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Driving to Ruidoso after the Little Bear Fire last year, we passed a meadow brimming with hay bales about to become mulch on burn-scarred land.
Up north, Santa Clara Pueblo officials figure it will take $100 million and 100 years to restore Santa Clara Canyon after fire devastated half the watershed.
The average westerner is relinquishing the notion of our forests as a pristine resource and getting used to the reality of an overgrown, parched and buggy tinder box, dangerous as a warehouse full of old dynamite.
We don’t lack for solutions. In fact, there are so many loud voices, that’s part of the problem.
Another is that policy makers don’t recognize that the real cost of these fires goes beyond firefighting.
Those are two points made by the nonpartisan, nonprofit National Institute for the Elimination of Catastrophic Wildfire.
Its organizers and supporters are retired forestry professionals and firefighters.
In a nutshell, the institute sees a federal Forest Service that’s paralyzed by a dense patchwork of conflicting laws, decisions made by political appointees with no experience on the ground, poor morale, under-staffing and budget cuts. The fires grow bigger, and the funding grows smaller.

“Ignorance is bliss,” they say. Well, if this is really true, we have a lot of happy people in this world.
 When using a credit card at a grocery store last month, the clerk handed it back and said she couldn’t accept it because it wasn’t signed. That was very responsible on her part. Cards are signed to provide security.
 So I took out a pen and signed the card. Then she accepted it and ran it through for the purchase.
Ah yes, I do love security procedures.
A few weeks ago, we celebrated Pi Day. I was telling someone about how one can estimate pi by tossing rods across a set of parallel lines and counting the percentage of times they cross the lines. I then mentioned how the Otowi bookstore did this last year by having children toss hot dogs across a grid.
The man asked me, “So, is that how they compute pi?”
Uh, yeah. Yes, that’s right. They do it with hot dogs. Lots of hot dogs.
Like I said. A lot of very happy people out there.
Rudolph Zallinger’s classic picture of the ascent of man shows an early primate walking, standing more and more erect, his head lifting ever higher toward the heavens. My theory is that as man’s head was elevated, the increased altitude reduced the oxygen level to the brain.

Almost 30 million years ago, in what is now Northern New Mexico, two of our planet’s ever-shifting plates, the North American and the Pacific, crunched up against one another, causing a dramatic separation in the earth’s crust through which in time a great river would flow.
Today that separation in the earth’s crust remains spectacular, and we know it as the Rio Grande Gorge, named for the river that runs through it, sometimes ferociously, sometimes serenely.
To drive through that canyon is to drive through one of this continent’s beautiful and breathtaking wonders.
Last week President Barack Obama used the powers vested in him by the Antiquities Act of 1906 to make it the “Rio Grande del Norte National Monument.”
Corks were popping and hands were clapping from Taos to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., as the President signed a proclamation adding some 240,000 acres of Northern New Mexico, all the way up to Ute Mountain near the Colorado border, to the roster of national monuments.
It was an especially poignant moment for New Mexico’s recently retired U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, who was present for the White House signing ceremony.
Bingaman has long championed national park or monument status for the area. “This is a great day for New Mexico,” the former senator said.

Most people who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II learned to scrimp and save as a matter of necessity.
Many also gained financial security during subsequent decades when pension plans were more common, homeownership became the norm and government programs like Social Security and Medicare expanded.
For a time, it seemed their Baby Boomer children stood to inherit amounts unheard of for previous generations.
However, many economic factors have taken their toll on seniors’ nest eggs in recent years.
Thus, if you were counting on a sizeable inheritance to help finance your own retirement, you may want to rethink that strategy.
Here are several reasons why many seniors are revising their estate distribution plans:
Most people who invested heavily in the stock market during the Great Recession watched helplessly as their accounts lost significant value. Although the market has mostly recovered, many people — especially those in or approaching retirement — stashed their remaining balances in safer investments earning very low interest, worried the market might plunge further.
Many likely will have to draw on their account principal to make ends meet, thereby depleting their savings (and estates) much more rapidly than planned.