Sunday, June 26, 2011, sometime between noon-1 pm (I don't remember the exact time), walked to Los Alamos airport and on the way back, thought I saw a few straggly wisps of smoke rise up in the distance. Since I saw no distinct smoke plume, I convinced myself that it was only dust stirred up by the high winds. After briefly stopping at home, I continued walking to Mesa Public Library on the Pueblo Canyon Rim trail behind East Park. When I got up to the Walkup Center, just before 2 pm, I was astounded to see a well-developed, towering plume of smoke south of the ridge above Water Canyon.
One of the librarians found the newly developed wildfire quite ominous because it reminded her of the 2000 Cerro Grande fire. She was very worried about having to evacuate 2 dogs by herself because her husband was out of town attending to his dying father. In my naivete, I thought that another evacuation would be highly unlikely. On the walk back home, I kept looking to the southwest. The smoke filled the southern half of the sky with blue skies to the north. The sunlight had an orange cast to it. I was surprised by how quickly the fire was growing but I shouldn't have been since our mountains are tinderbox dry. In the evening, we could smell the smoke so we closed our windows even though it was very hot outside.
When it was dark, we could see flames to the the southwest. (Later we learned we were looking at the area of Sawyer Hill and Ponderosa Campground burning.) Other neighbors were also out watching the flames. On KRSN, we heard that a voluntary evacuation was ordered. We could see a lot of traffic, including horse trailers, driving down the Main Hill Road (NM502), leaving town. Husband kept insisting that we pack up and leave that night but I felt that since both our night vision is impaired, we should wait until the next day, especially since a mandatory evacuation order hadn't been issued yet. Our next door neighbors who are both in their 80's were helped by their son to evacuate to Espanola. We realized that inevitably we'd have to evacuate again, just like we did 11 years ago for the Cerro Grande fire so we started to pack. I stayed up until around 1 am and then went to bed but couldn't fall asleep until sometime after 3 pm.
The smoke wasn't any better the next day. It was now moving to the north and ash was falling. Our next door neighbors had returned to get some items they had forgotten. I asked if they needed any help carrying anything out but he reassured me that he didn't. Throughout the morning, I had packed more but didn't do the last minute packing (toiletries and some food from the refrigerator) until the mandatory evacuation order, which we heard on KRSN, was issued Monday, June 27, at 2 pm. (Residents were to be notified by reverse 911. From Albuquerque, we checked our phone messages to see if we received the reverse 911 phone call but we didn't. Must notify Phil Taylor, Emergency Management Coordinator, about this.)
We were to leave in stages, our neighborhood last, but since we were mostly packed and live at the most eastern edge of town, we left within a half hour, each driving our car. We stopped at a friend's house in Santa Fe to leave one of the cars and drove the other to a hotel in Albuquerque. It wasn't until that evening in the Fairfield Inn that we both realized we could have packed all our photos and slides in the trunk of the car to be parked in Santa Fe rather than leaving them at home to possibly burn up a lifetime of memories. I remember we packed all the memorabilia and my genealogy research when we evacuated for Cerro Grande. We were gone for 10 days and I got so anxious about all that being stored in the trunk of our car while we stayed in Albuquerque. I didn't really think anything would burn this time since it seemed they were evacuating us more because of the air quality and to keep us out of the way of the firefighters. Luckily, no houses burned in Los Alamos during the Las Conchas fire.
[I started this on July 1 while we were evacuated in Albuquerque but never finished it. I'm posting it unfinished. It's old news now. I haven't had any time recently to post anything. My sister's planned visit started on July 5, 2 days after we got back home on July 3, so I've been busy. She flew back home July 12 but since then, I've been busily catching up with my life.]