By Dave Tomlin
For the Ruidoso News
Strength, courage, resilience and generosity emerged in wake of fire one year ago
Everybody who was here a year ago has a story about what they did when they realized the South Fork Fire was out of control and coming our way. Here’s mine.
It was late morning on Monday, June 17, and I was in the front yard of my cabin in Ponderosa Heights, looking west across Brady Canyon to the ridges behind it, where a thick plume of gray smoke was rising.
Helicopters were dropping red fire retardant, but the plume kept getting bigger. The wind was blowing strong, straight into my face. It smelled like burning trees.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and texted my wife at work that I was going to hitch our camper to my Tacoma.
“Come home now,” I wrote. “We need to get out of here.”
Less than half an hour later, around noon, as we were scrambling into the truck with our daughter, go-bags and dogs, I suddenly remembered we had new neighbors a few doors away who might not realize what was happening.
I told my daughter to run to their door and tell them the fire was getting too close and we were leaving. Sure enough, they had no idea of the danger.
They thanked her, packed up and hit the road not long after we did. We went south to Alamogordo on Highway 70 before smoke from the Salt Fire closed the road. Our neighbors drove just a few miles north and checked into the Swiss Chalet Inn.
Their stay was a short one.
Tragedy strikes
From its point of origin in the Upper Canyon a couple of miles inside Mescalero tribal land, the titanic wall of flame and smoke swept northeast through the northern edge of Ponderosa Heights, destroying two dozen homes just a few hundred yards from my cabin.
Then it wiped the Cedar Creek and Alpine Village subdivisions off the map before jumping Highway 48 onto upper Gavilan Canyon Road and lapping at the edges of Alto.
The Swiss Chalet Inn, built in 1962, stood directly in the fire’s broad path as it leaped the highway. The motel was reduced to cinders and rubble. Only its sky blue roadside pylon sign was spared and still marks the empty site.
Rescue workers found the body of Patrick Pearson lying not far away. Pearson, 60, a popular Ruidoso country musician, father of three and grandfather of seven who often played guitar at Quarters in Midtown, was living at the Chalet. He was recovering from surgery on a broken leg. As the news spread, social media blew up with heartfelt tributes, photos and grief.
My neighbors realized when they saw the outpouring of sorrow online that they had spoken with Pearson outside the Chalet as they made their second hasty evacuation of the day. He told them somebody was coming for him. The fire was moving so fast, it seems tragically possible that if Pearson’s ride was arriving from the north, it couldn’t reach him after Highway 48 was closed.
Pearson’s was one of two known deaths in the fire. The other victim was discovered across the highway and down a steep hill from the Chalet inside a vehicle parked on Ranier Road, burned beyond recognition. To this day, authorities haven’t said who it was or even if they ever found this out themselves.
Most of the 8,000 permanent residents of Ruidoso, along with however many visitors were here, swarmed east toward Roswell, 75 miles away on the only highway left open out of town. At the same time, an influx of responders was just beginning.
“Fourteen states responded and multiple state and federal agencies,” said Kerry Gladden, who handles public relations for the Village of Ruidoso. “At the height of the disaster, there were 2,000-plus responders on-scene, including firefighters, swift water rescue teams, National Guard, and local, state and federal resources.”
The danger and destruction lasted for weeks. As the fires were contained, the National Weather Service counted more than 40 flash floods from monsoon rains that hit the burn scars and turned our lazy cross-county streams into raging cataracts.
In the 12 months since, inbound and outbound migrations of large mobile workforces have defined each stage of the rescue, recovery and cleanup, and then the rebuilding processes that are ongoing and will be with us for years to come.
In countless ways, it has been and continues to be a remarkable comeback. Yet if a comeback is a return to where you were before tragedy struck, what is underway here is really something else entirely.
The version of Ruidoso slowly taking shape before our eyes — Mayor Lynn Crawford calls it Ruidoso 2.0 — is a place that will look, feel and behave differently after what it’s been through, and yet will still somehow be the Ruidoso that we and our visitors have always loved.
“We want a place that people, their kids that are born here, raised here, can get educated here through ENMU,” Crawford said. “The look and feel is clean and energetic and homey.
“How do you throw all that in there,” he asked as he struggled to describe his own vision of the Ruidoso to come. “Family businesses, eclectic shops, artisans, breweries and things that are fun in life but that are built for the long term. And a strong economy, diversified.”
Comeback in the works
“Diversified” is a freighted word among those who monitor the business vitality of Lincoln County and the neighboring Mescalero tribal homeland.
