Volunteers help seedlings take root as New Mexico attempts to recover from historic wildfire

A small team of volunteers spent a few hours scrambling across fire-ravaged mountainsides, planting hundreds of seedlings as part of a monumental recovery effort that has been ongoing following the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history.

The Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon blaze was spawned in 2022 by a pair of botched prescribed burns that federal forest managers intended to lessen the threat of catastrophic fire in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Instead, large swaths of northern New Mexico were reduced to ash and rural communities were upended.

It rained overnight, making for perfect conditions for the volunteers in the mountains near the community of Mora. It was just enough to soften the ground for the group's shovels on Saturday.

“The planting was so easy that we got done a little early and ran out of trees to plant that day. So it was a good day,” said David Hernandez, a stewardship ecologist with The Nature Conservancy, which is partnering with the Hermit's Peak Watershed Alliance on the project.

Nearly 400 ponderosa pine seedlings were placed in spots identified by the U.S. Forest Service as high priorities, given the severity of the burn. Those locations are mostly areas where not a single live tree was left standing.

It's here where land managers, researchers and volunteers hope the seedlings will form islands of trees that can help regenerate more trees by producing their own seeds over time.

The Nature Conservancy used donations to purchase a total of 5,000 seedlings. New Mexico Highlands University is contributing another 3,500 seedlings.

The trees will be monitored to gauge success.

Researchers at New Mexico State University's Forestry Research Center in Mora are experimenting with drought-hardening some seedlings to prepare them for the warmer and drier conditions they could face when they put down roots in burn scars. That means the plants are watered less frequently to make them more drought tolerant.

Owen Burney, the center's director, said his team has yet to scale up the number of drought-conditioned seedlings, but more will be ready to plant in the spring.

The Hermit's Peak Watershed Alliance team was on its way up the mountain again Monday to do more work. They will continue daily through early October, with a couple more weekend planting sessions for interested volunteers.

The goal is to get the seedlings in the ground before the first freeze.

There have been days when 20 volunteers have been able to plant around 1,000 trees, said Joseph Casedy, who works with alliance.

“It's strength in numbers,” he said, acknowledging that repeatedly bending down to drop the trees into their holes before compacting the surrounding soil can be fatiguing work.

Burney, Hernandez and others say there's a need to bolster the infrastructure required to develop seed banks, grow seedlings and do post-fire planting as wildfires have decimated large swaths of the U.S.

This year alone, more than 11,460 square miles (29,681 square kilometers) have been charred, outpacing the 10-year average. The National Interagency Fire Center also notes that there have been delays in reporting actual acreage burned given the “very high tempo and scale” of fire activity across the nation over recent months.

In northern New Mexico, reseeding started soon after the flames were dying down in 2022 as crews began working on mitigating erosion and flood damage within a burn scar that spanned more than 534 square miles (1,383 square kilometers) across three counties. In the first phase, federal agencies were able to seed about 36 square miles (93 square kilometers) and spread mulch over thousands of acres more.

In the last two years, tens of thousands of more acres have been seeded and mulched, and sediment catchments, earthen diversions and other flood control structures have been built at countless sites. Still, runoff from heavy storms the last two summers have resulted in damage.

There are certainly patches of ground that aren't taking seed because they were burned so severely, and Casedy said it will take more time and funding to address problems in those areas. But he said other spots are bouncing back, providing some hope.

“Ground cover is looking a lot better this year,” he said. "At the place I'm standing right now, there's 10-foot-tall aspens coming in."