if you know Albuquerque you know the sandias they rise above the east side of the city Granite mountains topped with Limestone that ignite to Pink every sunset the sandias hold Wilderness Springs recreation Trails wildlife but the forests here are increasingly vulnerable to Drought insect outbreaks and fire in a world that's warming warming all the time the sandias are drying the are telling us to pay attention on the east side of the sandia's and in the Cibola national forest and basically the Southwest in general we have areas of forests that actually resemble historic conditions but on a whole we have density levels of trees that we just haven't seen and so with that density level the force is really in an unhealthy spot these forests looked different 150 years ago before widespread grazing before A Century of fire suppression by the federal government and before greenhouse gas emissions fired up our planet's atmosphere if you go back almost only 150 years what you would have seen was variable trees and varying densities so you'd get into some areas that were really parked like really big open grown trees with some underbrush and some younger trees that are going in and then you could go just over the next Ridge and you could be a really thick dense forest of ponderosa pine so it was more varying 150 years ago compared to where it is now where we're just seeing really dense forest stands across the landscape [Music] bowl full of straws in the past there were fewer trees fewer straws sucking up water each tree got to take a big drink they could stretch and grow strong in a dense forest there are more straws each tree gets less water and is less resilient and now of course there's another problem less water in the bowl things are getting hotter and drier you know the snowpack is much more variable it's not as reliable year to year you know we've been in drought conditions you know these types of conditions really stress out trees and that makes them of course more susceptible to insects and diseases and you know we've seen a lot of that here in the last five ten years here on the east side of the Sandia Mountains in the last decade insects like the Douglas vertussic moth and the fur engraver have boomed in the sandias and their signs are everywhere they've caused a significant amount of mortality there's that elevational band of about one to two thousand feet where we've seen all that damage and it's probably cost about 50 percent mortality of the trees there as you're driving up the Sandia Crest Highway you look around and you see you know trees that are either turning brown or are dead and have lost their needles already that's almost entirely the result of the Douglas fruit tussock moth and then the fur engraver kind of working hand in hand tag teaming if you will compound that with drought conditions and it's it's really not a very good combination that combination we know is explosive for forests if there were a fire to occur on the east side of the CND is I would expect we could see some pretty severe fire conditions you know similar to fires that have happened to the south of us in the Manzano mountains also on the sibling National Forest you know things like most recently the dog had fire in 2016. we had Trigo Big Springs and Ojo Peak fires you know and those tended to start near the crest they were wind driven and they worked them their way downhill at you know really rapid paces and did a lot of damage so I guess you could expect kind of the same thing here in worst case scenarios there may not be a forest here due to the unhealthy nature of it right now so we had a fire we could lose this entire Mountain if conditions are conducive and perfect to carry fire we could lose this entire mountain in a matter of hours to days however if we continue to look for funding and opportunities to actively manage the fuel conditions on this mountain in 20 years the forest there's a good chance it'll still be here we may have some small patches that it may have burned we may have areas that we did prescribe fire in but if we actively go in and remove trees and thin the forest and make it more resilient in 20 years to 100 years this Forest could be as healthy as ever foreign ER world the choices we make the signs we pay attention to they matter more than ever for our land and New Mexico InFocus I'm Laura paskis