It’s shorthand for a regional economy that doesn’t depend almost entirely on visitor traffic generated by the Ruidoso Downs racetrack in the summer and Ski Apache in the winter.
It’s not a new idea. Ten years ago, Jim Miller helped organize and lead a series of high-level study and focus group meetings on economic development at the Inn of the Mountain Gods. Miller was the founding president of ENMU-Ruidoso and later became a business and management consultant.
The “Stronger Economies Together” conferences produced a thick report and a list of recommended “Strategies for Building New Economic Opportunities.”
Among them was the creation of more opportunities for outdoor recreation and exploration of cultural and historic sites. It proposed more systematic marketing to state and national groups that love the outdoors and might bring their members here to hike, bike, compete and play, then to eat, drink, shop and spend the night.
The report also urged “expansion or recruitment of 20 new non-tourism corporations or light industries to the region.”
In 2015 when the meetings ended, Miller took his three-ring binder of talking points and infographics home, put it on a shelf and watched it gather dust. But lately, it’s been coming to life all around him.
Miller sees the current expansion of the Region 9 Education Cooperative and the likely revival of commercial logging in Mescalero to process lumber from forest thinning projects as examples of the non-tourism business expansion the area needs.
The fires and floods have been a wake-up call. The racetrack had to move its 2024 season to Albuquerque. Then a paltry winter snowfall crushed all hope of a busy ski season that might have made up at least some of the lost summer millions in tourism earnings.
Participants in Miller’s 2015 breakout sessions thought they were looking for a way to better fill the quiet “shoulder seasons” between racing and skiing. But after a taste of two “peak” seasons not much richer than “off-peak,” there’s a real sense of urgency around the “Ruidoso 2.0” brainstorming that has resumed in earnest.
The village has hired a full-time staffer to go after off-road racing competitions, disc golf tournaments and other such events.
Miller isn’t the kind of guy to say, “I told you so.” But he might murmur a quiet “better late than never.” With a caveat: To keep visitor traffic strong, “the appearance of recovery is as important as recovery itself,” he says.
Road to recovery
It’s safe to assume that visitors who know what happened here last summer are willing to make allowances for absent landmarks, street closures, convoys of silt-laden dump trucks, heavy earth moving equipment on flatbed haulers, flood mitigation barriers and piles of woody waste from tree thinning.
And of course, there’s the dead-zone slash of scorched earth and naked tree trunks that now mars Ruidoso’s trademark view of Sierra Blanca, rising from what used to be unblemished forest green expanses of ponderosa pine.
For anyone whose most recent view of Ruidoso was before last June 17, these industrial-scale signs of a disaster’s aftermath are bound to be startling. But if “the appearance of recovery” is important, this really is what recovery looks like. It is not pretty, nor is it cheap.
Mayor Crawford estimates that damage to Village infrastructure alone — roads, bridges, culverts, water and sewage systems — will eventually cost at least $500 million to put to rights, and the work is less than 15% done so far. It may go on for five more years.
Most of the money is expected to come from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but it doesn’t come fast or easy.
Crawford explained that you have to go around with FEMA staff looking at whatever is broken. You have to figure out what it will take to fix it. You have to commission engineering studies to plan the solutions. You have to find state money or a grant to pay for the studies. When the studies are done, you have to get FEMA to agree in writing to reimburse the cost of doing the work.
Then and only then can you sign the work orders to do the projects, but only if you have gotten your hands on state or other grant or loan funds to pay the contractors. FEMA will only pay you or your lender back for work that has already been done and paid for, and only if it has approved the work in advance.
Oh, and you have to locate the contractors. Crawford said good ones are hard to find these days.
Crawford said some municipalities that signed post-disaster work orders too soon have found themselves on the hook for work after FEMA failed to reimburse them.
“We’ve run across communities all over this country that they’re still trying to pay off that debt,” he said. “It’s almost bankrupted some communities.”
Another cause for worry has emerged this year about dependence on FEMA. There has been open hostility in the new administration to federal involvement in disaster relief, along with threats to the agency’s very existence.
“It is a concern,” said Lincoln County Commission Chair Mark Fischer. But he said President Donald Trump visited disaster scenes in North Carolina and California even before the election. Fischer said he’s “cautiously optimistic” that federal support for relief work and the many grants in the pipeline will remain solid.
“I like to think it’s not just politically motivated,” Fischer said.
Crawford seemed less sure.
“At the end of the day, disaster response shouldn’t be partisan,” he said. “The fires and floodwaters didn’t check voter registrations before destroying homes and businesses in our community.”
