JEMEZ MOUNTAINS – Two years ago, Laney Smith watched a smoke plume from his house on Cochiti Mesa in the Jemez Mountains on a Sunday afternoon, saw it quickly grow bigger and called his wife, Susie, who was in town in Los Alamos to ask her to stock up on some provisions.
It looked like it might be a big forest fire and they might be holed up in their remote home for a few days.
Smith, who owns a machine shop in Los Alamos with his
brother, had cleared a defensible space around his house – the house he
had just finished building and furnished three months earlier – and
wasn’t too worried about fire coming close. Until he saw the Las Conchas
Fire advancing at what he would later learn was an acre a second.
“It took off so fast,” Smith said. “We could hear it. We could see it moving toward us. It was just a roar.”
Laney and Susie Smith had only two concerns, and their names are Juneau and Kiska.
The purebred wolves came to live with Smith 12 years ago,
when they were 3 months old, after his father, Donald, was killed in a
car accident. Donald loved wolves, had plenty of land for large pens at
his rural home in Utah and knew a wolf breeder who often had animals
that needed a home.
After he died, the timberwolf pups became Laney’s
responsibility. He built a large pen for them, arranged to get donated
freezer meat, and roadkill elk and deer to feed them, and gave them love
and attention. “It was quite an inheritance,” he says.
Laney
Smith pets Kiska, left, and Juneau, his two timberwolves, in a pen in
the Jemez Mountains. After surviving the Las Conchas Fire two years ago,
the wolves had another close call with the Thompson Ridge Fire this
month. (Marla Brose/Albuquerque Journal)
As the fire roared toward the mesa that night, Laney and
Susie knew they had only minutes to get out alive and they had no
vehicle that could safely transport two 130-pound wild animals. Laney
stood at the wolves’ pen, opening and closing the gate latch, wondering
whether he should keep Juneau and Kiska penned up to possibly burn to
death or let them run free.
“Say goodbye,” Susie told him. “We gotta go.”
After he and Susie kissed them on their noses, Laney latched
the gate and they ran for their car, thinking they’d never see the
wolves alive again. On the road out, he saw his brother, Tom, racing in
with a truck with a camper shell and waved him on to the house. Seven
minutes later, Tom had the wolves in his truck and drove out. The fire
leaped the road just behind his truck and within minutes had engulfed
the Smiths’ house.
The Smiths were among a few dozen victims of the Las Conchas
Fire, which at the time was the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s
history, the fastest-moving and the most intense. Like others, they got
out with the clothes on their backs and lost everything.
But they had the wolves.
Settled in White Rock, they found temporary space at a wolf
sanctuary for Juneau and Kiska, and began building a permanent home for
the wolves on some isolated private land bordering the forest. They
moved the wolves there later in 2011.
On May 31 this year, a power line sparked a fire about two
miles northeast of La Cueva, on the other side of Redondo Peak from the
wolves. For the next two weeks, Smith spent all the time he could with
the wolves, who were unconcerned and entertaining themselves with a
fresh deer carcass, as he watched the fire march up the flank of Redondo
and around its base, closer and closer to their pen.
What are the chances two wolves would be threatened by
wildfire twice in two years? In the Jemez, unfortunately, the odds
aren’t that bad.
Some of the biggest and most destructive forest fires in New
Mexico have burned in the Jemez – the Dome Fire, Cerro Grande, Las
Conchas. Smith has watched them all with a front-row seat.
“I hate to say it,” he told me, “but it’s really exciting.”
These past two weeks have certainly been exciting,
especially June 8, when the blaze jumped a fire line and began making a
beeline for the wolves. Firefighters bulldozed a break line all around
the wolves’ pen, and Laney and Susie set up their sleeping bags on a
hill nearby. For hours, they watched the fire march toward them and
listened to its dull roar.
Laney told me they had a truck with a camper shell waiting
nearby in case they had to re-create the Cochiti Mesa escape. At 3 in
the morning, with smoke and fire advancing, he said, “We were sitting
there thinking, ‘Do we need to go?’ ”
I was standing on that hillside with Laney and Susie the
other evening, looking at wisps of smoke from lingering hot spots, all
that’s left now of the Thompson Ridge Fire.
Firefighters were all over the fire as it moved toward the
wolves that night, and they stopped it about a half-mile from Juneau and
Kiska’s pen.
“I’ve never seen a crew hit a fire so hard,” Laney said. “They were definitely awesome, the fire folks.”
The fire is well-contained at about 24,000 acres now. Juneau
and Kiska, no worse for the experience, were romping in their pen with
Laney and Susie the other evening, munching on bloody oxtails and
howling as the sun set.
Because they were bottle-fed and raised around humans,
Juneau and Kiska are affectionate and gentle with their keepers, but
they remain wild animals with strong jaws and flashing teeth. They’re 12
now, with an expected lifespan of about 14 years, so the Smiths are
preparing for a future without wolves.
“I’m going to be sad when they’re gone, but I’ll also be
relieved,” Laney said. “This isn’t something I ever would have chosen.
But I inherited them from my dad, and I’m going to take good care of
them.”
And what about staying in the fire-prone Jemez Mountains?
“I moved here 23 years ago and got to see it at its best,”
Laney said. “We love it here. Fires are a fact of life. As long as we
don’t get burned up in them, we’ll stay here.”
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