Category: Places

Five years after the horrific Cerro Grande fire, the people of Los Alamos, and some of their surroundings, have slowly returned to life

By Kate Nash
Tribune Reporter

LOS ALAMOS – Less than a week after a runaway forest fire shredded their hilltop home, Sue and Stan Bodenstein stood in an Albuquerque Wal-Mart parking lot with a list of things they would need to start restocking their lives.

“I turned to Stan and hugged him and said, ‘After 32 years of marriage, we’re starting from scratch,’ because the first thing on the list was underwear,” said Sue Bodenstein, a retired travel agent.

As the couple began to rebuild their world with material goods, they also needed a supply of intangibles, like patience and humor — qualities they would need while waiting for their house on Arizona Street to again be a home.

The Bodensteins and more than 200 other families whose lives were scorched by the Cerro Grande Fire five years ago this week were about to learn that getting back to normal involved more than merely reconstructing their physical location.

A big part of building anew after losing everything has meant reclaiming a positive attitude amid the shock.

“We’ve got a nice house now,” Stan Bodenstein said. “We had a nice house before. It wasn’t easy from there to here. But the negative things we’ve just kind of shoved off to the side.”

On May 10, 2000, the most expensive fire in the Southwest’s history roared into this town, gulped down homes, incinerated wildlife habitat and chewed holes through parts of Los Alamos County’s utilities system.

It burned almost 8,000 acres of property owned by Los Alamos National Laboratory for a time threatening the birthplace of the atomic bomb.

The Cerro Grande also ate more than 47,000 acres of ponderosa pine, aspen and oak, and it displaced hundreds of people for months.

But the unbelievably hot flames also brought together the people of Los Alamos in a way some say nothing else could have.

“We are a lot closer because of everything that happened,” Sue Bodenstein said. “Where you had superficial friendships, you’ve gotten to know people a lot better.”

Today, half a decade since New Mexico’s smallest county became the site of the state’s biggest disaster, most houses on Arizona Street once the stark epitome of what an unleashed inferno can do to serene, picturesque neighborhood have been rebuilt.

Others are in various stages of building. Modern adobe and brick mark progress along streets that are slippery with mud because underground utilities are still being fixed.

But the blackened, brittle pine trees that loom from the ridge along the street are reminders of the lessons learned.

***

Above the rebuilding, above Arizona and Yucca streets, the once-majestic slopes of Los Alamos are charred and stripped, looking like a bomb blew through instead of a fire.

That sight makes Los Alamos County’s fire chief, Douglas MacDonald, sick.

“When I look at the mountain, I see the burned hill and I get ill every day,” he said. “I look at the issues our community has suffered every day, the people leaving, the streets torn up.”

MacDonald, who oversees a department of 117 firefighters, said the Cerro Grande Fire left a mixed bag of emotions and results in its wake.

On one hand, his department was able to buy a new fleet.

“(But) I don’t think the good is even close to the bad,” he said. “I don’t think having a new house outweighs all that.”

Apart from residents who have seen their neighborhoods upended, MacDonald lamented the fact that the Los Alamos reservoir, a popular recreation area for hiking and fishing, remains closed to the public, because it is unstable.

“We lost a pristine family reservoir that doesn’t look like it’s going to open for four or five years,” he said.

As the fire subsided and residents were able to see its destruction, many lashed out at the National Park Service for allowing a controlled burn on a windy May day. They said they were frustrated by forest management policies that let the woods grow into perfect fuel for the fire. To this day, many say it was clear the forests were too thick; that they would burn; that no one did anything about it.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt visited Santa Fe and accepted government responsibility for the fire. And there has been a cost: The Federal Emergency Management Agency has paid more than $546 million in claims to individuals, businesses and government agencies through the end of April. Four claim cases are pending, said FEMA spokesman David Passey.

FEMA spent $23 million on emergency services, replacing infrastructure and putting residents up in temporary housing. Federal officials reconsidered the Wildland Fire Management Policy and urged residents to put a “defensible space” between their new homes and the forest, an area called the “urban-wildland interface.”

The Bodensteins, however, were familiar with those terms and had a xeriscaped lawn with gravel, hoping to ward off flames. The Cerro Grande was too hot, too big, too fast.

And the town the residents Los Alamos evacuated that day was nothing like the place to which they would return.

***

Less than a mile from the Bodensteins, Dwey Molleur’s recollection of that warm spring day is quite different. The Cerro Grande, which randomly hopscotched over some houses, left only burned spots on his Woodland Road roof.

