Another Road, Another Wash

A road branches to the west from the ranch road just below my fence. It was always there in some form, but some years ago some trucks came through and made it more obvious.

At the time someone told me the Indians did it to get back to some clay deposits they needed for their pottery. The person who told me was simply passing on something he’d heard. However, it sounded like one of those things you’re told by people who are aware others exist in the universe who live differently than they, but don’t actually know any of them and so attribute everything to them in an almost conspiratorial fashion to establish they really do know what’s going on.

Another possibility was that some utility had to get back.

The one thing it wasn’t was an enlightened county project to build a recreation trail. However, that’s how it’s been used since by those who walk their dogs or their hearts. The trucks haven’t been back, but it’s been kept open by ATV’s.

It never seemed particularly interesting to me, because I’d already learned few wild flowers grew with the prairie grasses. The far arroyo was more rewarding.

Yesterday was the first time I walked farther than the junipers.

A wash opened on the right that wasn’t connected to the one that had backed up from the acequia drop. The ranch road goes between the two with no sign it’s been filled. Still this wash looked like it might be part of the same weak area.

The banks were steep and maybe 8' high with isolated tongues of soil in the center. It went back as far as a fence and stopped, for no apparent reason.

I didn’t go in to explore. That was the adventure for another day. Today I wanted to know where the road went.

The fence wire had been removed between three posts for the road, which continued to climb toward a row of utility poles. It got to them, and continued to the left, which would be north. So much for that theory.

It rose to a crest, then dropped into a wash, this one the upstream section of the one by the cone I call the barbarian’s wash for reasons best left to the imagination. It had the same characteristics as the one to the south, steep banks and chiseled islands.

There were no signs anyone had mined the area, only that ATV’s had been through on their way north along the front of the tertiary uplands. So much for the theory it led to a special deposit of clay. It was simply a trail.

The Near Arroyo

The near arroyo shows the marks of man even more than the far one.

The road goes over, rather than through it. The local acequia dumps on the river side of the bridge, digging a hole where the water falls. As a result, the one side of the arroyo is more than twice as deep as the other.

Even when it’s not running, the open sections of the ditch that runs back to the Santa Cruz river collect rain water. After Wednesday’s rain, the point where it falls could be seen in the shelf of sand it carved in the bottom.

Three large culverts carry water under the road. They force the water into narrow channels which dig nearly a foot into the soft ground on the upriver side. In the summer, the heat dries the land and the wind smooths the edges, eventually carrying away much of the temporary island.

This arroyo, like the far one, has its sources three or four miles away in the Barrancos badlands that parallel highway 285 that runs from Pojoaque to Española. The rains bring down debris and weeds, especially Russian thistles, that are stopped by the culverts and sometimes block them.

While I think of the arroyo as having two sides, the deep one caused by the acequia and the swallow one carved by the culverts, both acts of man appear on both sides.

Last summer, a lateral was added to the acequia that now dumps just before the bridge on the upstream side. However, with this year’s drought, it hasn’t had a chance to run enough yet to have much impact.

And, on the other side of the bridge, the water leaves the culverts in narrow channels that dig their own paths, especially on the side away from where the acequia dumps. Apparently, the two paths of merge and push the water to the one side.

The erosion caused by the mere existence of the bridge also endangers it. Last year, the local ditch association had to replace the culverts with longer ones and rebuild the concrete faces. At that time, they also added the stone reinforcements.

Note: Top picture is looking towards the badlands on the other side of the Rio Grande and the Jemez. The brown legs in the second and fourth pictures belong to the flume that carries over the ditch water that eventually finds its way to the far arroyo.

Running Water

Another hurricane in the western Caribbean, some more rain this morning.

We’re past the danger point this year, when water is a potential enemy. In late summer, before the first rain after a long drought, you worry the ground has become too hard to absorb water and it will run off the surface. Firefighters were especially concerned about Santa Clara canyon where heat from the Las Conchas fire had baked the soil.

When I first moved here, I could be flooded when water coming off the hill turned into a rolling sheet that gathered force as it moved, fed as it was, every inch, by more rain. Water poured through the joints in my the rail tie retaining wall, until I stuffed broken tiles behind the cracks.

My uphill neighbor had worse problems. He’d built his house in an abandoned road bed which channeled the water his way. A few years ago, he got a backhoe and built a bunker behind his property which diverted the flow of water enough that I was no longer in its path.

At the corner of my property, the paved road makes a sweeping turn. People who live downhill regularly had their garages flooded as water running down the road, swollen by feeds from every driveway uphill, flowed down their drives. One year, a number also had their well houses inundated.

The curve is actually an intersection of three roads - or so the people who numbered the roads believe. The compacted dirt ranch road, which branches from the curve, also collects water from the paved road and sends it along the side of my property.

From there it flows towards the arroyo, collecting water from every break in its banks made by an ATV. This summer I could see where the water had penetrated from the surface, and where it has also been absorbed at the base, with a dry band between the two zones.

The ranch road continues on the other side, which means it feeds water into the arroyo from both sides.

I’m beginning to think one reason the arroyo is as wide as it is in that area is that the load of water has washed away more of the banks downstream. Since the water from the road would turn as soon as possible, it would move along the walls while the water coming from upstream would continue its path somewhere in the center.

Chamisa has taken advantage of the different flow rates to colonize the dryer areas between the banks. This has created the widened arroyo composed of platforms at the edges with some vegetation that drop into obvious water channels that move along two sides of islands anchored by chamisa.

Pictures
1. Ranch road going through the arroyo, 10/20, from top of the left bank; ATV tracks enter the arroyo on both sides of the curving road; my house is the one with the gray-white roof.
2. Water running down hill between dead grasses on the west side of my house to drain into the ranch road, 8/21.
3. Hill behind my uphill neighbor’s house which is elevated on the right by the abandoned road bed marked by the fence posts. The berm runs parallel to the house.
4. Bank of ranch road, 8/2.
5. Arroyo bottom, 9/11, from the platform at the base of the right bank.