Their house has stood for 130 years. A new wildfire era may change that.
Three wildfires skirted the author’s Boulder home. Then two more converged on her ancestral house in New Mexico. In the drying West, people must now keep their "head on a swivel."
My great-grandfather bought the land in the 1890s, in order to log it. It was 10 miles from his home in the small city of Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he ran a business selling goods hauled by wagon along the Santa Fe trail. But then he traveled up the steep river-canyon and saw the ancient ponderosa pines and the lush meadows that climbed toward a granite-faced mountain called Hermits Peak. He decided to build a house there instead.
When we heard about the fire in early April, we were planning a Zoom call to discuss the future of the place. A dozen cousins now share ownership of four houses and 700 forested acres. But on April 6, a prescribed burn