It took Molleur, a retired welder, five days to find out his simple, single-story white house was among the saved.

After the fire, he spent 10 days in Albuquerque and lost two refrigerators full of food he had filled just before relatives were set to visit.

“We just thank God every day,” he said. “We thank the firemen.”

The location of Molleur’s house, a block in from the forest instead of up against it like the homes on Arizona Street, could have meant its demise. But it also could have led to its salvation.

His house is one block closer to Los Alamos Fire Station No. 4, about a mile away.

Firefighters at the station are close enough to see from their kitchen window the same burned ridges that border Arizona Street.

Like other residents, each firefighter at the station has memories of the two weeks straight many spent taking stabs at the orange monster.

Capt. Justin Grider remembers sleeping one night on a concrete floor and using a roll of paper towels for a pillow. Another firefighter slept on the gurney of an unused ambulance. Many went without seeing their families for days, all while fighting the fire that seemed like it would never die.

All interviewed recently said they were more than glad to do it.

And the firefighters remarked how amazing it was no one died that day.

The help the firefighters provided started a loop of other assistance, with residents and people from throughout the state giving them what they could; massages, water, meals, encouragement, a place to sleep, a thank-you.

A few residents who lost their homes were angry with firefighters for not doing more. But firefighters said the majority of people gave them accolades for their efforts.

Some firefighters lamented the fact they couldn’t do more and spoke of how hard it was to stand and watch houses fall apart at the hand of the flames.

Others still marvel at the sheer size of the Cerro Grande.

“You got a career’s worth of firefighting in two weeks,” firefighter Steve Dawald said.

***

Before the Bodensteins’ lot could be built on again, the past had to be taken away.
Clearing out their old home started with days and nights of meetings with federal and county government officials, and appointments with insurance adjusters.

One of the hardest parts of losing a lifetime of memories was creating what came to be known as the Contents List, the Bodensteins said. Their insurance company needed an inventory of what the family once owned in order to calculate what would be covered and how much money they would get.

“I went around the rooms mentally and started opening drawers and looking in them,” Sue Bodenstein said. “And then it was like a weight was lifted.”

Thinking about all that had been lost also became a turning point, the pair said.

“I think it was a way of saying goodbye,” she said.

And they moved on.

Eventually, they’d have to give county officials the final OK to tear down their chimney –the only really recognizable part left of their home — and allow construction equipment to bite up what was once their foundation.

But before that, they had to sort one last time through the rubble of their memories, another part of detaching themselves from the things they and their two adult children once owned.

Stan Bodenstein, an engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said he became fascinated with finding things, no matter the condition.

In many ways, seeing bits of his life for the last time was a form of closure.

“You end up having a drive to find stuff,” he said. “But once you find it, you look at it, it’s totally useless, and you can just chuck it.”

Amid the rubble, there was the family’s entire nativity set, blackened but there. A cup with what Stan Bodenstein guesses is the glass from a wine bottle melted on it. A few ounces of what once was a 10-pound bronze bell. Several pieces of pottery in good shape apparently because they had been fired by the potter. A silver Nambe serving platter, twisted into what looks like molten sea coral.

Sue’s childhood Christmas stocking was there, too, charred and torn but mostly, unbelievably, intact.

While the Cerro Grande was hot enough to lick all the color off what it didn’t destroy, one item lay there with all of its color: an angel Sue’s mom had given her years before.

The family has put some of what they salvaged on display in their living room, a testament to the fire’s power and to the past.

Although the couple cling to those reminders, Sue said she learned that life and friendship are more valuable than any one thing.

“It’s like, all of a sudden, what’s really important is brought into focus. The material stuff, it’s just stuff.”

Published May 6, 2005.

Frontier of Grit: No electric lines or easy water. Bad roads. County warnings. Yet about 350 families, many from Mexico, prefer this plateau of dirt to the drawbacks of Albuquerque 12 miles away. And the settlers continue to come, their mobile homes and the American Dream in tow.

By Kate Nash
Tribune Reporter

PAJARITO MESA — Logistically, it was a fairly simple move.
Three men in a truck hauled a mobile home three miles across a latticework of rugged roads to a place called Pajarito Mesa.

But the change of address to a place without one was an event of huge proportions in the lives of Joel and Nelida Gonzalez.

Their relocation, to this remote settlement on a plateau above Albuquerque, was a dream nearly four years and two countries in the making.

By 21st-century standards, the Gonzalezes’ dwelling in the shadow of a mountainous tire pile isn’t much.

