Our lives are shaped by pivotal moments, the kinds that turn our world upside down: falling in love, reaching a hard-won goal, birthing a child, losing someone beloved.

In May 2000, the Cerro Grande Fire marked the lives of Los Alamos residents. People like Jerry Beguin watched as their homes, and those of family members, burned to the ground. Firefighters, such as Los Alamos County Fire Chief Doug Tucker, then the deputy chief, put their lives on the line to try to save as many homes as they could.

Ignited as a prescribed burn in Bandelier National Monument, the blaze jumped fire lines and raged through an overgrown, tinder-dry forest, driven by strong wind. The entire town was evacuated, and later the nearby town of White Rock. The flames devoured 235 homes, leaving more than 400 families homeless. No people died, but some pets did. Irreplaceable photos, historic books and personal mementos were burned to ash. More than 40,000 acres of the beautiful, pine-covered mountains surrounding the town were scorched and blackened by a fire so hot it melted the soil.

The fire brought the town that created the atomic bomb to its knees.

The challenges continued long after the fire was under control. July brought torrential rains that poured off the denuded hillsides and washed out a major road. Two years later, drought descended.

A decade later, Beguin and others have rebuilt. But the scars remain for some, even as the blackened mountain begins to recover with the help of volunteers and nature. People accept prescribed burns inside the town; they've lived through what happens when the forest is overgrown.

New people have moved into Los Alamos who weren't there during the fire. They don't know what the mountain looked like before black tree trunks blanketed the mountainside.

For those who remember, smoke in the air still causes an involuntary reaction — an intake of breath, a skipped heartbeat. They know where they were and what they felt as the world turned upside down and a fire raged.

"This event is part of our community. It always will be," said Sharon Stover, Los Alamos County councilor.

The fire ecologist

After the town was evacuated May 10 and the fire was torching Los Alamos houses, Terry Foxx watched as someone in the Albuquerque Walmart dropped money into a jar. According to the sign on the jar, the contributions would help the victims of the Cerro Grande Fire. Foxx, a Los Alamos resident, began to cry. "Suddenly I realized I was an evacuee," she said.

Foxx knew better than many people that fire is good for New Mexico's pine forests, just not huge, destructive fires like Cerro Grande. She was a fire ecologist, studying the long-term effects of earlier fires on Bandelier National Monument. Fire historically had run through the mountains every five to 20 years, burning low and mildly, enriching the soil with nutrients and never reaching the treetops. "If a forest burns frequently, there are no ladder fuels and the fire won't crown," Foxx said. Preventing fires became the official forest management mantra in 1905. Brush, trees and other flammable forest materials built up. Foxx calculated some parts of Bandelier hadn't burned since the 1880s.

The human-caused 1977 La Mesa Fire at Bandelier, and Cerro Grande, were the new breed of forest fires that resulted — big, bad and destructive to everything in sight. "Any fire that crowns over that large an acreage is not a good thing," Foxx said.

Still, there was hope. Shortly after La Mesa destroyed 15,444 acres and some forest plots Foxx was studying, she went out to inspect. "There among all the black were bright green sprigs of grass like little emeralds," Foxx said. "It was amazing."

Foxx knew nature would heal the land even after Cerro Grande. But in the immediate devastation after the fire, it was hard to remember.

She didn't lose her home, but some of her friends watched theirs burn. Foxx began interviewing Los Alamos residents a few months after the fire. This year, she visited with them again. The stories of what they lost and how they've moved on are gathered in her recently self-published book, Touched by Fire, Renewal of A Landscape and A Community. Proceeds from the book's sale benefit the Pajarito Environmental Education Center.

Foxx said people need to get back in a forest after a wildfire and see the land healing. She knows people who still haven't gone into the forest burned by Cerro Grande. "You have to be out there to see what nature can do. It helps you heal."

The firefighter

On May 10, vehicles streamed out of Los Alamos in a line snaking off the hill and through back roads out of canyons as the 11,000 residents evacuated. The next day, the town was almost deserted, shops closed. The power was out. Smoke roiled through the neighborhoods as the flames consumed houses and firefighters fought to prevent the destruction. Ash filled the air.

Tucker, a highly seasoned firefighter who had overseen evacuations of mile-square areas in other cities, had never evacuated an entire town. "It was eerie, devastating to drive around," Tucker said. "It looked like a bomb had hit the town."

For days before Cerro Grande Fire began, Los Alamos firefighters were chasing down an arsonist. Then Cerro Grande threatened the town for five days. The Los Alamos firefighters were exhausted, but they fought on, joined by hundreds of firefighters from 65 fire departments from around the state and federal agencies.

