Walt Anderson's Photos of Horseshoe Two

Walt Anderson is a long-time friend and fellow artist who teaches at Prescott College. He was in Chiricahua National Monument when the Horseshoe Two Fire jumped containment lines at Saulsbury Saddle and raged through Rustler and Barfoot Parks. His photos document that awesome, terrible event.

Smoke boils over the distant Chiricahua Mountains.

(All photos by Walt Anderson)

From Chiricahua National Monument

Horseshoe Two Fire from Sugarloaf in Chiricahua National Monument

An unearthly light filters through the smoke from Barfoot.

Barfoot in flames

The glowing dot after the inferno is Barfoot Lookout.

Current Fire Strategy

Yesterday the wind was calmer, and fire crews working on the Horseshoe Two Fire (which has burned for more than a month in the Chiricahua Mountains) were able to gain some ground in their efforts to contain this fire. Today's fire map shows the areas of active fire (red boundary lines) and of the planned containment boundary (dotted black lines).

Fire map on 11 June 2011

The original plan called for stopping the fire in the interior of the Chiricahuas at several key ridges and points. However, given the unusually extreme conditions of dryness and wind, it has not been possible to contain the fire within the rougher terrain. In high winds (of which we've had plenty!), whirlwinds of fire cast embers a couple of miles away from the main fire, and create new fire starts. The primary places where containment efforts are working are down in the flats at the base of the mountains, and that is why the new fallback lines are drawn so far away from the currently active fire. The crews are bringing the fire to them, where it can be managed.

Within the Chiricahua National Monument, fire is burning in Jesse James Canyon and upper Rhyolite Canyon. Here standard suppression tools are not being used, beyond protecting structures and possibly igniting fire on ridges, using helicopters, in order to create a lower intensity burn. Suppression tools carry their own impacts, and here fire is mainly being allowed to burn through the monument, and fire lines are going around it. The very rugged cliffs and hoodoos should afford some natural barriers to fire, and it's my hope that a mosaic burn can happen, as long as wind remains calmer while fire is moving through the monument.

Detail of Horseshoe Two Fire entering Chiricahua National Monument

In Pinery Canyon and West Turkey Creek, the fire was active yesterday due to wind flow through the canyons, but it was constrained by water drops.

Detail of active fire in West Turkey Creek area on 11 June 2011

At the far northern edge of the fire, lighter fuels will be running out, and segments of the perimeter line are being connected to achieve containment. In Whitetail Canyon, mop-up work continues today.

Better news is that some of the big trees in the Rustler Park area survived. Apparently not many, but some is better than none, which was originally feared to be the case. In other areas, glimmers of green remain. We won't really know the condition of the high country until the smoke clears, ashes settle, and the first rains start to revive the burn. Raymond VanBuskirk hiked Bear Canyon behind our house, which burned intensively during the first night of the fire, and found a few big madrone trees still alive.

A community meeting with the fire team is set for 6 PM tonight at the Rodeo Community Center. Joining them will be representatives from the Coronado National Forest, National Park Service, and State of Arizona.

As of this morning, the burn covers 134,615 acres and is 45% contained. 23 structures have been destroyed, most of them outbuildings. 1,153 people are working to put out the Horseshoe Two Fire.

A Burning Question

As one of the hotshot fire crews finished their work at Rick and Lynne Taylor's house in Whitetail Canyon, their neighbor walked past, and was asked this question: "What is the ratio of sugar to water for filling these hummingbird feeders?"

Now that is an unusual level of care being taken!

Magnificent and Calliope Hummingbirds

(Acrylics by Narca)

Homecoming to the Horseshoe Two Fire

Yesterday evening as we dropped down Granite Gap into the San Simon Valley, plumes of smoke still churned from the Chiricahua Mountains. Homecoming is bittersweet.

Smoke from Whitetail Canyon in the Chiricahua Mountains

(Photos by Narca)

Horseshoe Two continues to surge north and west, driven by erratic––and sometimes unpredicted––winds. Crews have come to expect the unexpected: wind blows when little wind was forecast. Fire burns into the wind as well as with it. Steep terrain is crisscrossed by canyons which suck wind into the inferno, against the direction of prevailing winds. Fire can sprout anywhere as it spots up to 2 miles away from the body of the fire, creating very dangerous conditions for the firefighters.

