Out of the Ashes

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“The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish.”

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J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist in the development of the nuclear bomb, shortly after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

“Trails don’t just happen—they have to be built.”

Craig Martin, Los Alamos trail-builder

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os Alamos, New Mexico, had it all. While nearby Santa Fe and Taos got all the hype, this little-visited town sat high on the slopes of the Jemez Mountains, perched along scenic canyon rims, with singletrack radiating out in every direction. Forest spilled into the edges of town and trails lead from many backyards up thickly wooded mountainsides and down sunny canyon bottoms. As one resident describes it, “When I wanted to go hiking, I could walk right out my door.” Los Alamos, known mainly as the birthplace of nuclear weapons secrets, had another secret—it was an undiscovered, outdoor-lovers Eden.

Then, on May 11, 2000, Armageddon came. A week earlier, fire crews in neighboring Bandelier National Monument had started a prescribed fire to reduce the area forest’s heavy fuel load, but it quickly grew out of control and, now, blasted by 70-mile-per-hour winds, the inferno charged towards Los Alamos like Hell’s fury unleashed. The entire town of 12,000 fled in four hours. According to one local, “Everything was red, like you were in a giant darkroom.”

Out of the Ashes LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO, WAS ONCE HOME TO EPIC MOUNTAIN BIKING. THEN IT WENT STRAIGHT TO HELL.

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The Cerro Grand Fire, named for the mountain on which it started, was merciless, incinerating the homes of 403 families and the surrounding 70 square miles of forest—that’s an area nearly three times the size of Manhattan. The wooded mountainsides that had given the town its verdant backdrop were reduced to a smoldering dead zone of skeletal black sticks. Los Alamos was headline news across the nation and 75-percent of its singletrack was destroyed. The whole town was shaken,” said one Los Alamosian. “If you didn’t lose your home, you knew three people that did.”

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’D HAD MY EYE ON LOS ALAMOS FOR A FEW YEARS, having been tipped off to its undiscovered mountain biking and unique history. After the fire, I called Alex Mora, owner of the local bike shop, who said the trails were “totally destroyed.”

He said he hadn’t been selling many bikes either, and with no place to ride and, for many people, no place to live, “The spirit of biking has been burnt here.”

After the fire I wrote Los Alamos off, figuring whatever mountain bike jewels it once held were lost. But then a started hearing rumors. Locals were trying to rebuild the trails. A mountain bike club was leading the charge. IMBA had even sent its Trail Care Crew. I called Craig Martin, a leader of the trail community and author of two local mountain-bike guidebooks, who confirmed the rumors but said that few mountain bikers were visiting. “People don’t like burned landscapes—they think it looks just like it did after the fire,” he explained. “They don’t understand what’s happening—you have to come here to see for yourself.”

So it is that I find myself driving up steep, two-lane Highway 502 out of the Rio Grande Valley and up Los Alamos Canyon under a sunny September sky. Topping out on the canyon rim, the rounded peaks of the Jemez Mountains rise up ahead to over 10,000 feet, but first, here on a hidden shelf between canyons and mountains, sits Los Alamos. Remote and virtually inaccessible for years, it’s the perfect place for a secret laboratory.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory, though, isn’t my concern. I have other questions: Is there anything to ride? And if there is, is it any good?

Martin describes the trails immediately after the fire as “a shallow depression in six inches of ash” and the Forest Service and Los Alamos County were overwhelmed with restoration work. Then, much to their surprise, 500 volunteers showed up

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two weeks after the fire for an emergency work session on the local watershed. It was an astounding display—the fire was bringing the devastated community together in ways no one had imagined. “This is great,” Martin recalls saying to his neighbor, fire ecologist John Hogan, “this is going to get us through.”

So Martin and Hogan started the Volunteer Task Force, to lead the rehabilitation efforts. They were so successful that after six weeks all the rehab work volunteers could do was complete, and someone asked, “What can we do next?”

To Martin the answer was obvious: “How about trails?”

It was then he says that he decided, “OK, I’m going to give two years to lead this.” His wife worked at the lab and they and their two high-school-aged children lived comfortably, so he says he “didn’t need the money.” Plus, he really wanted the trails back.

And from there, Martin became the spiritual leader of the Los Alamos trail revival.