Tucker and other fire leaders made decisions they wouldn't have normally. "We had lab buildings we had to save at all costs. We put many firefighters in harm's way," he said as he drove around the town on a recent cold spring day.

The fire department had preached to residents for years about thinning trees, removing pine needles and creating a "defensible space" around houses. "People were resistant to cleaning up needles and trees. They wanted a natural look," Tucker said. "They cost us neighborhoods during Cerro Grande."

At least one woman listened as the big fire burned closer, cleaning out pine needles and brush before she evacuated. Cerro Grande came within feet of her Maple Street home and moved around it.

Since the fire, residents have remained mixed about fireproofing their residences. "After Cerro Grande, our deal was save your house, save the neighborhood," Tucker said. "We still meet resistance from people who think natural means pine needles on the ground and trees around the house."

The fire had benefits. Los Alamos changed its building code, requiring homes to meet new fire resistant design standards. Tucker said the relationship between his department, Bandelier and Santa Fe National Forest has improved "immensely. Our firefighters cross-train together."

The fire department beefed up its fleet, and all the firefighters received training in wildland as well as structural firefighting. "I think we have one of the strongest Wildland Urban Interface firefighting departments in the country," Tucker said.

As Tucker drove along Arizona and 46th streets recently, it was hard to miss a lasting irony of the fire. Those who lost their homes now live in new, grander ones paid for by the federal government. Those whose homes were saved by luck and the monumental efforts of firefighters are the decidedly poorer-looking clapboard cousins in the neighborhood, government houses dating to the Manhattan Project.

The High Schooler

Sylvan Argo, only a couple of weeks from graduating Los Alamos High School, couldn't reach her mom during the evacuation. Few people had cell phones back then. As the fire raced toward Los Alamos and residents fled to safety, the teenager was stuck on a back road when her old car broke down. "The air was thick with smoke," she recalled recently sitting at a Los Alamos coffee shop. "I can physically feel what it was like."

An older couple helped her get it started and she made it to N.M. 4 before the car broke down again. Wind caught an open box of photos and letters she had grabbed on her way out the door and scattered them around the roadside. Distraught, she jumped out of the car and raced madly to grab the floating papers. "I just needed to hold onto something familiar," she said.

She went to stay with friends in nearby White Rock. At 2 a.m., she evacuated again with White Rock residents and ended up in a shelter.

Argo, whose grandmother was a nuclear physicist with the Manhattan Project, had grown up around the world with her parents. But visits to Los Alamos were frequent. "Los Alamos was a stable point for me," she said.

The Los Alamos High School Class of 2000 graduated a couple of weeks after the fire was contained. Argo returned a couple of summers later to work with the Youth Conservation Corps and two of the town's foremost rehabilitation experts, Craig Martin and John Hogan, learning fire ecology and helping begin the long work of restoration. "The fire provided a very good reason for the community to get kids outside and working with the land," Argo said. "It was great. We would come off the trails covered in soot."

She completed her master's degree in human ecology later in Scotland, using the restoration program as her project. In 2006, Argo took a full-time job with the YMCA Yes Corps in Los Alamos. She helps her youth crews explore their relationship to the land through trail projects and art. They gather stream data, track seedling growth. They write poetry. For the summer, she already has 36 youth signed up and more on a waiting list. Some of the students worked on the forest rehab projects every year after the Cerro Grande Fire. Kids who moved on to college still remember trees they planted, a footbridge they built.

"This program is so much what I think needs to happen," she said. "Now I have stories for every bit of trail we've rehabilitated. It's a great sense of continuity."

The homeowner

The smoke pouring into Los Alamos during the first week of May 2000 set off Sherry Hardage's asthma and bronchitis. A single mother and electrical/mechanical designer at the lab, Hardage had bought a place in one of the old quadruplexes eight months before. "I had not unpacked many boxes," she said.

She didn't have the energy to prepare for possible evacuation early on in the fire. Her son Garret was only 9 and busy with school. When police came around and told everyone to evacuate, she didn't take much. "I don't frighten easily," said Hardage, now 57. "I didn't think the fire was as serious a threat as they said."

Later, when she took stock of all she had lost when the quad burned down, she wished she had saved a few more things, like the set of Civil War-era encyclopedias signed by her great-great-grandfather, a general. "I really didn't expect so much destruction," said Hardage.

Digging through the ashes, touching the foundation, made the loss real. "And the smell was just awful. It wasn't a firewood smell," she recalled.

