2009 Fire Ecology Institute for Educators

Six years ago the eighth grade class was ready to go on retreat to the Jemez Mountains and a wildland fire threatened the area and we had to postpone our trip. Two years before that, Los Alamos was on fire and 266 homes were lost. During 2001, we could see large ash clouds billowing up to twenty thousand feet and at night we could see the towering flames. Last year we moved the eighth grade retreat to the Manzano Mountains east of Albuquerque. In May, three months before we were scheduled to go, the Trego Fire broke out and the Manzano Mountain Retreat Center narrowly escaped going up in flames. Fortunately, the owners of the retreat center put a lot of effort into mitigating their property. They took out hundreds of trees and followed the Forest Service’s recommendations on preparing their property. The fire crews decided that the camp was a defensible space and used the camp as their base of operations. After the crews were gone the fire reignited and burned through the thinned trees and scorched one of the buildings. A close call, indeed! At first we wanted to cancel our reservation since the National Forest was burned to the ground and the camp was surrounded by scorched wood, but the director invited us out and gave the teachers a tearful presentation of how the camp was saved and we decided to go ahead and come in September. It became an excellent learning opportunity for our eighth grade science course as we have been starting the year out with a unit called “Fire in the Earth Systems” for the last six years.

The Fire Ecology Workshop in Durango could have been tailor made for our Earth Systems course. We already use the video Fire Wars in our course and cover many of the points made in the video. However, the workshop helped us to develop our unit with new and interesting facts as well as complementary activities. For example, I now have resources that I can use to help my students understand the fire history, fire ecology and principles of mitigation. I was impressed with the mitigation that took place at Lemon Reservoir. John Eye was resourceful and forceful in making quick decisions to avert what could have been the loss of Durango’s water supply and the decimation of the river ecology. The fire fighters of Missionary Ridge were also very impressive. I was struck by their preparedness in terms of fitness, caches and organizational strategies.

The science behind the scenes helped me to understand how interconnected our systems are and how preventing fire, a natural part of the ecosystem, has tipped the balance and left our forests vulnerable. Ros Wu’s presentation on dendrochronology was like a CSI investigation of the forest. I know I will be able to use the cookies to develop a chronology for our surrounding forest and plan to explore the possibilities of using this unit during our Manzano Mountain Retreat. Learning about the different beetles and how they are opportunistic in infesting the forest when the trees are stressed reinforced the systems connections. Learning different types of trees and their particular ecoculture helped me broaden my understanding and I know I’ll be able to use this knowledge in the classroom.