Out of the Ashes

LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO, WAS ONCE HOME TO EPIC MOUNTAIN BIKING.

THEN IT WENT STRAIGHT TO HELL.

Los 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 Ban-

delier 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 in-

ferno 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.”

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

Te x t a n d P h o t o s b y A a r o n Te a s d a l e

l l l

l l l

l l l

40

RODALE’S MOUNTAIN BIKE MAY 2005

l l l

l l l

l l l

41

RODALE’S MOUNTAIN BIKE MAY 2005

Caption to go here in

this Caption to go

here in this space

Caption to go here in

this space Caption

to go here in this

The Cerro Grand Fire, named for the

mountain on which it started, was merci-

less, incinerating the homes of 403 families

and the surrounding 70 square miles of for-

est—that’s an area nearly three times the

size of Manhattan. The wooded mountain-

sides 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.”

I’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 moun-

tain 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. “Peo-

ple 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 un-

der 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 con-

cern. 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

two weeks after the fire for an emergency work session on the lo-

cal watershed. It was an astounding display—the fire was bring-

ing the devastated community together in ways no one had imag-

ined. “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-

l l l

l l l

l l l

42

RODALE’S MOUNTAIN BIKE MAY 2005

l l l

l l l

l l l

42

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 rebuild-

ing 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 small-

town club. But after the fire, according to former Tuff Riders’

president Gabriella Lopez Escobedo, “we were out every week-

end with 20 people for two to three years.”

Even with the outpouring of volunteer labor, trail restora-

tion went slowly the summer after the burn. Conditions on

the ground—eroding soils, buried trails, and fallen trees ev-

erywhere—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.

AT 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 moun-

tain bike calendar was the Pajarito Punishment race, which at-

tracted 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 hand-

ful 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 cy-

clists 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

Caption to go here in this Caption to go here

in this space Caption to go here in this space

Caption to go here in this space Caption to go

here in this space Caption to go here in this

Caption to go here in this Caption to go here in this space

l l l

l l l

l l l

43

RODALE’S MOUNTAIN BIKE MAY 2005

narrow and serpentine and fun, and it flows through a green for-

est of spruce, fir, and aspen.

Ah forest. The next day I’m only a few miles away from Pajari-

to’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 crys-

talline 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.

“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 oth-

er 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 per-

formed 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,” Van-

den 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 mon-

itors 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 lead-

ing peace protests or partying with what-

ever’s left of the Grateful Dead.

Sportsman doesn’t fit the pocket-pro-

tectored 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 sin-

gletrack skills. Los Alamos riding is unre-

lentingly 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.

BY THE SPRING OF 2001,

one year after the fire, the

community’s effort to re-

habilitate 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. An-

other massive volunteer effort, co-

ordinated again by Martin, plant-

ed 12,000 pine seedlings in the

burned hills outside town.

It wasn’t uncommon for multiple physicists to show up for

Tuff Riders trailwork sessions and as one non-scientist club

member says, “It’s goddamned funny—they stand around having

intense academic conversations about it. It even gets to the point

where someone will go and take apart what another guy just built

and build his own idea.” Not be the fastest way to build a trail per-

haps, but at least they were out there.

Looking to take their trailbuilding skills to a higher level (and

maybe even get their feuding Einsteins on the same page), Tuff

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 ini-

tially reluctant, predicting the job would take many work ses-

sions. 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 ax-

like 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

first called Martin. One third of her students’ homes had burned

and she said, “These kids lost their houses—what can we do?” So

they started trailwork one day a week and within a year, Martin,

along with Volunteer Task Force co-founder John Hogan, had de-

veloped an outdoor environmental curriculum with restoration

and trailwork at its core. Soon, in addition to sixth-graders, they

had hundreds of middle-schoolers out planting native vegetation

and rebuilding trails.

“It sounds amazing, but the work they do is incredible,” Martin

says of the school kids, who became a major surprise factor in re-

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 sin-

gletrack. 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 enthu-

siastically 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, fol-

low 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.

l l l

l l l

l l l

44

RODALE’S MOUNTAIN BIKE MAY 2005RODALE’S MOUNTAIN BIKE MAY 2005

l l l

l l l

l l l

45

RODALE’S MOUNTAIN BIKE MAY 2005

Caption to go here in

this Caption to go

here in this space

Caption to go here in

this space Caption to

go here in this space

Caption to go here in

this space Caption to

go here in this space

l l l

l l l

l l l

44

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

Caption to go here in this Caption to go here in this space Caption to go here in this space

BUT NOT ALL OF LOS ALAMOS’S TRAILS ARE IN

such good shape. Though they’ve worked miracles re-

viving their near-town arteries, many of the routes fur-

ther afield, the epics—trails that Martin wrote off shortly after the

burn—still lay in ruin. Hiking deep into the backcountry and re-

building them is Los Alamos’s last great challenge. No trail epito-

mizes 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 vol-

unteers—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

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 sec-

tion 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-

l l l

l l l

l l l

46

RODALE’S MOUNTAIN BIKE MAY 2005

PH

OT

O C

RE

DIT

RODALE’S MOUNTAIN BIKE MAY 2005

l l l

l l l

l l l

46 PH

OT

O C

RE

DIT

Caption to go here in this Caption to go here in this space

Caption to go here in this space Caption to go here in this space

Caption to go here in this space Caption to go here in this space A boy looks back with a spark in his eye and says, “I’m gonna mountain bike this!” Another trail built; another trail-builder born.

scent as we pick our way for hours down rock fields and through

flesh-tearing locust bushes that have grown over the route. Some-

times Guaje’s ghostly remnants fade out completely and we lose

the line, only to find it again 10 minutes later.

AT THE TIME OF OUR BUSHWHACKING THE DREAM

of resuscitating Guaje was just that, a dream. But the re-

peated visits we made to it that week lit a match under lo-

cals 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 re-

stored by Halloween. An epic feat, even by Los Alamos standards.

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

tinga lead me on a tour of the town trail system. Pedaling through a

neighborhood of all new, fire-resistant homes and freshly-laid side-

walks—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 Can-

yon 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 bik-

ers never faltered in their determination to rebuild their trails.

And nobody was more determined than Martin. More than half-

a-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 ra-

diating out in every direction—Los Alamos has it all. Again.

PH

OT

O C

RE

DIT

RODALE’S MOUNTAIN BIKE MAY 2005

l l l

l l l

l l l

47