‘Astonishing’ outpouring of aid
The loss of homes has been devastating on many levels. Fischer puts the total at approximately 1,350, perhaps 900 of those from the fire and the rest from floods. Kerry Gladden confirmed that 15 of the burned or flooded houses belonged to Village employees.
Some lost their homes while fighting to save the homes of others. Four were firefighters, including the chief, Joe Kasuboski. The Village police chief, L.T. Chavez, also lost his home. Both have since retired.
At the Ruidoso Municipal School District, 20 teachers and staff members were burned or flooded out of their homes.
Hundreds of evacuees returned to find themselves homeless and required immediate help with food and shelter while they figured out how to reorganize and relocate their lives.
More than any other family, Riker and Cindi Davis found themselves totally immersed in the chaos created by the mountain of urgent needs. Riker is chair of the Community Foundation of Lincoln County. Cindi is chair of the foundation’s Shelter Fund Committee.
Together, they led a fundraising campaign that collected more than $3.5 million and quickly distributed all of it in the form of instant cash grants to pay for immediate aid to well over 1,000 families who had been suddenly left with nothing.
“Money came in from all over the country,” Riker said. “We just need to harness that energy going forward.”
“It was truly astonishing the love that poured in,” said Cindi Davis. “I don’t see us raising that kind of money again, though we’ll probably need it.”
Most of the recipients were unaware that the Davis family had troubles of its own after the fires were out. Riker and Cindi’s main house survived, but they lost other structures, and their children were not so lucky. One lost a home in Cedar Creek. The home of another burned on upper Gavilan Canyon Road.
“We’ve got four insurance claims going among the four of us,” Cindi said.
For homeowners who chose to stay here and rebuild, insurance claims have been only one of the dozens of frustrations they’re facing, including but not limited to clearing away debris, obtaining new insurance and applying for building permits.
Nowhere have these tasks seemed more numerous or difficult than along the banks of the Rio Ruidoso. Post-fire flash floods have permanently changed and expanded the shape of the floodway and surrounding floodplain, forcing changes in building codes and insurance eligibility and leaving owners uncertain whether they can — or should — rebuild.
The confusion is even greater in the formerly shaded and coveted but now flood-ravaged enclave of Fern Trail near Midtown, where some officials would like to see damaged cabins and houses permanently removed and replaced with a public greenway and river walk.
A voluntary property buyout program has been discussed but seems to have stalled over some property owners’ reluctance to trust assessments of the “fair market value” they might be offered.
Another stumbling block is that federal funds would pay for only 75% of the cost of the buyout, and local government sponsors of the program must come up with the rest of the money.
“There’s a lot of interest,” said County Commissioner Fischer. “A lot of private property owners are still wanting to do that. The problem the county has is getting the 25% match.”
Yet even with all the complications, new homes are starting to pop up in burned-out neighborhoods. Three or four are taking shape in Ponderosa Heights. Two of them are even painted. Cindi Davis said one of her neighbors in Cedar Creek had broken ground by last September.
“I was so excited,” she said. “It was like, ‘OK, we’re coming back, don’t mess with us.’ You know, after the fire you wondered how many residents would move away. To see the determination, it’s fabulous.”
Even in Alpine Village, formerly a wooded dreamland of rolling hills and upscale homes but now a scorched and deserted moonscape, there are signs it won’t be that way forever or even for very long.
Tom Austin, a local real estate broker who knows property and knows the community, swallowed his misgivings and bought 4 acres where the previous owner’s house had burned down.
“I bought and planted 20 aspen trees,” he said. “Now I’m fighting off the elk and fighting off the horses. I love the spot. I love the area. I wouldn’t mind living there for the rest of my life. We don’t really know what the future’s going to hold. Everybody’s scared up there. We’re just hoping this all works out.”
Restoration and mitigation
Anybody living within the vast tracts of Lincoln County who has been burned or flooded at least once in the past century and says they aren’t scared isn’t paying attention.
The Bad Hoss Map Co. published a large-format topographical map last year titled “A Geographic History of Wildland Fires” in Ruidoso from 1911 through 2024. It lists 15 events and displays the overlaid scars in pastel colors. It’s pretty, from a distance.
“Burn scar” is a harsh phrase, but it doesn’t do justice to the reality. A scar marks the healed location of past trauma. But the charred regions left behind by the South Fork and Salt fires are open wounds. They still hurt. They still threaten the healthy zones around them. They still need care.
The good news is that they’re getting quite a lot of it. You can see some if you stand next to the Swiss Chalet sign north of town and turn in a slow circle. The hills are cleared of all debris except for long tree trunks laid horizontally on the slopes.
