There's already some evidence in hand that the forests that burned around Los Alamos back in 2011 will never regenerate.

Instead, scrub and brush will take the place of ponderosa pine climax forests that once covered the area.

So, yeah, something else will grow there instead, just not necessarily trees.

In the Jemez mountains west of Santa Fe, the charred remnants of the 2011 Las Conchas blaze stretch for miles above the atomic city of Los Alamos. It was the biggest wildfire in New Mexico's recorded history, until the following year, when lightning ignited the Whitewater Baldy fire in the southern part of state torching an area nearly half the size of Rhode Island.

Much of the Los Alamos burn resembles today a lunar landscapes -- vast slopes of denuded gray soil where little vegetation has come back. Hillsides, once covered with ponderosa pine and squat, drought tolerant pinon and juniper trees, now grow only clumps of cheatgrass, an invasive species, and occasional bush-like shrub oaks. Biologist Craig Allen of the U.S. Geological Survey, who has has spent years studying the Southwest forest ecosystem, says that areas like these won't be forested again in our lifetime, and possibly they never will be. The reason that Allen and others are pessimistic is that climate change is hitting the Southwest harder and faster than most other areas in the U.S. The region has warmed on average between 2 and 5 degrees during the past century, and this trend is expected to accelerate in the years ahead.

Add to this the danger from what scientists call a possible "mega-drought." The Southwest has always been prone to extended dry periods, like the one which archeologists believe drove the Anasazi people of Chaco Canyon in the Four Corner's area to the wetter Rio Grande Valley in the late 13th century. But a study published last year in the journal Nature Climate says that, by 2050, the region will be even drier than in previous mega-droughts. Moreover, hot summer temperatures in the southwest will literally suck the water our of leaves and needles killing trees in unprecedented numbers. "The majority of forests in the Southwest probably cannot survive in the temperatures that are projected," one of the study's co-authors, Park Williams, a bio-climatologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory told Environment 360.

The stress that trees are already under becomes clear during a short drive north of Santa Fe. Whole hillsides near the town of Abiquiu, made famous by the haunting desert landscapes of Georgia O'Keefe, are now covered by the ashen skeletons of pinon pines. The trees, weakened by years of drought, were finally killed off in the late nineteen nineties by bark beetles, insects which have also devastated numerous stands of ponderosa and spruce at higher elevations.

EDIT

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-southwests-forests-may-never-recover-from-megafires/277545/