Fire and Flood: Ruidoso in the Twenty Twenties
Near Ruidoso, New Mexico
The mountains that make this place beautiful can also turn on it, and in the summer of two thousand twenty-four they did. In mid-June, two wildfires exploded across the Mescalero reservation and the edge of Ruidoso, the South Fork Fire and the Salt Fire, at least one of them touched off by lightning. Together they burned around twenty-five thousand acres, forced roughly eight thousand people to flee under orders to go now, and destroyed at least fourteen hundred homes and structures.
Two people were killed. But the disaster did not end when the flames did. Wildfire strips a hillside of every plant that once held the soil in place, and above Ruidoso that left a bare burn scar poised over the town.
When the summer rains came, water that would once have soaked into the forest instead sheeted straight down into the Rio Ruidoso. In July of two thousand twenty-five, a storm dumped several inches in barely an hour and the noisy river surged from ankle-deep to more than twenty feet, cresting at a record height, sweeping away homes and killing three people, among them two young children of a soldier from Fort Bliss. Ruidoso is still healing, and still bracing, each monsoon season.