Their new home, like many on the parched land 12 miles southwest of the city, doesn’t have the basic services that most New Mexicans took for granted decades ago.

But to Nelida, Joel, Adrian, Luis, Susana and Joel Jr., getting this home felt like heaven.

“At first, it’s hard to adjust, to flipping the switch and there’s no water or electricity. But up here, we have our own place, away from the city, and much more tranquil,” said Nelida, 26.

“Up here” is an unincorporated but fast-developing area that some see as an eyesore at worst and a colonia at best. Nelida, her four children and her husband are among about 350 families who reside atop the rural highland.

The story of Pajarito Mesa is as American as it gets one of people forging a homeland out of next to nothing.

But it’s also a Mexican-American tale; about 85 percent of the inhabitants are from Mexico or are of Mexican descent, residents estimate.

Each family some flung out on the mesa’s 22,000 acres and others huddled together in clusters has a different tale of moving to the dusty tabletop of land.

Some are undocumented immigrants whose families double or triple up in tiny trailers; others are city folk who got tired of the hustle and bustle, the bullets, the traffic.

Some own their land and homes. Others rent. Some stay with friends.

Many are happy to live in a place where Downtown Albuquerque is less than a speck on the horizon.

“I’d rather live here than in the city. I think it’s a lot safer for my kids, and they have a place to play, a place to go,” said Nelida Gonzalez, who for a time tried life in Albuquerque’s South Valley.

Others live here, seemingly decades from the lifestyle many Albuquerqueans enjoy, because it’s cheap.

The residents’ choice to live away from it all leaves Bernalillo County officials with a decision of their own: whether to evict some of the mesa’s residents, who they say essentially live here illegally.

County Manager Juan Vigil said that some parts of the mesa weren’t subdivided in accordance with zoning laws although other areas, some with single homes on 20 or more acres, do follow county zoning rules.

“That’s the dilemma,” Vigil said. “By enforcing our zoning ordinance, we could evict some of the residents. But we have to consider: Is that the right thing to do?”

The county, Vigil said, has known about Pajarito Mesa for about seven years. But as the area like other places at the edges of the city and county has grown, officials say they have been forced to consider doing something now to avoid larger problems in the future.

Already the county has fired a legal warning shot.

In the past two years, officials have posted signs in English and Spanish, informing would-be residents that they must have a set of proper permits for their mobile homes before moving to the mesa.

County officials say they could evict residents and red-tag trailers that don’t have the right paperwork, but so far they have been reluctant to do so. Instead, they say, they are trying to work with residents to bring them into compliance with county regulations.

In any case, some residents say it’s doubtful those alerts have stopped many people from coming. About 40 new families moved to the mesa over the past two years, residents said.

Officials also have met with residents to address their concerns about a lack of emergency services a major problem in a place where the nearest hospital is at least 15 miles away.

Clearly, bringing this community into the modern era will involve several layers of work. But things like paved roads needed to carry the trucks that would be used to install the services likely are years away, Vigil said.

In the meantime, and with more growth possible, the county will likely become responsible for more services here at a time when it’s already a struggle to provide fire protection and flood control in more populated areas like the South Valley and East Mountains.

“It’s been very difficult,” County Attorney Tito Chavez said. “We’re trying to balance wanting well-meaning people to live in that area with what our rules are.”

In many ways, the history of the mesa settlement is as complex as the series of lomas, cerros and arroyos that carve through it. It’s a complicated set of stories, different for nearly each settler in the various development pockets along the horizon.

While government planners and lawyers fret over the area’s past and future, many residents here are concerned with today. And while some say they’re happy with life on the mesa, even without the basics, others complain that, despite owning land and paying taxes, the county has done little to help them.

The situation has created uncertainty both for residents who want services and the county, which says it can’t do much until it has a better sense of how various lawsuits concerning land development and ownership will turn out.

This month, county officials are expected to receive the results of a $100,000 study trying to determine landownership and a more precise population count.

The study, started nearly two years ago, was also to look at where easements for utilities could be made.

Residents say they keep guarded hopes that the land history will be sorted out and they will get services.

To many elsewhere, the thought of difficult-to-obtain water, no sewer, no telephone and no ambulance service would be intolerable. But to understand the patience of the settlers here is to understand where they were before.

Living outside the wired world, Nelida Gonzalez says, is still better than what her family could have eked out in her native state of Chihuahua, Mexico.

