On The Cerro Grande Fire 20 Years Later: A Reflection

Submitted by Carol A. Clark
on May 11, 2020
- 10:07 am

Vanessa and her grandfather Pascual Chavez of Los Alamos during the Cerro Grande Fire evacuation in 2000 at Cities of Gold Casino. Courtesy photo

By VANESSA (CHAVEZ) FEAGIN
Los Alamos

In 2001, when I was a sixth grader at Mountain Elementary, my classmates and I spent a semester hiking our way up the Quemazon Trail to plant Ponderosa Pines or do trail maintenance.

We were doing this to try and help rebuild the forest that had been burned by the Cerro Grande Fire the year before. At the time, I didn’t understand what a large impact those trips would have on me personally or for the community in which I grew up and would eventually return to as an adult.

What I did understand was that the tools we carried were heavy, the walk was long and tiring, but it was pretty cool because on those days it meant I didn’t have to be stuck inside a classroom. We planted those seedlings, I finished out my 6th grade year, and rarely gave those trees or their impact another thought. Like most others, I got used to life after the fire.

In 2019, my thoughts returned to Quemazon Trail and those trees after a brief social media conversation with Megan Rains and Craig Martin (former county open space specialist). That October, I returned but this time with 75 seventh graders, and an amazing group of adults to collect data on the very same trees I helped plant almost two decades prior.

At the end of a mostly productive day, Craig spoke to the students about how important the work that they were doing was for the community. He told them that their data would not only produce some numbers that would be used for a school project, but that it would also provide an illustration of how much regrowth our precious mountains had experienced over the last 20 years. He told them that this was just a glimpse at the type of regrowth our landscape would experience for the next 20 years and the 20 years after that. It would be something that future generations look at the way he and so many others did before the fire.

Craig told them that by helping with this project they were helping to rebuild our community. I don’t know how many of them were still really listening by this time (seventh graders have a pretty short attention span) but as someone who was evacuated from her home during the Cerro Grande Fire and returned to see her hometown mostly ashes, these words meant so much to me. I’m sure the kids didn’t think twice about his speech that day – much like I didn’t when he probably gave a similar one to my class 18 years earlier – but I realize now how much that experience helped shape who I am today.

I went for a hike to the Natural Arch the other week and sat underneath it with my husband. We looked toward the mountains and noticed all the new ponderosa and aspen growing tall and strong below us. My heart felt so much joy at seeing our landscape from that perspective: green and new and evolving.

As humans, we aren’t always ready or comfortable with change, but Mother Earth – she is always ready. She takes change head on and then adapts however she sees fit, sometimes with the help from a few sixth and seventh graders. Her resilience is a lesson, and I am thankful to her for it.