As he and his wife drove to Las Vegas to check on their home, Whitmore says he kept watching for changes along the highway and across the smoke-filled landscape, recalling that, with every passing mile, his heart sank.

"Just as I made it to the local gas station right before the lake and scanned the horizon, I knew things were disastrous," he says.

"I drove up to our property, stopped, looked out, and couldn't believe my eyes," he says. "It looked like the moon.

"It looked lie the moon--
I mean, nothing left"

"There was nothing, I mean, nothing left but scorched dirt, rocks, and burned trees--no vegetation, no pine needles, not even live animals--just dead horses."

Whitmore says the damage to his home graphically revealed just how hot the flames burning his land got at their height.

"Our home had literally melted--there's no other way to describe it," he remembers. "Even the glass windows melted out."

"Our propane tank," he says. "It didn't explode, and it didn't melt. On our property that had been dense with lush, green trees and undergrowth, the only thing left was a metal tank. Go figure."

In the middle of his loss, still fresh, Whitmore says when searching for answers, he thinks of his mother, now 93.

"My mom was, is, such a powerful woman," he says. And it was she who first made this property happen."

Whitmore explains that it was his parents who bought his homestead's original 1,000 acres and turned it into a nature preserve.

"Don't get me wrong--they weren't rich at all," Whitmore says. "My mother in her youth was bequeathed a funky little old farm back East that got rezoned commercial and provided the wherewithal to buy this land, and to preserve it." But the question of wealth was originally significant, he says.

"One of the reasons I respect my mother so much is she came from great wealth," Whitmore says, but she walked away from it all."

Leaving her childhood home, Whitmore says his mother set out by herself in life without money, wanting to make her own way.

"She was one of 10 kids. She just up and went out West one day, got a tiny apartment, and became a first grade teacher," he recounts. "She was the head of school boards, she organized school dances, she did everything. She's like a force."

His mother's influence is what Whitmore says has helped him envision his next steps.

"I think through all of this I've been kind of moving through the stages of grief," he admits. "You know, denial, anger, all of it.

"And I had decided, 'It's just too much--I'm going to walk away.' But with a mother like mine, you can't just throw it all in."

So with his sadness and stress slowly easing, Whitmore now says he thinks he has found his purpose.

"I think we're all here--here on earth--to learn lessons," he says. "And I think this is mine. This will be a lesson in rebuilding.

"I believe it's now my purpose to play a role in bringing back the land, the vegetation, the animals, help the trees come back. "I actually saw deer," he says. "They hadn't run away. We also have elk up here, bear, wild turkeys, all kinds of birds and animals. "I've been talking to the Forest Service, they'll be helping us," Whitmore says. "We need to reseed the native grasses to hold the soil, keep out non-value vegetation. It'll take some time, but--what's time, anyway?"

Whitmore the artists' supplier is also a musician--a keyboardist and a song writer, with a voice as fresh and plain and honest as the man himself.

"I write songs from the heart," he says.

And that heart will surely touch the hearts of those around him as they struggle with their present circumstances, and wait, and watch the trees grow back.

"I know, I know, that I am at the bottom, at my lowest point in life--I know that now--we lost everything--there's nothing left."

Michelle, the native northern New Mexican telling this story, is still moving through the loss of her family's home to the unprecedented destruction by fires in her area that have been burning since early April. (Michelle asked that we not reveal her last name.)

"It's not just our own home, our trees, everything, that's gone--we lost the homes, all the belongings, of my mother, my husband's mother, who'd both just died," she says. "It's all gone--we couldn't get their things out."

Her voice is quiet, restrained, touched by grief, as she labors to describe what she remembers of the day that changed her life.

"In the beginning, all we knew was--it was around April 6--that a fire had started," Michelle begins.

"We knew Hermit's Peak was on fire, we could see it--and then the smoke started coming towards us.

"The next day, we hurried, we tried to pack up everything, we did our best," Michelle continues. "But we couldn't save anything--everything was destroyed by the fire."

In the days to come, Michelle kept mentally working through what had happened, and, still overwhelmed, looked around her and saw she was not alone.

"We met a man just outside of there, our neighbor, who told us, 'All I have now is what's on my back,'" Michelle remembers. "We found out that our home, and a lot of others', had been in a 'hot spot'--all our homes were taken."

Michelle says that, at the time, she and neighbors were told containment efforts were being stymied due to high winds.