I first meet Martin at a trailhead on the edge of town. He’s wearing Carhartt pants with reinforced knees, dusty sunglasses rest on the bill of his baseball cap, and a ponytail hangs down his darkly tanned neck. The man clearly lives outdoors—he has the most U.V.-deteriorated Camelbak I’ve ever seen, it’s red nylon faded to a sun-bleached pink. We follow the trail a short ways into a boneyard forest of blackened trees and come upon a dozen trail-

workers. Martin is quickly in action and everyone listens as he goes into trail-Yoda mode, guiding their work and explaining the primary goal: keeping water off the trail.

All of the trailworkers are riders, which is typical—from the beginning, mountain bikers have led the charge on rebuilding Los Alamos’s singletrack. Before the fire, Tuff Riders—the local mountain bike club named after Tuff, the volcanic rock that covers much of the area—held once-a-month trailwork sessions that drew five or six riders, a good showing for a smalltown club. But after the fire, according to former Tuff Riders’ president Gabriella Lopez Escobedo, “we were out every weekend with 20 people for two to three years.”

Even with the outpouring of volunteer labor, trail restoration went slowly the summer after the burn. Conditions on the ground—eroding soils, buried trails, and fallen trees everywhere—were tough, and as Martin explains, “The Forest Service guys had never seen anything like this before either.”

Even with the National Guard in town hauling trailworkers into the backcountry in a troop carrier, the trails were in such bad shape that it took 30 volunteers a day, showing up for both days of three consecutive weekends, to restore only three miles of trail. People tried not to think about the other lost trails; it was too painful, the prospect of bringing them back too out of reach.

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T THE TRAILWORK, I MEET KENT HETTINGA who offers to show me the trails he’s masterminded at the nearby Pajarito Mountain Ski Area, only four miles from town. For years the biggest event on the Los Alamos mountain bike calendar was the Pajarito Punishment race, which attracted cyclists from across the Southwest. But when the fire torched the entire race route, the Punishment looked like it was toast. Hettinga and a few other Tuff Riders vowed to not let that happen, but they needed a new course. And fast.

When the ski area volunteered its land—most of which had been mercifully spared by fire—Hettinga, Escobedo, and a handful of other Tuff Riders hit the slopes determined to build a course.

“We were up there every night after work,” Escobedo says of their feverish, marathon effort. “We built three miles of trail in like three weeks.”

It wasn’t exactly a huge course, but it was enough. The race was saved—with lots of laps—attracting 80 riders, including cyclists from Texas and Colorado.

Hettinga, a 43-year-old computer specialist for the lab, has been coming up here after work and on weekends ever since, hewing another four miles of singletrack. “I just like to be outside and get my hands in the forest soil,” he says, before throwing a leg over his Moots YBB and leading me into the woods. His trail is

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narrow and serpentine and fun, and it flows through a green forest of spruce, fir, and aspen.

Ah forest. The next day I’m only a few miles away from Pajarito’s lush singeltrack but you’d never know it. Scott Sportsman, Bart Vanden Plas, and I sit in the dirt munching energy bars on the route formerly known as the Guaje Ridge Trail. The sun is high in a crystalline blue sky but everywhere else you look, at the canyons and mountainsides, is black, the charcoal-plated surfaces of thousands of scorched trunks shining an iridescent sheen in the sunlight. It’s an unearthly landscape, but also, a peaceful one. Though we’re only three miles from town, we’re immersed in wilderness.

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“There used to be trails all through here,” Vanden Plas says, waving his hand across the empty land before us. The Guaje Ridge Trail was the favorite local epic, Los Alamos’ best and most classic ride, a rugged singletrack that dropped down the forested ridges overlooking town. But as we sit here we know Gauje’s a still-buried treasure, like so many other trails around Los Alamos.

So we change the subject. Vanden Plas and Sportsman are describing what it’s like to work at the lab—potentially the most anally retentive workplace in the history of humankind. Much sensitive nuclear and other secret work is still performed there, and they tell of random, early morning breathalyzers given to lab employees designed to detect alcohol drank the night before. They discuss the intense scrutiny every potential “Labbie” undergoes before being hired; between the FBI interrogations and background investigations, no past indiscretions go uncovered. “I told ’em everything,” Vanden Plas says, hinting at a colorful past, “and they still hired me.”

Most scientists and lab employees are uber-nerd straight, but Vanden Plas, a 45-year-old chemical engineer who monitors the cleanup of waste left by the lab’s 50 years of nuclear research, is different.

With his long blond hair and voluminous, graying beard he could just as well be leading peace protests or partying with whatever’s left of the Grateful Dead.

