Early season fire conditions turned northern New Mexico into a firebox/Cerro Pelado fire, May 9, 2022

It took only a handful or two of days between the disappearance of snow in the Santa Fe National Forest and the start of the Cerro Pelado fire, a growing blaze that has intruded into two units of the National Park System in New Mexico in an early season signal that the coming summer months will be smoky in many parts of the park system west of the Rockies. 

"They're burning in areas where the snow just came off, " said James Wallman, a meteorologist in the National Interagency Fire Cache in Boise, Idaho, in discussing the fire conditions that led to the Cerro Pelado, Hermit's Peak, and Calf Canyon fires. "Right before they started. Maybe like a week or two. You think everything's moist, but yet... Some of that we think is due to climate change. We're not sure. But we just know it seems to be drying out a lot faster. Fire seasons are getting longer, it seems."

Not only are fire seasons lasting longer, but this year they are starting earlier, at least in New Mexico, where as of Monday a trio of fires covered more than 200,000 acres, had burned nearly 300 structures, and led to the evacuation of many small communities in the fires' path. While the Cerro Pelado fire was the smallest of the three, at roughly 41,000 acres, it had burned into the southeastern corner of Valles Caldera National Preserve, was on the border of Bandelier National Monument's northwestern tip, and posed a threat to the Los Alamos National Lab and the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, where the visitor center closed Monday due to the fire.

While Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Glacier, Sequoia, Crater Lake and other national park units in the West might not see fire starts in the coming weeks or before July, current trends portend a smoky summer, said Wallman. Whether this is the "new normal" for fire season in the West remains to be determined, he added.

"What's the new normal? We don't know because everything is still changing," he said last week during a phone call. "How do we adapt to it? How do we think about all these things? How do we tell people what's going on? I think what we're seeing is what is consistent with what is being predicted with climate change."

90-Day Fire Outlook

Last year's fire season saw 7,125,643 acres burned nationally, a drop from 2020 when 10,122,336 acres burned. However, in Northern California, some fires grew "to enormous size, causing the overall acreage burned to significantly exceed the area's 10-year average," according to the National Interagency Fire Cache's annual summary of 2021's fire activity. 

"In Northwest and Eastern areas, the combination of more fires and large sizes resulted in above average activity," it added. "That trend was amplied most in Northern Rockies, which tallied significantly more  fires and burned more than twice the normal acreage in comparison with its 10-year averages.

Foremost among last year's fires were the KNP Complex that raged through Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, charring nearly 90,000 acres, and the Dixie Fire, which consumed nearly 1 million acres and burned through Lassen Volcanic National Park.

Lassen Volcanic, in Northern California, saw the Dixie Fire burn a swath from south-to-north through the park's interior, destorying the historic Mount Harkness fire lookout in the process. While the park's 2021-22 winter started out on a positive note, with above-average snowfall in December, a dry first quarter to 2022 reversed that positive outlook. As of April 1, "the Lower Lassen Peak monitoring station was at 55 percent average snow depth, 58 percent average water content, and only 47 percent average water density. These numbers are not tracked after April, so the significant precipitation we received that month will not be reflected in our overall data. It is very unlikely that the amount we received in April, and any extra we will receive in May, will put the park near its average for the year," said park spokesperson Kevin Sweeney in an email.

"Human-caused climate change continues to contribute to the extreme drought conditions felt throughout the West, and in Lassen Volcanic National Park. We are expecting another challenging summer with regards to wildfires in and near the park," he added.

Another problem that could arise at Lassen Volcanic lies in the areas that did burn last year.

"There are concerns about soil erosion, landslides, and runoff related to the impacts of the Dixie Fire. While the fire moderated its behavior significantly when it entered into areas of previous burns and fuel treatments, it did burn with high severity in the Mt. Conard, Mt. Harkness, and the Warner Valley areas," said Sweeney. "Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams have identified the areas of highest concern and crews will be working to stabilize these areas as soon as they are able to access them. Most of these areas are still covered in snow, as they are at higher elevations."

The 2021 fire season was particularly brutal for Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, where the Cameron Peak Fire and the East Troublesome Fire combined to burn approximately 30,000 acres, or roughly 9 percent, of the park. The East Troublesome fire actually jumped the Continental Divide in the park.

With that fire season still fresh in mind, the outlook for this year is concerning.

"Above normal significant wildlfire potential is expected to continue across portions of the Rocky Mountain Area through August 2022 due to long-term precipitation deficits and ongoing drought in conjunction with expansion of above-normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation during the outlook period," which runs through August, reads the 120-day forecast for the region issued by NIFC's Predictive Services branch.

Snowpack measurements on May 1 were below normal for Rocky Mountain, Arches, Canyonlands, Mesa Verde, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Colorado National Monument, Great Sand Dunes, and Zion national parks, as well as for Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Yosemite, and Lassen Volcanic, according to the agency.

Preparing For Fire

As the Traveler reported last fall, National Park Service managers are well aware of the changing fire regimes and are taking steps to try to reduce the threat of large conflagrations in their parks. One of the key approaches is "fuels reduction," a process involving chainsaws and hand tools to remove downed trees, branches, and vegetation that can provide flames with "ladders" into a forest's canopy, where it can roar across the roof of the landscape, spitting out embers that can travel a mile or more on the winds and land to ignite more fire.

Not only is that reduction intended to reduce the threat of major conflagrations, but it can open up a forest to give firefighters more room to get in and combat the flames without dangerously clambering over and around downed trees. Forest cleansing also can reduce massive wildfires.

"When you can reduce the fuels and get them more to a natural state, like they were before all the fire suppression over 100 years ago, the active fire suppression, it will help," said Wallman back at NIFC. "When the fuels are really dry, it's hard to stop them."

But, he continued, in areas where there was a previous burn or fuels reductions were carried out, "the fuel load isn't as heavy, even on the ground and in the trees, that they become more surface fires. And when there you have more surface fires, they tend to be more beneficial, clears out the underbrush."

In the Pacific Northwest, Crater Lake National Park crews have worked for two decades or so to reduce fire fuels by cleaning a 200-foot-wide strip of forest on either side of the park's entrance roads, and also have used prescribed burns to "clean up" the forest litter. This summer could start out somewhat calm, fire-wise, for the park, as the forecast calls for dry, windy conditions but not a lot of lightning that could spark a blaze.

Beginning in July, though, "the elevated risk [fore fires] will expand into southwest Oregon and central Washington before significant fire potential increases to encompass most of the geographic area in August," reads NIFC's outlook through August.

If there is a slim silver lining in the long-range outlook, it's that NIFC meteorologists believe "[T]he North American Monsoon is likely to arrive on time and be robust this summer." However, they quickly add, "potential early moisture surges during June could result in periods of lightning across the Southwest, Colorado, and the southern Great Basin."

Unfortunately, as New Mexico's firefighters can attest, this year's frequent arrival of unusually strong and gusting winds has dried out the forests, "with many places seeing fire danger indices and dead fuel moistures exceeding the 97th percentile."

And that portends to a smoky summer across many of the West's National Park System units.