In Whitetail Canyon, whirling fire jumped the line and destroyed some residences and outbuildings. The sheriff is in the process of contacting our neighbors who suffered that loss. Among those whose homes are safe are Rick and Lynne Taylor, Jim Brown, and Tom and Debbie Collazo. Wynne Brown lost her hay barn, but her home and other structures are intact. (She very characteristically saw a positive angle: the barn wasn't big enough anyway!)

Breach of the fire line means that crews have to drop back to the next defensible place, shown by dotted lines on today's fire map. The new goal in the north is to prevent Horseshoe Two from reaching Fort Bowie National Historical Site. The fire is burning into Chiricahua National Monument, and work continues there with the goal of protecting both the monument's resources and its structures. The fire's growth potential remains extreme, and the difficulty of the terrain is still extreme.

Fire map for the 10 June 2011 briefing

This fire is setting new local records right and left, not only in sheer size (now estimated at 128,652 acres), but also in categories such as low fuel moisture. Fuel that would be expected to burn for 10 hours before drying out is instead drying in a single hour. That is extreme. The overall burn index is 95%: this measurement is the ignition probability with wind factored in. So a spark falling on fuel would ignite fire 95 times out of 100. That is extreme. Many of the indices used by firefighters are at an all-time high for this locale, the Chiricahua Mountains.

While we are focused on our local inferno and damage here, the national media is focused on the Wallow Fire burning in the White Mountains, where similarly extreme conditions apply. As of June 10, the Wallow has burned 408,887 acres, mainly in pine forest, and is only 5% contained. Of more than 4,000 residences, 67 have been lost.

A third big Arizona fire, the Murphy Complex, is burning east of Arivaca and west of Tubac. It is moving through grass, shrub and oak habitats, has consumed 68,033 acres, and is now 75% contained.

Given the extreme dryness and unusually windy conditions, it has not been possible simply to extinguish these raging fires. The fire crews have instead had to use all their skill to moderate the fires wherever possible. When the fire jumps lines, control is lost and a much more severe burn results. Where it has been possible to moderate the fires' intensity, a mosaic burn is being achieved. The burn in South Fork was reportedly well-controlled and moderate. Elsewhere, crown fires are causing replacement of entire stands of forest.

One of the major fears about climate change in the Southwest is that forest types such as spruce-fir which need moister conditions will be driven completely off the tops of the mountains. We will lose those refugia and the animals and plants tied to those communities, and thus suffer a loss of richness, a loss of biological wealth.

I have heard scientists' predictions about the changes in store for the Southwest, and about fire being a mechanism for bringing about those changes. But somehow I didn't expect it to happen all at once, in a few short months. Most of us aren't geared to accept drastic change at the speed of light.

Faced with change and crisis, most of us grieve what is lost. We rage. Acting from anger, we assign blame. In the midst of our reactions, we need to be sure that any blame is correctly assigned. It is very difficult to know with 100% certainty who set these fires. (In the case of the Wallow Fire, the cause is thought to be an escaped campfire.) However, authorities do need to recognize the communities' frustration with the matter of designating a cause. On the one hand, the responsible individual may never be known. On the other hand, an employee of the Coronado National Forest told a Portal resident this spring that 12 of the last 18 fires in the Chiricahuas were set by illegal immigrants. By that accounting, Horseshoe Two is fire number 19, and circumstantial evidence points to that same origin. Yet no official statement ever supports what we are told unofficially. That dissonance breeds trouble.

I agree with Rick Taylor that one way to prevent many of these fires is to institute a good workers' program that allows people to enter the country legally for a specified amount of time in order to work. With a legal program in place, participating workers would avoid the hazards of illegal entry, and many fewer people would seek a way through these mountains. And a hypothetical 12 of the next 18 fires might be prevented.