Sportsman doesn’t fit the pocket-protectored Los Alamos stereotype, either. If the lab is the world’s largest nerdery, then Sportsman is the cool nerd, the one with pierced ears, calf tattoos, and wicked singletrack skills. Los Alamos riding is unrelentingly rocky and technical, with loads of climbing, and yet Sportsman blazes it all on a fully-rigid steel singlespeed. “I haven’t ridden this trail since before the fire,” Vanden Plas says as we start pedaling again, a hint of wistfulness in his voice. We’ve come here to scope out what remains of it and the answer is: not much.

As we turn around to head back to the trails that are actually trails, Vanden Plas points out some rocks that cracked during the fire. When it raged through here, the fire was burning at a toasty 2,000 degrees, hot enough to, well, crack rocks. “Look tire tracks,” Sportsman says, excitedly pointing to the rolling chevron pattern in the soil. “Yes!” To Sportsman and Vanden Plas these are more

than just tread marks, they are a sign—mountain bikers haven’t given up on Guaje. If there’s one thing the people of Los Alamos have learned, it’s that what has been lost can be reclaimed.

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Y THE SPRING OF 2001, one year after the fire, the community’s effort to rehabilitate the land and rebuild the trails around Los Alamos were reaching heroic levels. Thanks to volunteers led by Martin, 20 miles of trail were stabilized and fitted with crucial erosion-controls. Another massive volunteer effort, coCaption to go here in this Caption to go here in this space Caption to go here in this space ordinated again by Martin, planted 12,000 pine seedlings in the burned hills outside town. first called Martin. One third of her students’ homes had burned It wasn’t uncommon for multiple physicists to show up for and she said, “These kids lost their houses—what can we do?” So Tuff Riders trailwork sessions and as one non-scientist club they started trailwork one day a week and within a year, Martin, member says, “It’s goddamned funny—they stand around having along with Volunteer Task Force co-founder John Hogan, had deintense academic conversations about it. It even gets to the point veloped an outdoor environmental curriculum with restoration where someone will go and take apart what another guy just built and trailwork at its core. Soon, in addition to sixth-graders, they and build his own idea.” Not be the fastest way to build a trail perhad hundreds of middle-schoolers out planting native vegetation haps, but at least they were out there. and rebuilding trails.

Looking to take their trailbuilding skills to a higher level (and “It sounds amazing, but the work they do is incredible,” Martin maybe even get their feuding Einsteins on the same page), Tuff says of the school kids, who became a major surprise factor in re-

When it raged through here, the fire was burning at a toasty 2,000 degrees, hot enough to crack rocks.

Riders landed a visit from IMBA’s Trail Care Crew that spring. By all accounts it was a landmark visit. “It was huge,” says Escobedo.

Locals learned new techniques for making more durable and mountain-bike friendly singletrack, but just as important, the TCC’s visit left Tuff Riders energized. The newly trail-savvy club promptly proposed a reroute of a popular canyon-bottom trail that been destroyed by the fire. Forest Service managers were initially reluctant, predicting the job would take many work sessions. Instead, 30 volunteer mountain bikers showed up and the new route was built in a day.

“I love pulaskis,” an 11-year-old girl says as she swings the axlike tool into the soil on a Los Alamos hillside. The 6th grade class from Mountain Elementary School is cutting a new trail in the burned area on the edge of town that will eventually connect their neighborhood to their school. They’re working at the base of Burnt Mountain, or as Martin wryly calls it, “Re-Burnt Mountain.”

It was the fall of 2000 when schoolteacher Laura Patterson

building the trails. “You put Pulaskis in the hands of 8th grade girls—not boys, because that’s too dangerous—and a lot of stuff gets done in a short period of time.”

The 6th graders are scheduled to work until lunch, and as the morning winds down they’ve cut about 1/8 of a mile of fresh singletrack. One boy asks his teacher, “Mr. Orr, can we do this all day?” As Martin checks out the work he notices a handful of boys who have lost track of the flags that mark the trail and are enthusiastically hacking away at where there think it should go—down a steep, rocky slope. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Martin calls out as he runs over to boys. “Do you see any flags there?” he says while herding them back up the hill. “Remember, follow the flags, follow the flags.”

Heading back to school for the day, as the class walks back along the trail they’ve just made, another boy looks at it with a spark in his eye and says, “I’m gonna mountain bike this trail!”

Another trail built; another trail-builder born.

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A boy looks back with

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a spark in his eye and says, “I’m gonna mountain bike this!” Another trail built; another trail-builder born.

