Which I completely did not go to this year as I was so tired. Instead I rested after a very fun yet exhausting trip to knoxville for work. I crammed in two rides among working and other shenanigans. I need to go back without working as I did not see quite everyone I wanted to and working really interupted my having fun time.

Riding in the slop with Gary:


Excellent evidence of a good ride:




I have been skiing a fair bit since I have been back, perhaps races will happen again. The snow is in reasonably good shape and the trails have been well groomed. I did a great little back country ski trip from the ski hill parking lot over and down to the Caldera with my friend zach, more pics here scoping out a guided tour that Zach is organizing. Among the highlights were hopping fences in skis:


Snow biking has been excellent too. Even where the snow is aflame:


Finally the infink is now action little girl. It is good.

Bulldozing a trail

As many know there was a really big fire around Los Alamos last month, called the Las Conchas fire. Someday I will write about it, but not today. A fair bit of our trails were heavily fire damaged, including the nordic ski area, but today I will write about what it looks like when they bulldoze a trail to make a fireline. I ran up the Quemazon trail about 3/4 of the way up to the Pipeline Trail intersection. The fire crews ran a bulldozer more or less right up this trail to create a potential fire break for the western area and the rest of town. I probably have run or ridden this trail 2-3 times a month in the warm months since I moved to Los Alamos in 2003. It is a rocky technical climb that is fairly continuous with lots of tricky bits and some really fun slick rock esque tuff rock sections. There are still wagon wheel ruts in the tuff rock (enhanced by peds and bikes) from when this trail connected the grazing grounds of the caldera and the los alamos mesa.

Anyhow, technical soft rock trail does not really hold up to being bulldozed.


You can see some burnt trees from the 2000 cerro grande fire up in the top of the picture. The trail was a narrow doubletrack with technical bits here. Now it is pretty smooth. You can see the bulldozer track scars on the tuff rock.


Same deal as before. You can see what was individual rocks now sort of smooshed together where the tracks went. Most of the trail looks like this now. I am pretty impressed they could get a bulldozer up the steeper parts and through some of the technical section. Fortunately they went around the first technical section right near the bottom with the step in it:


But that is pretty much it for the tricky bits.

I got a pretty good look at the upper southern part of Los Alamos canyon. It either burnt heavily or was backburned. The slope is steep and completely denuded of vegetation. LA canyon goes right alongside of town. The major fire fighting effort to save town and my neighborhood was to keep the fire from spreading down the canyon. It worked. This trail bulldozing was a part of that.


The dead trees in the foreground are from the 2000 cerro grande fire which heavily damaged this trail. The south side of the canyon and the east side of the ski hill is visible and fireblackened.

Here are some pics and videos from pre-Las Conchas:










All the rocky lumpy bits are smoothish and the single track is now bulldozed width. The wagon ruts are dimished, but are still there, with overlaid bulldozer track scars. I think the few large remaining ponderosa pines next to the trail have been knocked down. There are some large bulldozed firebreak/clearings where the trail gets near LA canyon. There may have been one major reroute, but I can't really recognize much of the trail now. I will try to ride the trail this week to the top to see what it really looks like.

The good news:
1. The town and my neighborhood did not burn thanks to efforts of the fire crews, this bulldozing is part of that effort. Looks like some pretty intense burning was well within 3 miles as the crow flies of my house.
2. Most of the trail did not burn (the very top reportedly did, but I was too tired to run up there today)
3. Shoots from aspens, locust and scrub oaks are already coming back in the some of the bulldozed sections, so the trail will narrow up pretty quickly.
4. Trail work crews have already constructed waterbars on the steeper dirt parts of the trail to hopefully prevent major damage.
5. The huge aspen grove was widened a bit, but was not damaged too much. There may be shade yet on this trail. The aspens were a couple feet high when I first moved here. Now they are 10+ feet high.

Anyhow, kind of a bummer, but all told, it is still a good trail and I still have a house. So it is in the plus column in the big picture.

NM Fire info!

Rio Fire as seen from the santa fe relief route on 5/31/10


It is already a doozy of a fire season. There have been a number of relatively close fires that have covered the town with smoke and disquietude. In an effort to find out more information about the Rio Fire last month (~1000 acres near fenton lake, 30 miles or so away from here) I stumbled upon the NM fire info Blog and twitter feed.

http://nmfireinfo.wordpress.com/

Sweet! Good use of the new media to get timely info out without having to filter through the relatively abominable local news websites. My only criticism is they should have maps of where the fires are as the location descriptions are a bit hard to follow as they use somewhat odd baselines. But overall very comforting.


Tecolote or South Fork fire (need that map, read a bit more, it is south fork, 12000 acres and counting), seen from town, 6-18-10


Los Alamos has had a long history of damaging wildfires. Having almost lost the entire town and lab to fire in the early years and then again most recently with the catastrophic Cerro Grande Fire just over a decade ago. For a first person account go here. Anyhow, it is nice to be able to get some quick info as to where and how bad the fires are without relying on rumor and crappy news stories.

Remember, put out your camp fires completely. Sheesh.