Santa Fe Is Squished in a Sandwich of Fire

The delicious smell of a wood grill is wafting over New Mexico cities, but it's not coming from a community barbeque. Two ravenous wildfires are eating up trees and scrubland in the northern part of the state, putting the residents of Santa Fe in a sandwich of raging flame.

To the west is the Thompson Ridge Fire, a crackling, human-caused blaze in the Valles Caldera National Preserve that's swelled to 2,000 acres. Eastward is the Tres Lagunas Fire, a 8,500-acre conflagration sparked in late May by a downed power line. Both fires are in their infancy and expected to grow, partly due to rugged terrain that makes firefighting difficult and extremely parched land – New Mexico got less than half the amount of rain it normally does in May, and more than 80 percent of the state is in a nasty drought. Hundreds of firefighting personnel are tackling these outbreaks, which have prompted a few evacuations but no significant exodus yet.