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scent as we pick our way for hours down rock fields and through flesh-tearing locust bushes that have grown over the route. Sometimes Guaje’s ghostly remnants fade out completely and we lose the line, only to find it again 10 minutes later.

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charred trees, then directs the group to start clearing the trail and cutting in new tread. The considerations are always the same: erosion (where will water go?), and flow (how will the trail ride?).

Sportsman and I spend a long time examining one particular section where a smooth rock popper drops into a snaking “S” turn.

We pretend we’re railing it on bikes and walk the section again and again, moving rocks and uprooting bunchgrass to get the sight lines and flow just right. It may only be 50 feet of trail, but we’re going to make darn sure it’s a fun 50 feet.

The next day, Sportsman leads me on a ride into the upper reaches of the mountains above town until we reach an old sign that beckons: “Guaje Ridge Trail.” Though our trailwork only reached the trail’s bottommost section, we’re hungry for an epic and want to see what remains of the trail from this end. It may be a scorched, rocky mess, but it’s also a thrilling, bone-rattling de-

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UT NOT ALL OF LOS ALAMOS’S TRAILS ARE IN such good shape. Though they’ve worked miracles reviving their near-town arteries, many of the routes further afield, the epics—trails that Martin wrote off shortly after the burn—still lay in ruin. Hiking deep into the backcountry and rebuilding them is Los Alamos’s last great challenge. No trail epitomizes this more than Guaje Ridge, where Sportsman, Vanden Plas and I found the tire tracks a few days earlier. So it is with much enthusiasm that Sportsman, Hettinga, and eight other volunteers—led, of course, by Martin, who admits to the group that, “we thought we’d never revive this trail”—hike in three miles at sunrise to perform the first trailwork on Guaje since the fire.

The trail is a wreck—eroded, grown over, and hard to find— and there’s much to be done. Martin stops for a minute to marvel at the flood of aster flowers spreading a sea of violet under the

tinga lead me on a tour of the town trail system. Pedaling through a neighborhood of all new, fire-resistant homes and freshly-laid sidewalks—where still-standing, charred telephone poles are all that remain of neighborhoods lost—we duck onto a newly-built trail that takes us on a rollicking ride through the sun-drenched burn zone. It’s ledgy and fast, with one arcing turn after another. When we reach the end of the burn, it’s like someone’s flipped a giant switch—suddenly we’re in a pine-needle blanketed world of shady ponderosa pine forest. The fire largely missed the canyons below town and we take a long singletrack tour of their labyrinth. From Rendija Canyon to Bayo Canyon to Walnut Canyon to Pueblo Canyon we ride, only twice popping up into town to cross roads.

This unburned forest has changed since the fire though, too.

Learning from their past, Los Alamos citizens have diligently thinned the ponderosa to prepare for the inevitable fires to come.

For if there’s one thing scientists and recent history tell us, it’s that fire is coming—to backyards and favorite trails across the country. A century of fire suppression has left many towns in the same position: ready to burn. But as Los Alamos has shown, fire isn’t the end, it’s an opportunity.

And although the huge numbers of volunteers from the area slowly ebbed in the years after the fire, Los Alamos mountain bikers never faltered in their determination to rebuild their trails.

And nobody was more determined than Martin. More than halfa-decade after deciding to give two years to the effort, he’s made a career of it—in late 2003 Los Alamos County made him their Open Space Specialist and bought him a new mountain bike, which he calls his “official county vehicle.”

By my visit in 2005, thanks to over 65,000 Herculean hours of volunteer labor, the entire near-town trail network had been not only restored, but improved—with almost 30 miles of trail rebuilt, and nine miles of all-new singletrack linking everything into a cohesive web. Today, Los Alamos’s community trail system is one of the best, and most fun to ride, in the country.

Uncrowded singletrack, wildflower oceans, and new trails radiating out in every direction—Los Alamos has it all. Again.

T THE TIME OF OUR BUSHWHACKING THE DREAM of resuscitating Guaje was just that, a dream. But the repeated visits we made to it that week lit a match under locals and sparked an effort that hadn’t been seen since the summer after the fire. After I leave, Sportsman will ride the trail repeatedly.

Together he and Hettinga will rally the Tuff Riders, while Martin will hike in with an entire Boy Scout troop. After multiple workdays with dozens of volunteers, the entire five-mile singletrack will be restored by Halloween. An epic feat, even by Los Alamos standards.

Near the end of my stay, Sportsman, Vanden Plas, and Het-

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