Gila Wilderness

But we

got quite a few of them here, and then in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico, there's a bunch of them as well.

There's some in Utah, too.

I've just never been to Utah.

Um, there's a lot of different activities that, uh, folks can do here in, uh, Sierra County altogether, the whole entire county.

Uh, one of the things my, one of my favorite things to do is go up to the Gila Wilderness.

So where we're at right now, um, where I'm sitting, we are in, you know, the desert.

We're in the Chihuahuan Desert.

So we go a little bit higher in elevation, we go up to the Gila Wilderness and we've got, you know, groves of pine trees, we've got mountains, and just beautiful vistas and, you know, that's a place that I really like to go to to unwind and just, uh, you know, sit back and relax and look at the beauty around me.

Real quick, you said a minute ago 4.0. Um, what-

[laughs]

He helps to decolonize our minds from the Western cultural propensity of looking at all of the beings of Earth in terms of extraction and domination, which is increasingly causing harm to all.

Kauaki lives in the Membrace Watershed near the Gila Wilderness area in New Mexico, in the unceded lands of the living Chiricahua peoples, of the brown bear, of the jaguar, of the beaver, and of the forests and wetlands which stood there 400 years ago.

And now, let's go to the forest and talk with Kauaki.

And we're here today, late October, near Taos, New Mexico, but it's San Cristobal area.

Wildfires that burned in ways like Cody referenced earlier, low severity surface fires that may have been beneficial for fire adapted ecosystems.

Obviously places like the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico are great examples of that because they have such a long history of recurring fires.

One of my favorite examples is the 2020 Medio Fire, where we included it in the fire season overview because it's a unique overlap of past treatments and a current wildfire, where a prescribed burn, the Pacheco prescribed burn, gave wildland firefighters the opportunity to stop the Medio Fire before it burned into the Santa Fe watershed and disrupted the Santa Fe ski basin.

So it's those sorts of examples that we felt were really important to capture.