Ghost Ranch burning: Pedernal disappears in smoke

Pedernal is the mountain made famous by Georgia O'Keeffe because she painted it so often. She is even quoted as having a proprietary claim on it: "God told me I could have it if I painted it enough." Pedernal is one of a number of distinctive landmarks that make up the "Valley of Shining Stone" near Abiquiu, NM, where O'Keeffe lived for nearly 50 years.

I am staying at Ghost Ranch, which is where one of O'Keeffe's two houses is located. This is where she painted many of the canvases that include Pedernal as a motif and metaphor.

Sadly, Pedernal disappeared yesterday. The sky was clear enough in the morning that Pedernal stood out in the distance as usual (above.) But a plume of smoke rose ominously over the mountain and drifted off to the east, as it has ever since I arrived in NM ten days ago. The smoke is from the Thompson Ridge fire in the Jemez Mountains. It is some distance beyond Pedernal from this vantage and doesn't threaten the immediate vicinity. It is the same fire that I saw and posted about in Santa Fe last week.

By mid-morning yesterday the wind had shifted and the smoke came directly over Pedernal, obscuring it completely (below.) The fire was reported to have been 40% contained at that time.

Pedernal is in the center of this photo, just to the left of the dead tree, barely visible through the haze of smoke.

The good news, though, is that it rained for the first time in a long time yesterday afternoon and evening. There have been record droughts two years in a row here now. The rain was insufficient to break the drought, but a news report this morning says the Jemez fire is now 60% contained. I was relieved to see Pedernal again on my morning hike (below.) Today, for the first time, there is no obvious plume of smoke.

Keep your fingers crossed. Pray, if that's your inclination, for more rain.

I posted a related story, about the "O'Keeffe Landscape Tour," on Arts Without Borders.

To see additional photos from Ghost Ranch, go to my flickr set.

Santa Fe burning

I arrived in Santa Fe yesterday. I had read about the fires, but like the tornadoes in Oklahoma, they were abstractions. The tornadoes were horrible; the fires were horrible. But horrible is an abstract emotion. It doesn't bite to the bone. That is when we say "terrible" instead of "horrible."

I could see the smoke before I got halfway from Albuquerque to Santa Fe.

There are two fires burning, in the Jemez Mountains to the west of Santa Fe and the Pecos to the east. They don't threaten the city itself, apparently, and so people go about their lives, though the pall of smoke is ever-present.

It was the sunset last night that really brought home the fires for me. I watched the sun go down for over an hour with a mixture of fascination, horror, and melancholy. It was terribly beautiful.

I am staying at a B&B and my hosts were patient with me when I asked where I could go to watch the sunset. I could see the melancholy in their eyes. The fascination, if they ever felt it, had faded with time. "The fire in the Jemez [to the west] does make for beautiful sunsets," one of them said sadly.

The smoke drifted ceaselessly upwards, as it has done for too many days. It rose into a wide pall that stretched across the entire sky, gradually darkening until it was impossible to distinguish the smoke from the on-coming night.

Tornadoes, fire, drought.... What will we dream in this on-coming night?