Pillar Of Fire

In 2011, a New Mexico wildfire went from normal to nuclear, kicking up a 45,000-foot column of tornadic winds and burning debris. Three local scientists set out to learn why.

- Kyle Dickman

A WORRIED HOME OWNER NAMED MARK  Winkel stood on his porch and pointed his telescope at a wildfire ripping through the forest several miles from his home outside Los Alamos, New Mexico. The blaze had started 12 hours earlier when a strong gust knocked an aspen into a power line in Las Conchas, a hiking trail along a 13-mile-wide caldera called the Valles Grande. Already it had torched about 7,000 acres, an impressive rate of spread, but predictable given the heavy winds and the onset of fire season, which would last until July’s monsoons finally saturated the tinderbox.

Having faced three big wildfires in the span of 20 years, locals in this part of parched and drought-stricken New Mexico knew enough to consider this one dangerous. But it was now 1:30 a.m., an hour when most fires, faced with cool air, calm for the night. As Winkel pointed his scope up one of the eight canyons that radiate like spokes from the caldera, he saw something unexpected: a yellow-orange wall marching down the southern face of the Jemez Mountains that surround the Valles Grande caldera.

Wildfires don’t typically burn downhill. They climb upward, their flames drying and igniting the fresh vegetation above. This one was racing downslope, at night, directly at Winkel. Worried, he scrambled uphill for a better view. Near the top, a hot wind struck his chest, and he watched to the northwest as the blaze’s front rolled like barrels in 35-foot-high flames. He had never seen this effect before— few people have. Winkel was witnessing a blowup, an intense and sudden force, second in power to a nuclear explosion, able to boil stream water, melt dirt, and crack boulders. This one would spawn a horrific 45,000-foot furnace of smoke and soot, spin up 400-foot-high fire tornadoes, generate powerful updrafting and downdrafting winds, create lightning high in the plume, and send embers flying almost 25 miles away.