“I don’t think we could have owned a home there,” she said in Spanish, looking out one of her two back windows at the arid terrain.

“It’s similar to Mexico. But we live better than that, especially with the money Joel can make.”

Joel, a meatcutter in the South Valley, earns $1,000 a month. Much of what isn’t spent on food for the six family members goes to payments on their $4,000, three-bedroom, brown and white mobile home.

It also goes to make their portion of the $18,000 land payment they split with other members of their family, who occupy two other trailers on the shared 2 1/2 acres.

Nelida works at home, spending nearly all of her time taking care of her four children. Or her sister’s three children. Or her neighbors’ children. Or all of them.

For the Gonzalezes, water comes from a well at the top of the mesa, dug less than a year ago.

Some of their neighbors in the area buy water in the city and truck it up the hill in buckets, tanks, whatever they can find.

While Joel works to keep his family’s generator full of gas to create power in their home, other homes run on solar energy.

For some, an outhouse is the bathroom. The Gonzalezes have their own septic tank.
Some residents use and reuse water, maybe at first to wash hands or clothes, and then to water plants.

It’s a simple life, although simple isn’t easy.

The Gonzalezes at least choose to see it as an adventure.

To get to this point, the Gonzalezes left their native Mexico in 1998 with a walk across the El Paso-Juarez border 260 miles to the south.

They had visas then, which have since expired.

“At first I didn’t want to go,” Nelida said of the mesa, a place her family had heard about from friends. “I thought, that’s not a life for kids.”

But after initially locating on the mesa and spending time with other families, she realized it could work.
“It seemed complicated,” she said. “But you get used to it. You figure out how it works.”

Making it work means sharing space with rattlesnakes and wild dog packs. Living among teens who drive up at night, looking for a remote place to party. Living among intermittent piles of trash, stacked tires, burnt cars and shot-out washing machines along the sagebrush. With coyotes and large beetles.
With little more than cracked flyswatters to get at the swarms of flies.

With neighbors who stop by to chat, for lack of much other entertainment.

Without a doctor.

Which was hard for Nelida Gonzalez when she became pregnant with her third child nearly two years ago.

For a time, the Gonzalezes decided to move out of the home they were sharing with another family on the mesa and into a South Valley apartment.

There they stayed until Luis, now 1 1/2 years old, and then Adrian, now 5 months, were born. But life in the valley although close to medical help and a more modern lifestyle wasn’t for them, Nelida said.

“Down there, he ran into traffic and almost got run over three times,” she said of 2 1/2-year-old Joel Jr.
“Then this one,” she said, pointing at her 8-year old daughter, Susana, “started talking about bank robberies, as if they were cool.
“I decided we needed to move back.”

So they returned to Pajarito Mesa with enough to make the first payment on a mobile home of their own.

That was just more than a month ago.

In a way, they are starting a different life, like many on the mesa. Again.

But this time, Nelida Gonzalez says, there is a difference.

“I don’t think,” she said, smiling and pulling back her long black hair, “we’re going back down there.”

Published Sept. 6, 2001

Valle Vidal is a natural wonder and thriving ecosystem – and it sits precariously atop valuable methane.

By Kate Nash
Tribune Reporter

INSIDE THE CARSON NATIONAL FOREST – Oscar Simpson scrabbles up a sandstone wall 1,000 feet above the forest floor and rests at the top, looking.

Below him, nearly 40,000 acres of the Valle Vidal stretch out with mint and olive greens, slivers of rusty reds and cornstalk yellows, dots of chocolatey browns.

It’s photogenic terrain superior to what any landscape painter could depict, home to thousands of Rocky Mountain elk, Rio Grande cutthroat trout and microscopic fairy shrimp.

Simpson, president of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, takes a breath, looking across the slice of northern New Mexico framed by some of the state’s highest peaks.

To him, the eastern section of the 101,000 acres of the Carson known as the Valle Vidal Unit is a treasure that provides once-in-a-lifetime elk hunts, fishing, camping and horseback riding.

Others see it as a potential site for coal bed methane drilling.

“There are some places that just shouldn’t be destroyed,” said Simpson, also a spokesman for the Coalition for the Valle Vidal, a group working to stop a 2002 request to the U.S. Forest Service by the El Paso Corp. to consider the area for drilling.

“That’s all we’re asking, is to protect this one little area. The rest of it is open (to energy development),” he says of the Raton Basin, of which the Valle Vidal is a tiny part.