She walked around, making a mental list of what was on the shelves, what was in the still-unpacked boxes. "When something like that happens, you have to say goodbye to things," Hardage said.

She felt luckier than others in her quadruplex. She had been there only a short time. Two of the other families had lived there for decades. She had been through many life changes. This was the first traumatic event for them. "Their whole life was right there. It had been stable and the same. Suddenly none of it was the same."

The quadruplex owners took the money offered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sold the lot and split all the money four ways. Hardage took her portion and bought half of a duplex. "As a single mom, there was no way I could deal with building a house from scratch," she said.

Hardage discovered how giving Los Alamos residents could be. "I was amazed at the transformation of the community for four or five years," she said. "It brought out the best in us for a while."

She said her son doesn't talk much about the fire. But he helped plant ponderosa pines later in the burn area. "He learned a lot," Hardage said. "Craig Martin used the fire as a real teaching tool for kids and adults."

Hardage kept a journal during and after the fire. Six years later, she wrote a poem about the experience and the recovery that is on display at the Mesa Public Library as part of a show commemorating Cerro Grande that will be up until May 30.

In some ways, the sense of what happened that May never goes away for her. "I look at the mountain and see the scar," she said.

The runner

Retired New York state history teacher and cross-country coach John N. Hains fell in love with Los Alamos in the 1990s. He and his wife enjoyed skiing at Pajarito, and Hains befriended other hard-core runners like himself. Pretty soon he was running up and down the mountain and through Frijoles Canyon with his friend Aaron Goldman.

He and his wife moved there in 1999. He ran past the beautiful Los Alamos reservoir and into the mountains, even in the winter. He ran on a carpet of pine needles so thick it silenced his footsteps. "It was just beautiful, like being in paradise," he said.

Ten months after the couple moved there, the fire hit. "It was unreal that something of that magnitude could occur," Hains said. "I thought the government would never let Los Alamos burn. Little did I know that Mother Nature was stronger than the lab's ability to resist it."

To this day, he doesn't know how people who had lived for decades there and lost their homes rebuilt. "I, myself, couldn't have done that," he said.

Hains didn't lose his home. He lost the landscape he had loved to explore on foot. He couldn't bring himself to run through the scorched mountains, in spite of Goldman's urgings. He put aside the running shoes and turned to perfecting another hobby — making micaceous pottery.

The irony isn't lost on him. Fire — the thing that took away what drew him to Los Alamos — is essential to making beautiful pots.

The county councilor

Three families moved into Los Alamos County Councilor Sharon Stover's house in White Rock when Los Alamos was evacuated. They were all making breakfast burritos for firefighters and putting kids to bed when Stover was called to a midnight fire update meeting, one of innumerable ones she had attended through the week. "My husband was just cleaning up the kitchen when I called him to say we had to leave," Stover recalled. "That's when we really knew we had friends outside of Los Alamos."

San Ildefonso Pueblo opened up the road through Tutavi Canyon, through some of the tribe's sacred sites, to help people evacuate.

The councilors and other local residents set up a public information center and operated it 24 hours a day. "People wanted to know about their houses. They wanted their pets rescued. They wanted to know what was burning," Stover said. "It was one place where people could call in and get information from people who knew Los Alamos."

A thousand things had to be dealt with even while the fire burned. Payroll had to go out. Firefighters had to be fed. Animals had to be rescued. "Different pockets of the community stepped up to do all of it," she said.

Her two young children only knew their mom wasn't around for the Mother's Day weekend. She was off doing what she could to help her constituents.

Stover said the outpouring of generosity stunned her — from the people in nearby communities who clothed and fed them to companies that sent socks and underwear for firefighters who spent days on the job.

The county received $120 million from the federal government to restore the town. New underground power lines were installed in the burned neighborhoods. Trailers were set up for the homeless on North Mesa and dubbed Femaville. County officials established a stricter building code. "We had to get buy-in from the community," she said. "These people were tired. They were trying to rebuild or decide if they should stay."

Many of the people who played a central role in the fire and the recovery are gone now, Stover said. Those who stayed will commemorate the fire at a simple ceremony on May 10 at Ashley Pond. "We are going to invite the communities and neighbors who helped us," she said.

The artist

Jerry Beguin was at his family's outdoor specialty business in Los Alamos when firemen told everyone they had to evacuate. Beguin's wife, Jan, had already packed a few bags of clothes just in case. They lived in one part of a quad. His mother-in-law and brother-in-law occupied another part, his son and daughter-in-law a third part and a friend the fourth. "No one really believed the fire would get as far as it did," he said.

