Written by Jose Iniguez
November 2012
If you attended the AFE conference last March and went on the Los Conchas field trip you may remember hearing that managers in the Jemez Mountains were actually expecting another big fire year in 2012. This was because the fire-scar fire history records contained a number of occasions of back-to-back fire years as- sociated with back-to-back drought years. Although this pattern never materialized in the Jemez, it did in the Gila where the 2011 Miller fire, which burned 88,000+ acres, was followed by the 2012 Whitewater-Baldy (WWB) fire. It became the largest fire in New Mexico history at nearly 300,000 acres.
