10-05-2025
25 years later: Efforts continue to restore the forest after devastating fire in Los Alamos
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (KRQE) – Decades after a prescribed burn ripped through the Los Alamos mountainside, reshaping the landscape for generations, the forest has struggled to recover. While it will take decades, a conservationist group is helping to restore the area faster.
25 years later: A look back at the Cerro Grande Fire
Twenty-five years after it was put out, the effect of the Cerro Grande Fire remains. 'Some of the largest burned areas were two miles wide and seven miles long in the middle of those high-severity burn patches, the nearest tree was a mile away,' said Steven Bassett, Director of Conservancy Programs, Nature Conservancy of New Mexico.
In May 2000, an official spoke on the damage. 'In some cases, it's burned so hot that the ash is a foot deep or more, and in some places, the soil is sterilized and may even look like glass beads where the atomic bomb was first exploded.'
About 48,000 acres burned in the mountains around Los Alamos. 'The fires not only killed the trees, but they also burned the soil and the seeds that were in the soil so the forest had a tough time recuperating and still has a tough time recuperating,' said Basset.
While replanting can happen without human intervention, the destructive Cerro Grande Fire burned so hot that a natural process would take decades. 'Even with wind and water, and animals helping move those seeds into the burned area, it can take a very long time to see forest recovery, and then it's a very narrow band of the burned area close to that seed source,' said Basset.
So, how do you replant a massive forest after a devastating fire? The Nature Conservancy has spent years replanting tens of thousands of seedlings in the Cerro Grande burn scar. 'The practices that are standard elsewhere don't really work here. We have extremely high seedling mortality when we're planting trees, and germination of seeds that are planted as well are low,' said Bassett.
The state and the U.S. Forest Service are also ramping up seedling production for New Mexico with an expanded reforestation center in Mora, expected to eventually produce 5,000,000 seedlings per year. 'We're on the cutting edge of reforestation. We have experienced bad fires and we're also working together to build back from them… they're… a fact of life here in New Mexico and we have to do our best to prepare for them and respond to them when they happen,' said Bassett.
To learn more about the Nature Conservancy and its projects in New Mexico, click this link.
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