artdirector@sfreporter.com
Morning Word
Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire progress faces test this weekend
Both acreage and containment have increased slightly on the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire: 312,057 acres and 47% containment as of the most recent reporting, with more than 3,000 personnel. However, fire officials expect growth over the holiday weekend as fire weather returns in the form of rising temperatures, dropping humidity and increased winds. “With the hotter and dryer weather, you can anticipate you’re going to see more smoke on the fire,” Jayson Coil, one of the fire’s operations section chief said during last night’s virtual community meeting. “We welcome that because it helps us to identify the areas there there could be some growth and it allows us to suppress them. If there is anything that gets out of our lines…I’ll come in here and we’ll do an update to make sure you guys know what’s going on.” The coming weather, Coil said, will help firefighters “test” the containment lines. “We don’t feel really good about our lines until they’ve had one of those tests,” he said, “because we know that the fire that looks like it’s parked under conditions that are mild, may not look the same under conditions that are extreme. So right now we welcome those extreme conditions because we want to see where we need to take action.” While numerous evacuation areas are in the process of repopulating, officials say residents of San Miguel, Mora, Taos, Colfax and Santa Fe Counties should remain on high alert for changes to evacuation statuses and road closures. You can view evacuation statuses and fire progression here; an interactive smoke map is available here. As numerous communities begin to repopulate, the Forest Service has released an “After Wildfire” guide for New Mexico.
City closes trails due to fire danger
As of tomorrow, several popular Santa Fe trails will close due to ongoing fire danger. An emergency order from Mayor Alan Webber will close The Dale Ball Trails (which are accessed off of Hyde Park Road, Cerro Gordo Road, Upper Canyon Road and Camino Cruz Blanca, including the Atalaya and Dorothy Stewart trails); The Sun Mountain Trail; La Tierra Trails; and MX/BMX trails at La Tierra and the Metropolitan Recreation Complex. The city closures follow forest closures by the US Forest Service and Santa Fe County closures of trails. The city closures accompany forecasts for hot, dry windy weather this weekend. “I’ve never seen such extreme fire conditions so early,” Santa Fe Fire Chief Brian Moya said in a statement. “The winds came in big, the fuel loads are heavy, and the drought conditions are extraordinary. Parts of these closed trails are remote and difficult to access, which can increase the amount of time it would take to respond to an emergency. All of those factors went into this decision. I’m also reminding the public to observe the fire restrictions that are in place—no open burning and no fireworks!” Numerous other trails within the city remain open and accessible; see those here.
State trumpets climate progress
Last year, the state of New Mexico implemented new rules requiring 98% of natural gas capture by 2026; doubled the number of renewable energy leases on state trust lands; and installed more than 2,100 solar projects in almost every New Mexico county through the Solar Market Development Tax Credit. These are just a few of the accomplishments touted yesterday by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office and detailed in a newly released annual report on the state’s climate strategy. In addition to outlining last year’s work, the report also notes notable accomplishments from this year, such as the adoption of the clean car rules for vehicles. Still to come this year includes the creation of a five-year climate action plan using the input of the Technical Advisory Group and the goals identified by the Climate Change Task Force, as well as the completion of the General Service Department’s State Buildings Green Energy Project. A news release from the governor’s office includes praise for the state’s progress from state Energy Secretary James Kinney, Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department Secretary Sarah Cottrell Propst and Demis Foster, executive director of Conservation Voters New Mexico: “We applaud the progress made over the past three years to address and cut climate pollution from the transportation, oil and gas, and energy sector, and invest in clean energy like wind and solar,” Foster said. “This progress has made New Mexico a national leader on climate action, and a model for other states. The hard work we’ve put in has laid a strong foundation to move the state forward on the road to a zero-emission economy by 2050.”
COVID-19 by the numbers
New cases: 838; 533,074 total cases
Deaths: 24; At last count, Santa Fe County had 294 total deaths; there have been 7,756 total fatalities statewide. Hospitalizations: 109. Patients on ventilators: 10
Case rates: As SFR reported earlier this week, Santa Fe County has the highest COVID-19 case rates in the state, according to the health department’s most recent report on geographical trends.
Community levels:The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “community levels” tracking system—which uses case rates along with two hospital metrics in combination to determine the state of the virus on a county level—as of yesterday now classifies nine counties as “yellow” or medium for risk (versus three counties last week). They are: Santa Fe, Rio Arriba, Los Alamos, Sandoval, Bernalillo, Cibola, De Baca, Grant, and Dona Ana counties. The rest of the state remains “green” for low community levels. The CDC updates its community levels on Thursdays. According to DOH Communications Director Jodi McGinnis Porter in an email response to questions from SFR: “DOH is keeping a close eye on hospitalizations and the trend over time is going up. DOH urges New Mexicans to stay up to date on COVID-19 vaccines and boosters, get tested if they’ve been exposed or show symptoms, and seek treatment early with [five] days if they have even one risk factor.” CDC recommendations for individuals and communities based on the community level rankings can be found here.