Beguin, an experienced flyfisher, carpenter and lifelong painter, grabbed two of his paintings — both of his wife — and a bunch of slides of his art. But he didn't take more than 100 paintings, his portfolios of drawings and furniture he had made by hand over the years.

And in the driveway he left a prized 1955 Chevy and a BMW.

Later that day, safely away from the fire, he called his house. Instead of a ring tone, all he heard was crackling on the other end. That night, a television newscast showed the charred remains of the quad, Bequin's two vehicles crumpled and melted nearby. "I realized (the house) was gone, but the reality didn't hit for a few days," Beguin said. "Then it was like, my god, we've lost everything. All of us. Everything we've ever done, everything we've ever saved."

A lifetime of his artwork, irreplaceable, up in smoke.

The business was saved, but many of the places it guided people on hiking and biking trips were gone. With no house, it was hard to keep the business going. The family made enough in a settlement to pay off a loan on the business and then shut it down.

Beguin and his family fought the government for five years, trying to get what they considered just compensation for everything they had lost. In the end, Beguin said bitterly, the government did what it wanted. "We didn't realize they weren't going to be honest about it," he said recently. "A lot of people I know didn't get fairly compensated."

Beguin could have accepted it if a bolt of lightning had lit the fire, he said. But the fact that government crews started it made what happened that much harder to swallow. And he still disagrees with prescribed burns.

Beguin built a house for himself and his wife on the lot of the old quad. His son and daughter-in-law bought another lot and Beguin built them a house as well.

It took him six years before he could paint again.

Los Alamos is his home and he loves the people. But sometimes, in darker moments, he says he wishes he hadn't stayed.

The educator

Craig Martin looked up at the obsidian-black, smoking mountain after the Cerro Grande Fire. He had spent years mountain biking, hiking and writing about the trails criss-crossing the landscape. The fire had changed it all. "My first thought when we got into the burned area was, 'Oh my god, it's gone,' " Martin said.

Three weeks later, Martin encountered the same miracle as Foxx — bits of bright green grass rising triumphantly out of the ash. "It was that tiny bit of hope that made me say, 'I'm going to do everything I can to bring it back,' " he recalled on a recent walk up one trail. "It is a changed beauty, but it is still beautiful."

Cerro Grande had burned so hot that rocks cracked. The fire turned the soil hydrophobic, shedding rainwater in fast-moving sheets across the denuded hills.

Martin and others went to work teaching youth how to build trails, plant trees, make seed balls and restore the land. They learned how to cut up and remove the charred skeletons of burned tree trunks fallen across trails. They got adults involved. Over the year, hundreds of hands pitched in to help. They dug holes, put in tree saplings. Some said prayers over the trees they planted. Some hauled water to keep them alive in the next year's drought. Normally only one in three of transplanted tree seedlings survive, Martin said.

"What we didn't know is that when volunteers plant and every one of those plantings represents hope, great things happen. We doubled the survival rate," said Martin, now open space and trails specialist for Los Alamos County.

By 2004, the hillsides were covered in grass, and by last year other ground cover was taking hold. The trees planted by volunteers are now at least 3 to 4 feet tall. Hikers now routinely pack small hacksaws with them to cut and move aside the burned trees that still periodically fall across the trails.

Today, Martin lives in one of the old houses left unscathed, right on the edge of the old burn. It gives him a backyard laboratory where he can watch and learn how the land heals.

The fire helped people understand "you really do have to actively manage forests and trails," Martin said. Over time, Los Alamos residents came to accept prescribed burns right inside the town's limits, to decrease the flammable forest litter and tree density.

Martin and others think the fire fundamentally changed another thing about Los Alamos. Once, the people on The Hill were perceived as separate from their neighbors in the valley. The fire brought them all together. "It broke down barriers," Martin said.

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

To view a Smug Mug photo gallery of images from the Cerro Grande Fire, visit http://tinyurl.com/2byzwma.

CERRO GRANDE: THE FIRE'S AFTERMATH

Structures burned in Los Alamos: 235
Structures burned at lab: 39
Families left homeless: 403
Total population evacuated: 18,000
Acres burned: 47,650
Firefighters on scene: 1,000
Homes and businesses saved: 7,000
Firefighting costs: $33.5 million
Total cost: Almost $1 billion

THE RECOVERY EFFORT

Volunteers: 6,000+
Hours: 81,000
Work sessions: 384
Acres raked, seeded and mulched: 500
Trees planted: 28,000
Miles of new and rebuilt trails: 29

Information from the National Park Service, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the General Accounting Office and Western Forestry Leadership Coalition.