Although most of the community is solidly supportive and appreciative of all that is being done to help, I have come home to find talk of conspiracies between Border Patrol and firefighting agencies. Seeing conspiracy is usually delusional and paranoid. But given the lack of real political discourse, and the use of anything to further a political agenda, the current mistrust of agencies is not surprising. People caught in the middle react, sometimes without logic or solid judgment. We need to rein ourselves in, stay as balanced and calm as possible. Long sieges are very wearing.

The fire crews are willing to face firestorms with the intention of salvaging what can be saved from incineration. They are operating with complete transparency, as anyone who attends the briefings can judge. Blaming the fire-fighting tactics for causing additional damage shows a lack of understanding of what is needed to moderate (and ultimately, contain) the fires during this season of extremes. And to the fire team: if we need to learn more about the rationale behind the strategies in play, please educate us. Knowing more helps to dispel ungrounded fear. (The well-grounded fears are bad enough!)

From South Carolina

You know you have been around intense fire way too much when you arrive in the gracious Deep South, and see the stately magnolias, and dogwood, and flowering crepe myrtle, and all you really see is ladder fuel. The wide expanses of lawn, however, are cropped so short by foraging lawnmowers that they would never carry a ground fire.

A new Type 1 fire team has rotated in, our third, so we are now in the fifth week of the Horseshoe Two Fire. The new team is headed by Jim Thomas and is based in the Great Basin. They are taking on a fire that has burned 100,200 acres and is only 55% contained. They are entering a community that has been under great stress for a month, after repeated evacuations, and which is stricken by the grievous loss in recent days of a number of our most treasured places, as the fire broke through containment lines and ravished the high country.

Yesterday the fire burned through Methodist Camp, which hosted a symposium on the Sky Islands in 1992. (Our memories are embedded in the landscape.) The structures were saved. Flames were still a couple of miles from Whitetail Canyon when the last fire update was posted.

Some of my friends are upset by the amount of backburning which firefighters have used to try to gain control of this marauding, volatile fire. It is true that the strategy carries risk, and that in some fires, and in less experienced hands, it has done more harm than good. However, in the case of the Horseshoe Two Fire and the extreme conditions we are dealing with, I don't see that there was another real option. In the hands of the Type 1 teams, the backfiring has gone remarkably well. I never believed they could hold the backburns in the howling winds, yet time after time they managed to moderate the fire's intensity and to stop it along a great length of the perimeter.

I would encourage anyone feeling anger at the fire's damage to go to the early morning briefings for the fire teams. You will be listening rather than questioning, but you will gain a more grounded sense of what the crews are facing, and how the strategies are being applied, than you will at the meetings held for the community (although those also can be valuable).

Wrenching News

I don't think I can report dispassionately the latest developments in the Horseshoe Two Fire, raging in the Chiricahua Mountains. When the fire jumped containment lines near Saulsbury Saddle, it roared through Rustler Park, Onion Saddle, Barfoot Park, and the high ridges so familiar to everyone who has roamed the high Chiricahuas. I am hearing from friends who are heartbroken. It is too soon to know just what has been lost.

In the other direction, fire raced in high winds through the village of Paradise, toward Whitetail Canyon, and Helen reported that last night Jhus Canyon was burning, next to Whitetail. So far people's homes and historic structures like the George Walker House in Paradise have been spared, thanks to thorough preparatory work by fire crews.

After the two weeks of very hard work by Dugger Hughes' Type 1 fire team, they have to feel terribly disheartened at the end of their rotation here, to see the fire escape because two firebrands were thrown by high winds, and started new fires 1.5 and 2 miles away. But without their valiant efforts, the outcome would have been so much worse. We likely would have seen the eradication of communities too.

We have been very focused, understandably, on the crisis in our backyard. Similar fires are raging throughout drought-stricken Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas. The Bear Wallow Fire near Alpine AZ just started, and yet blew to over 100,000 acres in just two days, as it roars through pine forest on the Mogollon Rim.

South of the border in Mexico, the entire Sierra Madre Occidental has been going up in flames, and Mexico does not have the resources which we have to deal with fire. So it is all just burning. "Sierra Madre" means the "Mother Mountains" and they are the heart of the habitats we so treasure in the Chiricahuas and other sky islands of the Southwest. The Sierra Madre has been an evolutionary cauldron for New World pine trees, and oaks, and madrones. They are the home of Eared Quetzals, Mountain Trogons, Thick-billed Parrots--and, of course, people.

