South Fork, Salt fires add to a long history of fires near Ruidoso
RUIDOSO, N.M. (KRQE) – As crews battle the South Fork and Salt fires near Ruidoso, New Mexico, long-time residents know this isn’t the first time the community has been impacted. Some even say they just finished unpacking their go-bags from the Blue 2 fire when the latest fires hit.
KRQE News 13 spoke with Colin Hood, the owner of Alto Ski Shop. “I’ve owned it since October of 2021. And since then, I’ve gone through three wildfires,” Hood says. “We just got over the Blue 2 fire a few weeks ago.”
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A review of data from the U.S. Forest Service shows that the Ruidoso area has been hit by around 20 fires in the last century. Some, like the Little Bear fire in 2012, burned tens of thousands of acres of land and destroyed homes. Others ripped through the landscape, impacting the ability of soils to absorb water – essentially raising the risk of flash floods.
“So debris flow and flooding are the two big ones we see, but we also have erosion and sedimentation coming out of the burned areas, because the vegetation has been stripped off. Whenever it rains, the rain just falls directly on the soil, and raindrops can be pretty erosive and kick up a lot of soil,” says Steven Bassett the director of conservation at the Nature Conservancy. “Really what’s downstream is what makes these floods and debris flows damaging if there’s communities downstream, in this case, Ruidoso.”
Ruidoso’s location, near steep slopes along Cedar Creek and Rio Ruidoso, makes the community particularly vulnerable to flooding and post-fire impacts, Bassett says. “We can see 10 to 100 times the volume of water that would be normal before a fire,” Bassett says, “especially in the Ruidoso area, because it’s so prone to high-intensity monsoonal precipitation events and also has really closely connected headwaters to downstream communities.”
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Data from the U.S. Forest Service shows the footprints of fires near Ruidoso from the 1970s to 2016. It does not include recent fires like the Blue 2 fire. Ruidoso and neighboring community streets shown in pink.
The White Fire, in 2011, impacted two municipal water systems and wells near Ruidoso. That fire caused moderate-to-high severity burns on about 7,000 acres east of Ruidoso and filled some natural drainage areas with up to eight inches of ash, according to a post-fire report. Several homes were burned as well.
Fires have been happening for decades in the mountains around Ruidoso. In 1967, the Gavilan fire burned 3,000 acres near Ruidoso, and an Amarillo Globe-Times newspaper report from the time says around 600 men, along with five converted bomber airplanes worked to put out the fire, just several miles from the town.
“The forests in the Ruidoso area, the Sacramento Mountains, they’re very dry, very fire-prone,” Bassett says. “We’re in a very dry, very arid time of year, where we haven’t had precipitation, where the forests are drying out. That happens on an annual basis, and it’s getting worse with climate change. But the forests near Ruidoso are also prone to fire. Historically, they would have burned everywhere from 10 to 20 years – the fuels would build up, and then a lightning strike would cause a small fire that would spread. Every time that happened, it would leave lower fuel density for future fires to run into, and then they would stop.”
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Essentially, natural burns would remove fuel from the landscape and act to some extent as a limiting factor on future burns. Some of Ruidoso’s previous wildfire burns are likely to do just that – an area that has burned within the last decade or so is less likely to burn again – at least until plant coverage returns.
“We’re going to see big, high-intensity fires. But fortunately, burn scars do act as kind of mitigation for future fires, and we’ll see some of that limiting effect,” Bassett says. Crews can also work to reduce fuels on the landscape and thereby help limit forest fires.
But once the landscape builds up fuels again, the risk for a high-intensity burn increases. And that is inevitable.
“The forest down there evolved with fire, and they will burn. There’s nothing we can do about that. We just have to be prepared for the fire response to safely and also get ahead of it if we can,” Bassett says.
Despite the ever-present threat of fires, some residents say they are going to keep living in the picturesque mountain town.
“What’s not to love, other than the fires? It’s a great place, clean air, beautiful views, good hiking,” says Brenda Brandt, who was evacuated from her home due to the recent fires near Ruidoso. “We came from Florida, so we’ve been evacuated there.”
Brandt and Larry Darmer say they moved to Ruidoso after a hurricane impacted their home in Florida about two decades ago. Now, they say that as long as they have a home to return to, they will return home.
“We can do this. We’ve been evacuated before for different things,” Brandt says.
“We’re not thinking of leaving,” Darmer adds.
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