I was keen to reconnect with old friends. My friend Randy, and his wife Kathleen, are the owners of some real estate on ‘the land grant,‘ nearest Tecolote, NM, with the largest nearby town being Las Vegas, NM. They’ve been out here for about twenty years; they know the ropes, and are members of the community.
The basic plan of the visit was hanging out. I knew that another, more regular guest was coming at the end of the month. That was Susan Taylor Lennon, formerly (emeritus?) of the University of Tampa. She had been the dean (chair?) of Dance and Theater there, had retired in 2018/2019.
Randy had the excellent idea of taking me up into the mountains, taking a tour of the aftermath of the Calf Canyon and Hermit’s Peak fires that had happened in 2022. Randy has served with the Tecolote/Bernal VFD, and was active in various capacities as a personal response to these historic blazes. The vehicle embarked in is a slightly battered Toyota 4Runner. It was well-suited to these adventures, and had seen plenty of action. Very nice to riding rather than driving!
The stripes on the middle distance ridges are geological features. Tree cover is sparse. The fire has left the geological history bare, and even where there is thriving vegetation, it is a feature of the American southwest that one gets a dramatic view of upheavals long past. I know very little about geology. I can, thanks to our information age, and those reviled data centers, do ready research and get my questions answered. The overview is shocking to those among us who expect things to remain more or less the same. Taking a long view, which is the only view available if one wishes to contemplate geological history and the resultant physiographic provinces. As near as I can figure, Tecolote, Las Vegas, and environs are roughly part of what is called the “Rio Grande Rift.” A ‘rift’ is where the landscape is pulled apart, usually along tectonic boundaries. In New Mexico, and the US southwest in general, a number of these boundaries and temporal ‘provinces’ form a general nexus. Provinces, in geology, are spatial areas with shared characteristics. Tecolote is on the eastern side of the huge rift that also contains Taos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque. Of course geologic areas do not line up with state lines…
In the photo above, we’re at about 9500 feet ASL.
Part of the cause of the Hermits Peak fire was the re-ignition of an “improperly extinguished” controlled burn by the US Fire Service. The burn had taken place in January of 2022, and it rekindled in April. Another Fire Service burn, a ‘pile-burn,’ was the culprit in the Calf Canyon fire. The two fires merged, and were fought as one enormous fire. Before the fire was fully contained in August of 2022, the fire went into the record books as New Mexico’s largest, most destructive, and earned the dubious distinction of being the largest fire in the entire United States for that year. The books are still very much open; climate change is driving the factors that make wind events of all sorts more and more likely. Records are being set annually now in terms of temperatures and heat.
It is useful, I think, to consider the long view that the geologic study presents in coming to terms with climate events, fires, the weather, and human responses. Geologic time, of course, tends to reduce the temporal significance of humanity. The nation we inhabit, with its social structures, politics, mores, and history is but a flash bulb going off when considered alongside the timespans that brought the continents into their current positions, the seas that have come and gone, the glaciers that have receded and left the moraines, and thrust the mountains into being. Consider that the geologic history covers several billion years. The precambrian span, broken down into eons, lasted from 4.56 billion years ago, the estimated age of our planet, until about 541 million years ago. That long span of time passed before the nascent life on earth blossomed into something resembling our current bounty of classes, kingdoms and phyla. The Cambrian explosion is churned up in the rift for our examination. Let the facts inform our humility.
Fires do much damage. That is a fact of the human condition. We would prefer to endure undamaged, our dwellings and dreams enduring. But “as falls Wichita, so Falls Wichita Falls.”
Word of the week: paridolia. Pareidolia (/ˌpærɪˈdoʊliə/) is the psychological tendency to perceive familiar, meaningful patterns—most commonly faces—in random, ambiguous, or unrelated stimuli. (Wikipedia.)
Thus, we have above the ‘woodpecker tree.’
More on this later: we visit the canyons and witness the intrepid dwellers and their dwellings. We are surrounded by the faces in the sandstone…
But first…
