The last time a big fire lit up Glorieta/Rowe Mesa southeast of Santa Fe was more than a century ago, according to tree ring and fire ecology scientists.

Without fire, several patches of densely packed, spindly, younger trees currently grow amid centuries-old ones and raise the potential for catastrophic wildfire wiping out forests and homes on the mesa.

Now a proposed forest-restoration project on 17,500 acres of the 70,000-acre mesa could become a model for managing whole landscapes more efficiently and at a lower cost.

The Rowe Mesa project is funded with a $235,000 grant from the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program. It involves the University of Arizona, Santa Fe National Forest, the Four Corners Institute, WildEarth Guardians, Quivira Coalition and Crane Collaborative.

Two dozen residents attended a meeting Thursday evening at the Arroyo Hondo Fire Station to comment on the project.

Melissa Savage, a fire ecologist and director of the Four Corners Institute, said people at the meeting were most concerned about a prescribed burn escaping and running amok. "Everyone thinks of the Cerro Grande Fire [a prescribed burn on Bandelier National Monument in 2000 that went out of control], but hundreds of prescribed fires were successfully done before and after that fire," Savage said.

Hundreds of thousands of acres of forest around the West are overgrown and prime for massive wildfires. Thinning those stands with saws or heavy equipment is expensive, time consuming and opposed by environmentalists. But prescribed burns have their own problems.

The Rowe Mesa collaborators are proposing a combination of strategies across the landscape. The plan involves thinning some areas, using prescribed burns in others, allowing local residents to take the thinned trees for firewood, and letting nature take care of the rest.

"If you treat 20 percent of the mesa strategically, you can reduce crown fires by 70 percent," Savage said. "We're hoping this model can be used throughout the CFRPs in New Mexico and throughout the West."

The federal grants in New Mexico are more than a decade old. Since its inception, the program has awarded 116 grants to 82 organizations in 17 counties. The next annual CFRP workshop will be March 5 at Santa Fe Community College.

The Rowe Mesa grant this year will be used to plan the forest work and get feedback from nearby communities. Future grants will be used to carry out the project.

University of Arizona researcher Ellis Q. Margolis, who is leading the project, collected tree-ring samples from seven plots around the mesa and used them to learn about the age and health of the trees and the frequency of fires. He's studied the link between fires and forests in Lassen National Park in California, the Santa Fe Watershed and the Jemez Mountains.

"Other people have developed fire models that show if you treat one area with fire, it benefits other areas," he said. "It is kind of a new frontier. The thinking is we don't have the money to treat all areas. This is about finding the most bang for the buck."

From examining the tree-ring samples, Margolis found that fire operated similarly in the Ponderosa pines and piñon/juniper forests: Frequent low intensity fires would sweep through, killing off young trees and leaving older trees. In between fires, a few young trees would take hold, but the forest stands left plenty of room for grasses.

Margolis said trees on the mesa date back four or five centuries. He calculates fires historically burned different portions of the mesa about every four to five years. The old trees showed multiple fire scars. Larger fires came along every decade or two, burning half or more of the mesa, until 1899. With the coming of the railroad, livestock grazing and people, fires became a thing of the past and the forest structure changed. "No living or dead trees in our plots show fire since," he said.

The challenge now is restoring the forest to what it looked like when fire was a frequent partner.

"We went and got the science and then we used that to present the forest restoration plan," Margolis said. "We wrapped all the science into what we could do from a management perspective."

Even before Thursday's meeting, people were talking about the project via email.

Bill McSweeney, a longtime firefighter and owner of a Pecos guest ranch, wrote that thinning in the area is a "huge problem. It will happen in one of four ways: We thin, drought thins due to overgrowth, bugs [kill the trees], or catastrophic fire."

John Turnbull, a Lower Cañoncito resident, wrote that forest health isn't the only concern on the mesa. "Personally, I would like to see the elk population reinhabit a lot of the meadows up there, where they once were, 200 years ago. Be aware that there is a discussion going on about wildlife restoration on Glorieta Mesa, and what it requires."

Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com.