You can see the extent of the fires on Google Earth. Many Norteamericanos have traveled the rail between Los Mochis and Chihuahua City, which runs through Copper Canyon and Tarahumara country. People in Portal have often sent supplies--ranging from clothes to school supplies to vitamins--to the mission school in Creel (visits which ceased when violence in Mexico escalated to the point that friends in Mexico advised against further trips for the time being). That region is burning. I may have missed something, but so far I haven't seen a single report in US newspapers about the plight of our neighbors to the south and the immense fires they are suffering.

The Border communities that are bearing the brunt of problems associated with illegal trafficking (fires, killings, home break-ins) are also communities with deep ties to Mexico. Many of us have travelled there for decades. We have led tours there, working with Mexican co-leaders. Our schools have exchange programs. Our biologists have worked with Mexican biologists to monitor and conserve species that are important to both countries, whether jaguars, or waterfowl, or parrots, or native fish, or prairie dogs. The cross-border relationship is vibrant, mutually beneficial, and highly valued.

We can affirm our continuing goodwill and friendship with Mexico while still acknowledging the serious border problems. It is important that other regions of the US understand that the border problems are real and must be addressed. Distant problems are all too easy to ignore. Please know that the outcry in Border communities is not based on prejudice, for the most part, but on actual, serious problems, which must be dealt with for the good of the whole country.

Mexicans are and have been our friends, and we lament the crises they are now suffering--crises of drug-related violence, of rampant fire, of economy.

The Long Siege Lengthens

As we thought we were seeing an end to the fire and its attendant stresses (with containment being predicted for June 22), the Horseshoe Two Fire has broken free of containment lines to move across Rock Creek Canyon and northeast toward Paradise, East Whitetail Canyon, and Chiricahua National Monument. The Monument is temporarily closed to visitors, and residents of Paradise and Whitetail are being evacuated––again, in the case of Paradise. One Whitetail resident was told yesterday that the fire was "still a day away" from her home.

Unexpected high winds caused the fire to jump to the north side of Rock Canyon, generating flame lengths 200 feet high in a veritable firestorm. (At the start of the fire on May 8, Barney Tomberlin––one of Portal's volunteer firemen who tackled the new conflagration––also estimated those initial flames to be 200 feet high and the convection column of smoke to be 20,000 feet high.)

Those appalling flames released embers that caused two new fires to start near Saulsbury Saddle, more than a mile and a half from the containment lines. One of those new fires had grown to 400 acres by yesterday morning.

Firefighters had to disengage from working the line in Rustler Park yesterday because the danger was too great. (Thus far, there have only been 7 injuries, thankfully all minor.)

News from the southwest part of the fire was better: the burnout along a 6-mile stretch of Tex Canyon Road was finished yesterday. That part of the perimeter is more secure, although smoke from the operation was very heavy and contributed to the pall that continues to shroud the northern end of the Chiricahuas, making breathing very uncomfortable and difficult for residents there.

The overall fire size is now 86,140 acres and is considered 50% contained (a drop from yesterday's 75% containment figure). The fire crews had begun to scale back, and now 825 personnel remain of the 900+ that were here a few days ago. With the new menace from the fire, will that scaling back continue?

When a crisis is viewed from a distance (right now, South Carolina), questions multiply. If any of our Portal friends send more information today, I'll post it.

What friends have been sending me is a link to the New York Times article questioning whether the fire was started by illegal immigrants. In the strictest sense, it is an accurate article. The only proof is circumstantial. However, the article also seems to diminish and discount the actual, daily effects of illegal immigration and smuggling on our communities, among them the settlements in and around the Chiricahua Mountains.

I would like to challenge the New York Times to send a reporter to live in one of our Border communities for a year, interacting frequently with Border Patrol, and then to write an investigative article about the real problems caused by illegal traffic of both humans and drugs. It sounds like Pulitzer Prize material to me.