Evacuation, Part 2

The Los Conchas wildfire, day 1, June 26th

It’s really interesting to find out what your family considers to be their most prized possessions. When the Los Conchas wildfire threatened our town last week and the town was evacuated for the second time in 11 years, all of us packed what we thought were irreplaceable items. For the boys, I told them to pack things that couldn’t be replaced at Target.

We thought we’d only be evacuated for a few days, just until the smoke left town. But it ended up being almost a full week, the same amount of time that we had to evacuate back in 2000 during the Cerro Grande fire that started when a control burn got out of control. With relief, this time no homes were threatened in our town site (unlike the 400 homes that burned in 2000). Unfortunately, all of the nature areas and trails were wiped out this time, as well as part of our ski hill.

For me, I packed all of the quilts and quilted wall hangings that I or my sister or mom made for us, all of the kids’ photo albums, every photograph off the wall, my iPod, Kindle, and enough clothes and toiletries to last us a week.

For my husband, he too packed clothes, but also the big computer, his iPhone, the Apple TV, his laptop, the wedding photos, and tools.

My oldest son, the teenager, was a minimalist. He packed his laptop, his iPod, the Nintendo Wii, his Nintendo 3DS, and a bunch of video games.

My pre-teen seemed to pack the most. He packed his Nintendo DS and video games, iPod, baseball and soccer trophies, Lego Bionicles, lots of stuffies, his guinea pig, his favorite DVDs, and his light sabers. It was this kid that insisted on bringing the turtles even though I thought they’d be fine during the evacuation.

My youngest, also a minimalist, included all his stuffies and baby blankets, iPod, Lego Bionicles, Nintendo 3DS, and video games. He wanted to bring his favorite board games but I assured him that we could buy those again in the store if we lost them.

Of course our dog and cat came with us, as well as the guinea pig and two turtles. They survived camping for 3 nights quite well and my sister survived them moving in with her for the next 3 days.

As I write today, the mountains are still smoldering. You can tell that all of the running trails that we used to run on are now gone. Back burns have been set on the ridges, firefighters hoping the fire won’t jump them and hit the town (notice they are calling them “backburns” rather than a “controlled burn” this time around). At night, the mountain glows and you can see spot fires all over. It is eerie and depressing to see such a sight.

Los Conchas Fire, day 10, July 5

Twice in a little over a decade is too often to have to leave town and worry that you’ll lose everything. But really, if you get all of your prized possessions out, the other stuff can just be replaced.

Fires

I was born and raised in northern California (as I've mentioned in my profile) and moved to the Land of Enchantment 9 years ago this week.  When we first visited here on a house hunting trip in September 1999, it was a beautiful town with mountains covered in evergreen pinon and ponderosa pine trees and gorgeous quaking aspen.  I always thought it looked like Lake Tahoe without the lake!  When we came to our new home a month later, we were told that we should have come a couple of weeks earlier so that we could have seen the fall colors with the aspens and oaks turning orange to yellow on the mountains.

About 6 months after we moved here a great fire burned through our mountains and our town.  We never did see the orange hills in the fall.  Four hundred homes were lost and the beautiful green hills were gone forever.  We were evacuated from town on May 5, 2000 when the fires were said to have "hopped the canyon" and were headed for the homes in what was called "the western area".  We scrambled to get our most valuable belongings together and packed into the cars and joined the other vehicles that were on the road evacuating town.  As I sat there in the car at a standstill I was pointed toward the hills and watched in horror as the flames burned right in front of me.  Sure, it was about 50 feet up the hill but it was in my direct view and really was frightening.  We learned later that the homes directly below where the fires were seen on the mountain and in between the main road were lost.

When I was looking at various website's Week in Pictures links as I like to do each week, I was struck by this photo below from Yahoo!'s Week in Photos:

This photo was taken in Southern California in the San Fernando Valley area and reminded me of what the view was as we evacuated town all those years ago, only with the cars facing the opposite direction and it being later in the day in the above photo.  We evacuated town in early afternoon so it was still pretty light.  When I saw the photo I felt a hard pang in my stomach, even after all these years.  Hy heart goes out to everyone affected by the fires.

Now, over 8 years later, the aspen trees are filling the mountain areas little by little.  Each year is better and this year in the spring and summer, there was green "up there in them-thar hills".  And this fall we've seen some oranges and yellows from the new stands of aspens in the brown hills.  They say the pines won't come back for at least 30 years but at least we're seeing recovery (this photo taken this spring and the first two photos at the beginning of this blog via The WoodsWanderer).

Our town is still beautiful but scarred.  It doesn't look like I remember Lake Tahoe looking anymore, but is fantastic regardless.  If you ask me, it is the people who make this town beautiful!