In a Santa Fe Walmart, through aisles flooded by fluorescent light, I hunt down 5-gallon plastic jugs, finally finding them, illogically, halfway across the store from the water-filling station. I shove my shopping cart with the sticky wheel alongside the filling station, where water trickles from a jammed spigot so slowly it takes 30 minutes to fill eight jugs. Chilled and agitated by the store’s icy air conditioning, I wonder if there might be a better way.
When the Rio Gallinas flooded this June, a deluge of ash and chemicals used in fire retardants ran down Hermit’s Peak into the Rio Gallinas watershed, causing high turbidity in the drinking water in Las Vegas, New Mexico. I grew up in Las Vegas, my kids were born there, and my dad and my 21-year-old, Alex, currently live there. After the flooding, the city’s water treatment plant couldn’t keep up with demand. Undrinkable water has been common since the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire swept through Las Vegas in 2022. After the flood, the city distributed water at the Mike Marr Gymnasium at Robertson High School, first in big jugs, and then later in large cases of 8-ounce plastic bottles. Neither my dad nor Alex can drive. My dad is blind, and Alex just hasn’t learned yet. The town is small, but carrying a large amount of water on foot is challenging. So, one weekend in early July, I drive across Santa Fe to load up on water for them both. It costs $70 for the jugs and water and takes me three hours to deliver enough to last them a couple of weeks.
Despite having a temporary water treatment system in place, Las Vegas has been cited 27 times for polluted drinking water by the New Mexico Environment Department since the fire. A memorandum of agreement approved in August by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Claims Office, and the city of Las Vegas estimates that a permanent water treatment system will be complete in six years. Meanwhile, water delivery feels like the least I can do. I wasn’t in Las Vegas during the fire; I’m not dealing with the health consequences of smoke inhalation; and I’m not among those still fighting with FEMA two years later to rebuild their homes and livelihoods. Las Vegas, and the rural communities around it, are in a predominantly Hispano region, with high poverty rates and deep cultural connections to the land. The fire — the largest in New Mexico’s history — burned 341,725 acres, and it’s been a significant blow to the remote agricultural communities affected by it and an already precarious way of life. Still, the sense of trauma and grief is shared by all who call San Miguel and Mora counties home. The land is a part of us, and our memories cannot be untangled from the places that make us who we are.
The fire — the largest in New Mexico’s history — burned 341,725 acres, and it’s been a significant blow to the remote agricultural communities affected by it and an already precarious way of life.
NEARING LAS VEGAS with my jugs of water, I gaze at the imposing rocky profile of Hermit’s Peak in the distance. The mountain is named for the Italian monk Giovanni Maria de Agostini, who lived in a cave near the top of the peak for three years in the 1860s. Though it seems impossible, legend has it that El Solitario, as he became known, walked more than 50 miles from the cave to Las Vegas and back for Mass each Sunday.
Rising above 10,000 feet, Hermit’s Peak is part of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southern sub-range of the Rockies. I was 11 and my sister, Katie, was 9 when we first hiked up it. My mom drove us up the hairpin turns from where Las Vegas sits in the foothills, up and up and up past smashed guardrails and dense trees, until we emerged into the tiny villages that dotted the high mountain meadows. Finally, we reached the tiny campground in El Porvenir, uncurled ourselves from the car and began our trek. The hike was gentle at first, but when we reached the switchbacks, it became so rocky and steep that Katie sat down and refused to take another step. I glowered at her as she accepted our parents’ $5 bribe to keep going.
In seventh grade, I backpacked up the peak with classmates and our science teacher. As a P.E.-hating bookworm, I relished my athletic classmates’ complaints and their amazement at my hiking ability. We slept under the stars on the far side of the peak, waking to cows grazing around us before we began the endless stream crossings down the Beaver Creek Trail. Another time, at age 16, I cajoled my friend Rowyn into hiking up with me. She wanted to turn back many times, but at every switchback turn, I promised it wasn’t much farther. I’d also hiked it with my ex-husband when Alex was a baby. In my memory, Alex cooed when we reached the well near the top, where El Solitario drew water when he lived on the mountain. I hiked the peak again, post-divorce, with a friend and colleague to whom I had confided that I was queer. After passing the hermit’s well, we walked through the aspens on mercifully gentler terrain, finally arriving at the top of the peak, where we looked out over the rocky outcropping to the undulating dense blanket of evergreens and the Great Plains rippling out to the horizon.
WHEN THE HERMIT’S PEAK and Calf Canyon Fires started as two distinct fires — and before they merged into one — I was the interim director of university relations at New Mexico Highlands University, my alma mater, and was charged with communications for the school’s Incident Command team. For months, the incident commander called me at all hours. There were relentless Zoom meetings, complicated evacuation planning and press releases I rigorously drafted. The essential messages in the press releases were “don’t panic,” “only go when we say go” and “when we say go, do NOT stay behind.” We offered information about what to do if you needed help evacuating, numbers to call for help hauling livestock, details about places to find a warm meal and shelter, links to resources and counseling, and reminders that FEMA officials would be here eventually to help. The calls never stopped, the information changed hourly, and the helicopters were grounded because the wind, like everything else, was unprecedented. The fire, aided by the wind, raced north, and ash blanketed houses. I was working from home in Santa Fe, choking back tears each night as I learned how much farther the fire had spread, how much had been lost, how much of my home was gone.