Resources: Vaccine registration; Booster registration Free at-home rapid antigen tests; Self-report a positive COVID-19 test result to the health department; COVID-19 treatment info: oral treatments Paxlovid (age 12+) and Molnupiravir (age 18+); and monoclonal antibody treatments. Toolkit for immunocompromised individuals. People seeking treatment who do not have a medical provider can call NMDOH’s COVID-19 hotline at 1-855-600-3453.
You can read all of SFR’s COVID-19 coverage here.
Listen up
As the school year comes to a close, Santa Fe Public Schools’ podcast Inside SFPS host Cody Dynarski, the district’s public information officer, talks to Superintendent Hilario “Larry” Chavez about “Year One,” for the superintendent, who started his new position in July 2021. Completing his first academic year as superintendent, Chavez says, is “a great accomplishment, not only for me, but the team. It’s been a very very tough year for everyone involved in education, but we’ve gotten through this year and we’ve done it together and I think that’s what’s important to make note of: Without being together, it would have been a much more difficult year.” While graduations will signal the end of the school year, Chavez notes work remains to be done on the district’s budget ahead of the end of the fiscal year. As for graduations, Santa Fe High School’s graduation happened yesterday; watch it here; Capital High School’s graduation takes place at 9 am today and will stream live on the SFPS YouTube page. And speaking of graduating seniors, Mora High School held its prom at the governor’s mansion last night, and it looks like the students had a lot of well-deserved fun.
Art to start or end the day
New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art’s “Sunrise/Sunset” internet art project currently features Placitas artist Sara Ludy. The museum commissions the Sunrise/Sunset projects specifically for its website to “disrupt, replace or engage with the museum website as an information environment.” To see them, log on to whitney.org during sunrise or sunset (presumably sunrise or sunset EST based on our failed attempt to catch it this morning). Ludy’s project, “Tumbleweeds,” began May 25 and “creates a continuously evolving animated map of light points, which corresponds to a performative intervention that she is making in the desert of New Mexico. Over the duration of the project, she is meticulously attaching shards of glass to tumbleweeds, using biodegradable twine that dissolves over time, and releasing them into nature.” Ludy uses materials from the desert landscape—glass and tumbleweeds—to explore “connections between nature and the online world, as well as craft practices of tying knots and techniques of visualizing data.”
Grow a spine
Lots of plants grow in the desert, but you know which plants grow really well in the desert? Cacti, friends. Cacti. And people who love cacti are like no other people. They really love them. To prove this anodyne statement, we called up Peter Breslin, a long-ago SFR contributor who now has a Ph.D in plant evolution and population ecology. Breslin’s doctoral work focused on cacti, as does his post-doc at the University of Arizona, where he is working in the desert laboratory on Tumamoc Hill collecting data on the Saguaro cacti population there—the eighth survey since 1908 on the same population of cacti. We asked Breslin to explain his love for cacti and he obliged: “I think because they’re super tough; they’re easy to grow. A lot of the time, they take very little care and then when you give them a little bit of care, they respond gloriously: They grow and they have these beautiful flowers. For relatively low effort, they provide a very high payoff.” Sold? You’re in luck. The Santa Fe Cactus and Succulent Club will hold its annual one-day only Spring Plant Sale from 9 am to 4 pm, tomorrow (Saturday, May 28) at Waterwise Gardening, 2902 A Rufina Street (you’ll find a little more info on the sale on its Facebook event page). If you attend, Breslin recommends “talking to the people who are there to get a sense of what to grow because there’s going to be a lot of expert knowledge there. If you have questions or need advice, he says, “ask and people are going to be thrilled to tell you—probably more than you want to know.”
Red flag weekend
Santa Fe may see a high temperature near 88 degrees today, with sunny skies, east wind 10 to 15 mph becoming west 15 to 20 mph in the afternoon and a “slight chance of sprinkles” after 3 pm and before 9 pm. According to the National Weather Service, temps will stay in the 80s all weekend and become increasingly windy, with red flag warnings on Saturday turning into fire weather watch on Sunday.
Thanks for reading! The Word will be taking a holiday for Memorial Day and returns Tuesday, May 31. During the three-day weekend, she is considering cooking and eating some of the items Giancarlo Esposito includes in his fantasy dinner party menu while listening to Depeche Mode (RIP Andy Fletcher).