“We know that we’re going to have more flooding over the burn scars,” said Commissioner Fischer. “To try to reduce the rate and amount of flow of water, you’ve got to do those things. So reseeding, mulching and then taking out most of the material that was partially burned was important.
“And then establishing these horizontal runs of a few logs that you see to try to reduce that water flow perhaps reduces the impact of flooding and sediment.”
The federal Natural Resources Conservation Service does this kind of restorative work. Fischer doesn’t know what the agency work cost north of town, but he said the county has earmarked $50 million in federal aid for such defensive measures. Forest thinning projects and flood mitigation are underway in Mescalero as well.
Mitigation work is also visible along the Rio Ruidoso, especially near the intersection of Mechem and Sudderth where converging torrents smashed the Adobe Plaza beyond repair and drove giant boulders and debris into Fern Trail. Concrete Jersey barriers are lined up next to the scraped and flattened site to keep future floodwaters in their channel, now deepened by extensive silt removal.
Downstream near the racetrack and on tribal land to the south, huge catch basins are being laid out to keep water from overwhelming the clusters of mobile homes and the track itself, which were inundated last summer.
So we and our property are safer and getting more so as work proceeds. Has enough been done so far to get us through the summer just ahead?
I asked Rick Baugh, general manager of Ruidoso Downs, who has as much on the line as anyone and more than most as the monsoon season begins. He raised his hands and then his eyebrows. His mouth opened, but no words came out.
Ruidoso’s resilience
Memorial Day weekend brought two significant wildfires to Lincoln County, one of them at historic Ft. Stanton and the other in Flume Canyon. From my yard in Ponderosa Heights, the Flume plume looked too much like South Fork’s did a year ago. But RFD crews and air drops snuffed it out quickly.
In spite of the harms and fears of the past year, our communities have a lot to be thankful for and much to celebrate during this anniversary week.
Considering the scale and speed of the disasters, the loss of life could have been enormous. Good preparedness and decisive action prevented that. Eric Queller, village emergency management director, won a state award for his work before, during and after the days of crisis.
There was no local announcement. I stumbled across Queller’s honor by accident when I went online to find out how to spell his name for an article last year. Queller didn’t like talking about it; in his zero-tolerance view of emergency response, even one death would have been one too many. On the plus side, no firefighters or water rescue specialists were seriously hurt here.
Civic and government leaders could have taken bows for other achievements if the moment had ever made it seem appropriate. The water system stumbled but never fell. Zia crews kept natural gas lines from adding fuel to the fires. Commissioner Fischer improvised a recovery task force whose weekly meetings helped local, state and federal authorities coordinate efforts across interlocking jurisdictions.
The expected economic collapse of the regional economy never quite happened. Crawford said gross receipts tax, the most visible metric of business activity, staggered but then recovered.
Doomsday predictions of failures of Midtown retail and hospitality businesses didn’t materialize either. “There were some closures,” said Riker Davis, “but not to the numbers we thought might be impacted.”
Some business owners did leave, but new entrepreneurs arrived to replace them and serve visitor crowds that seem back to predisaster levels.
Much of this good news was driven by the hundreds of laborers who moved in, some with families in tow, for long-term recovery and repair work all over the county. Ongoing large-scale commercial projects like the Kinetic broadband network and the wind farms up north around Corona also helped.
The population of Lincoln County has been slowly declining for most of the past decade. The Ruidoso Municipal School District feared the fires and floods would lead to steeper losses and a sharp drop in school enrollment. That would have had a serious budget impact, since the state funding formula is based on classroom head counts. But it didn’t happen. Enrollment stayed flat.
Most gratifying of all, though, were the strength, courage, resilience and generosity that emerged from within and around the community in its hour of need. Tattoo artist Logan Fleharty became the poster boy for “Ruidoso Strong.” He grew internet famous for feeding evacuees’ pets and checking on property. My family learned from one of his video posts that our cabin was still standing.
There were cash donations to aid funds in astonishing amounts. There was volunteer help in abundance from church and nonprofit teams from near and far who passed out food, water and clothing, helped those in need with paperwork of all kinds and arranged temporary housing.
Merchants went far beyond the call of duty, too. Evacuees gridlocked on the road to Roswell told of handouts of water and food from the Allsup’s plaza east of Hondo, where they had to spend the night in their cars.
Chris Woodul of Sierra Blanca Pharmacy did many hours of behind-the-scenes paperwork and phone calls to fill prescriptions for locals and visitors whose medications and medical records were lost.
“One of the biggest things I learned is we’ve got a lot of people who love Ruidoso,” said Riker Davis. “We’ve got so much more in common than differences. I’m very optimistic for the future of this community.”
