2002

El Malpais National Monument
El Malpais National Monument and Southwest Youth Corps 2002 Hazard Fuel Reduction Project

El Malpais National Monument is located in west central New Mexico halfway between Albuquerque and Gallup. The monument’s 114,848 acres is a land of extremes. The area in and around the monument provides striking contrasts that include mountains, foothills, mesas, canyons, rugged lava flows and cinder cones, and open ranges. The monument supports a variety of fuel types, including grass, sage, pinyon/juniper, ponderosa pine and mixed conifer stands.

Due to fire exclusion practices and policies in the past, the monument has areas of heavy fuel concentrations. Some of these areas can be found in and around the monument’s private inholdings and park infrastructure. The monument completed a 300-acre Wildland Urban Interface project in the fall of 2002 to mitigate the hazard fuel problem. In addition, the monument has an active prescribed burn program, which will also aid in reducing heavy fuel loads.

In 2001, the monument applied for a Public Land Corps grant to fund a 10-person crew from the Southwest Youth Corps. That season, the crew helped prepare 200 acres for prescribed burning by thinning control lines of fuel which might cause burning crews problems during ignition. The crew did such a good job that the monument decided to bring them back for another season to remove and/or thin fuels around structures, along dirt roads and under power lines.

In the spring of 2002, the monument applied for a Public Land Corps grant of $18,000.00 to fund the Southwest Youth Corps (SYC) to perform hazard fuel reduction work. The Southwest Youth Corps, a non-profit organization based in Durango, Colorado, is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930’s. The goal of SYC programs is to engage young men and women, ages 16-25, as resources in the stewardship of public land throughout the Four Corners area while introducing them to careers in public land management, furthering their education and developing pertinent life skills.

Since its founding in 1998, SYC has continued to develop special programs and partnerships. In 2001, they launched a pilot program called the Fire and Fuel Reduction (FFR) crew. The purpose of the program was to hire and train young individuals in the techniques of pre-fire site preparation and fire fighting. The lead role of the crew is in Hazard Fuel Reduction. Towards that end, the crew went through two weeklong classes. The first was “Wildland Power Saws” which taught the crew to appreciate and safely operate chainsaws. The second class S-130/190, or “Basic Wildland Firefighter”, was dedicated to teaching the crew about fire behavior and techniques for containing wildfires. These classes were accompanied by certain certification tests, which rewarded each crewmember with a Red Card (fireline certification) and a Green Card (chainsaw certification).

A SYC crew of 7-10 crewmembers conducted three 36-40 hour sessions at the monument in the summer of 2002. They focused on three hazard fuel reduction projects. The first session was spent reducing fuel around park infrastructures. Thinning and piling of hazard fuel was performed around a park house, powerline and maintenance facility. The second session involved reducing fuels under powerlines that feed monument and National Conservation Area residents. The third session addressed Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) fuel reduction around monument inholdings. In total, 30 acres of hazard fuel reduction and 10 acres of WUI were treated.

El Malpais National Monument
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