El Paso Corp. spokesman Joe Hollier says the 40,000 acres can be drilled in a way that could fit into the environment. He points to the company’s drilling on Ted Turner’s 500,000-acre Vermejo Ranch, which abuts the Valle Vidal.

“We feel that’s a prime way to do it correctly,” he said. The wildlife has “adapted to the facility very well.”

There, 621 drill pads are spaced every 160 acres, and the surrounding landscape is used to minimize sound and hide the wells, Hollier said. Some of the equipment is painted green.

It’s up to the Forest Service to decide whether to open the area to drilling. If it gives approval, the service would regulate how many and how far apart the drill pads would be on the Valle Vidal.

The agency would also decide the pace of drilling, Hollier said, so it’s hard to know how much coal could be extracted at a time.

Simpson, who used to work for the state regulating the oil and gas industry, said the acreage in dispute would yield between 11 and 36 hours of national energy consumption over 20 years.

And, he said, there’s no way to make drilling equipment pretty.

“I don’t care if you hide it behind a tree or not, it still disrupts wildlife. It turns it into an industrial zone. That’s all there is to it,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Tom Udall, a Democrat from Santa Fe, has introduced a measure that would permanently prevent drilling in the valle. A subcommittee of the House Committee on Resources is expected hold a hearing on the bill Thursday.

“This is a magnificent area, which deserves protection,” he said.

Udall said he started thinking about his bill after taking a tour of the area with Forest Service officials. The agency doesn’t have the authority to withdraw land from future exploration, which is what his measure would do.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a Silver City Democrat, also has a measure pending before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the Senate. It would turn the area into a national preserve and prevent drilling. A hearing hasn’t been scheduled on that bill.

But Bob Gallagher, president of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, said it’s premature to consider any such measures.

“The Forest Service should make a decision first as to what would be allowed and where,” he said. “Then, if politicians want to get on the bandwagon, that’s fine.”

Gov. Bill Richardson, a first-term Democrat and former U.S. energy secretary, is pushing a plan that would prohibit degrading the area’s lakes and streams by designating them as outstanding natural resources.

U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, an Albuquerque Republican, is New Mexico’s only GOP lawmaker to come out against drilling the area using current coal bed methane technology.

Simpson, who hunts elk and deer, said his coalition, which includes 800 businesses and groups, is focused on the measures before Congress, because there’s nothing else that could stop energy exploration.

It can take months, if not years, to get a measure through Capitol Hill, he said.

“An act of Congress is the only thing that would protect it permanently,” Simpson said, standing on a cushy bed of pine needles nearly 2,000 miles from D.C.

The needles are where some of the 2,500 elk who live here bed down at night, cuddling against the cold.

The Valle Vidal, or Valley of Abundant Life, is home to the most concentrated elk herd in the state. Wild turkeys wander, and bouquets of wildflowers thrive.

People come by the thousands from across the nation to camp, hike, hunt, fish, take photos and just get away. Visitors include the Boy Scouts, whose Philmont Scout Ranch is nearby.

About 6,000 individuals have joined the coalition in hopes of persuading the federal government to leave the area alone.

The group includes hunters, ranchers, fishers, area business owners and horseback riders.

“It’s not just an isolated group of environmentalists. It’s a broad-based coalition,” Udall said.

About 50,000 people visit the area each year, according to the state Game and Fish Department. Simpson fears those visitors, who bring between $3 million and $5 million a year to primarily Colfax and Taos counties, won’t show up if there is drilling.

The elk that attract so many won’t stick around, either, he said.

“If you want to have a wildlife area and energy exploration, they aren’t compatible,” he said.

Gallagher disagrees.

“They can coexist easily with energy production,” he said.

Near the base of Big Costilla Peak, a 12,739-foot-tall rock pushed up out of the earth, Susan Clagett and Lisa Mandeville walk along the Rio Costilla Creek with their chow mix, Bear.

“We come here because there’s no people, no traffic,” Mandeville said. “How many other places can you come to like this?”

The pair, who work at a souvenir shop in Red River, hike or fish in the valle a few times a week. They don’t want drilling there.

When tourists ask them for advice on local places to visit, they sometimes hesitate to reveal the existence of a gigantic, gorgeous forest nearby.

“We’ve seen bear and their cubs, bald eagles and elk like you wouldn’t believe. . . . You don’t want to tell anybody about it,” Clagett said.

If the Forest Service does give the go-ahead for leases to drill, they would visit less often.

“This is a love affair,” Clagett said. “How did the oil and gas people find this place?”

Published Oct. 24, 2005.