NM’s 2025 Wildfire Season: Preparation, Resilience and Recovery

New Mexicans are weathering another wildfire season while the residents and forests in and around the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon burn scar are still recovering from the largest-ever fire to rip through the state in 2022.

This week, we take you to Northern New Mexico for an update on the status of those efforts.

On the burn scar itself, correspondent Elizabeth Miller meets up with reforestation researchers from UNM and NMSU to take you on a tour of the little seedlings that dot one corner of the more than 340,000 acres where towering pines once blanketed the landscape. You’ll see the scorched devastation, but also the hope for a future, more resilient forest everyone can rely on and enjoy much sooner than if nature simply took its course.

We’ll also head inside, to a hall at New Mexico Highlands University, to hear about how the area’s people and communities are recovering. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham held a town hall there to hear residents out and express her solidarity with how frustratingly slow recovery is going. She calls out the local governments for not spending their enormous influx of federal and state dollars fast enough and urges them to let her team step in.

So, yes, New Mexico is still very much recovering from past fires, but that can’t be our only focus, because here we are again in another wildfire season — one that’s predicted to worsen in the coming weeks amid persistent drought. Source New Mexico reporter Patrick Lohmann sits down with State Forester Laura McCarthy to bring you that forecast and understand more about the state’s preparation, especially in the face of changes at the federal level.

Past fires are also informing how the Santa Fe-based nonprofit Forest Stewards Guild is approaching its work this season. On a windy, dry day, federal government workers attempted a pair of controlled burns that quickly spiraled out of control and became the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. As an org that also conducts these burns, we learn about how the communities they serve feel about actively lighting fires in an effort to keep the wild ones small.

We also dig into the roles of prevention, preparedness and resilience in the organization’s approach. Federal changes come up in this conversation too, since the Guild uses a Biden-era grant to help homeowners assess their fire risk and chip in on fixes.

We know that with fire season can come worry and fear about the future, along with anger and heartbreak about the past. While this week’s show can’t necessarily ease that, I hope it can help you become better informed about the present. What are survivors experiencing, what is the government doing (and not doing), how are researchers and nonprofits showing up to help, and what’s the science behind their approach?

Join us as we wrap our heads around New Mexico’s 2025 wildfire season.

-Nash Jones, Host