"They weren't letting helicopters or airplanes fly, and the fire people couldn't work," she recounts. "The winds were extremely high--they told us nearly 78 m.p.h.--so conditions were life-threatening.

"They just had to let it burn--
We lost it all"

"They just had to let it burn," Michelle remembers, her voice falling. "They had no choice. We lost it all. It was April 22nd, a day we'll never forget, that our house was destroyed.

"Now, we sit and talk, try to figure out what to do, starting completely over, it just seems--unbelievable--our house was paid off, our land was paid off," she says. "My husband tells me the news, but I still can't handle it."

Weeks into the disaster, in the midst of their loss, she and her family took tentative steps toward recovery that included nurturing life in the forest that miraculously had endured.

"Finally, we went back out there, and we took stuff for the animals," she says.

"A hummingbird was still there, alive, and came right up to us. We always loved and kept the hummingbirds, we would sometimes go through three gallons of hummingbird water a day! So while we were there, we put new feeders up.

"We also put out birdseed, and took a bunch of food for the cats and dogs that were alive and still running around up there, you know, things like that."

Michelle says she draws hope from two other near-tragedies her family had already survived.

"I live through my kids," she says, "and both my daughter and my son at one time had very serious illnesses, and God brought both of them back, and they're still with me today. We all lived together in the house. And we're still together."

"We're going to come back stronger than ever before"

She hastens to credit her friends and neighbors with helping her start overcoming her despair.

"If it weren't for our friends, our neighbors, all our community people here constantly reaching out to us, it would be unbearable.

"So if I need to, or one of my neighbors needs to communicate, even if it's three in morning, we do it, and everyone understands--nobody judges us."

She announces the idea of a new house is now surfacing in her talks with her family.

"My husband's a carpenter," Michelle says, "and we're talking about what it's going to be like. Hard to think about, but we'll see what comes."

Michelle's voice quietly trails off, then brightens.

"So what I want to tell people is--no matter who you are, what your religion is, or what you're going through, we all are children of God. No matter what our differences, God will lead us," she declares.

The future, like the past, she says rests squarely on the shoulders of her people.

"The Hispanic people are a stubborn people, a proud people," she declares with a quiet laugh. "And make no mistake--we are going to come back.

"And when we do, we're going to come back stronger than we ever were before."

"I remember the moment my family was put on 'Set' status," says Jesus Romero, San Miguel County deputy manager, who like everyday citizens was impacted by the current forest fires around Las Vegas, N.M., looks after his own property while he helps run government operations.

"That's our code way of saying what level of fire threat you're under," Romero explains. "It's ready, set, go."

Romero says he and his family and neighbors continue to monitor the fires, and the fires' growing proximity to their properties, but admits it's a continual challenge for County employees whose homesteads are in danger to keeping working at their jobs.

"We still have a county that needs to be run on top of stressing over our own places, so we just deal with it," he says.

"Luckily, I have a supervisor (San Miguel County Manager Joy Ansley) who understands that everybody needs to take care of their own places," Romero says. Meanwhile, he says county employees continually report back on the ever-changing extent of damages to their community as the fire grows.

"We're saying the fire is now about 26 percent contained, so it seems to be dwindling," he reports, "with about 300,000 square miles of land area gone, and around 350 homes destroyed. But some areas are better or worse off than others."

The deputy manager says lands to the east are doing fairly well.

"The eastern portion looks good," he reports, "but the south and north portions are continuing to grow.

"Some people in various places have even been allowed to return," says Romero, "so there's progress there."

For his part, the manager says his greatest inspiration has been having his friends and neighbors approach him to lend a hand with his own property.

"There have been tons of people every single day, coming over and saying, 'What do you need, what can we help with?' and we do the same for them," he says.

And like many of his neighbors and fellow area residents, Romero uses a single word to describe his people as they confront their difficult situation.

"We're strong because our roots are embedded down in the grass--
And we all feel it"

"Stubborn," he laughs. "It's our incredible resilience that's always gotten us through, all these years.

"I put it to the fact that most of us up here come from both Native American and Spanish roots.

"From Spain, we get our guts and courage. I mean, it takes sheer guts to get on boat half a world away and go somewhere you know nothing about, and still find a way to survive--even thrive.

"From our Native American roots we draw from this powerful resiliency, the unbelievable strength to somehow come though these ordeals even stronger than before--because we're tied to the land.

"We're strong because our roots are embedded down in the grass, the soil--and we all feel it."