At 6 p.m. every night of the 148-day fire, I opened the Santa Fe National Forest Facebook page to watch the updates. It had become a digital communal space, where the people affected by the fire gathered. We talked in the comment section, asking questions, expressing thanks for the updates, and demanding answers from the Forest Service, which had started both fires to begin with. Incident meteorologist Bladen Breitreiter was often a part of these updates. Cool and tattooed, they stood in front of a giant fire map that grew daily. On one memorable evening, Breitreiter shared what they called “atmospheric nacho theory” — a lighthearted way to explain the air currents and the effect they had on the fire. Air currents and jet streams became layers of salsa and sour cream. Instead of fire, we momentarily saw food. Breitreiter’s ability to reach us through our fear and tension earned them a growing fan club as we waited for the wind to stop and for the hotshots to have a fighting chance at containing the fire.
The land is a part of us, and our memories cannot be untangled from the places that make us who we are.
A YEAR AFTER THE FIRES stopped burning, in October 2023, I saw a call for volunteers to help the Hermit’s Peak Watershed Alliance plant trees in the burn scar in Rociada, so I asked Alex to join me and signed us both up.
Just off state route 518 in Sapello, we passed Cyn and Amanda’s house; seeing how close the fire had come to their cabin was unsettling. As I drove farther, black trees carpeted entire mountainsides. I remembered all the times I had driven to Rociada previously — when my family visited friends, when my ex-husband had a job watering the Pendaries golf course, when my then-girlfriend and I backpacked into the Pecos Wilderness from the Rociada #250 trailhead. The trail was incinerated by the fire. I thought, too, of Makani, Jane and Randy, whose house was among the first to burn. My mom, a midwife, had delivered Makani, and I later babysat her. Our families ate meals together in that house. Makani posted photos on Facebook soon after the house burned while the fire raged northward. In the wreckage of her childhood home, she documented what remained: a doll’s head, a beer stein depicting hot air balloons, a metal candle holder featuring three wiry figures, dancing.
When we arrived at the spot where the road ends abruptly in giant potholes that give way to wilderness, we parked alongside the other vehicles. Alex and I each received tree-planting bags with two deep pockets like panniers that hung to the backs of our knees. We quickly filled the bags with saplings of western white pine, Douglas fir, ponderosa and mountain mahogany. The crew had been on the mountainside all morning and had already planted hundreds of trees. Alex and I each took 50 — 25 on each side. I was surprised by how heavy the water-logged saplings were. I grabbed a bright orange steel planting bar and, with the awkward heft of the bags and the bar, waddled as quickly as I could across the stream and up the mountain.
We put the triangular tips of our planting bars into the ground. The earth was packed so hard that digging deep enough took muscle I wasn’t sure I had. With repeated taps, I slowly got my blade into the ground. When I achieved the right depth, I removed the bar and carefully inserted the sapling, trying not to crush its delicate roots. I closed the hole around the plant and tamped the earth around its base. Then I moved 20 feet to begin the process again.
When it took me an hour to plant just eight trees, I realized that taking 50 had been overly ambitious. I looked east across the mountainside, where charcoaled trees seemed to stretch out forever. Across the stream to the north, another mountainside appeared as an endless ripple of black trees. Even if I could plant faster, and even with 100 people out here planting every day, the task felt insurmountable. Who are we, I wondered, to pretend we can ever repair the harm we’ve caused?
In this case, the fires were caused by prescribed burns and spread quickly in what New Mexicans know is the windiest season. In fact, the dreaded words “historic” and “unprecedented” were used to describe the wind in the spring of 2022 — which is to say, the Forest Service fucked up very specifically. Setting the stage were decades of settler-
colonizer fire suppression practices, along with the rapid warming of the planet, creating a tinderbox of trees and undergrowth dead or brittle from disease, bark beetles, not enough water and too much heat.
Who are we, I wondered, to pretend we can ever repair the harm we’ve caused?
The saplings were delicate and bright. They offered a sense of possibility — of curbing erosion, repopulating an ecosystem and protecting a watershed. But they were so few, given the nearly 62 million trees the fire burned. It was a number too big for me to grasp. I felt small on the mountainside, and less useful than the invasive mullein flaunting its fuzzy leaves all around me. The mullein was at least helping to curb erosion, even as it competed with native plants. As we walked back to our cars, I asked the crew leader, who was also the group’s executive director, how many of the 26 saplings I’d managed to plant might make it. She said partner organizations do some monitoring of the seedlings but that the Hermit’s Peak Watershed Alliance lacked the resources to track survival rate. She and her colleagues simply do the work and hope it sticks.
It hurts to know that Alex and my 18-year-old, Talia, will never get to see the rippling green tapestry spreading out from the base of Hermit’s Peak. They may never know a time when clean drinking water is not scarce or in jeopardy. I will the saplings we planted to take root, to grow against the odds, to deliver our lifeblood to us across this land that sustains us and that we, in turn, must help sustain.
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This article appeared in the December 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Burned.”
