Lakes

[I originally wrote this in October 2011, but never posted this series on the local geology. The pictures are still worth seeing. The Las Conchas fire burned through Santa Clara canyon that summer.]

The morning of the day the Las Conchas fire started, the air was so hot, the soil so dry I went looking to see if any prickly pear were blooming anywhere this season.

One place I walked was an open field just beyond the near arroyo. Nothing. Not a flower, hardly a healthy plant in a place they bloom year after year.

The Pacheco fire was still burning towards Tesuque and was sometimes visible from the road in the area. I looked that way from somewhere in the center of the field and saw something I’d never noticed before. The field looked like a great bay that water had washed over from a break in the badlands.

Saturday, when I was in the near arroyo, I wondered how it connected to that open space which it had to border somehow. The bed narrows between five or six foot walls a little beyond the point where water begins channeling itself for the culverts. As I went up stream from there, it turned to the left and suddenly opened into a great, wide expanse with almost no banks.

I remembered something similar in the far arroyo. Yesterday I walked back to refresh my memory. Again, the tall walls make a turn, this time to the right, and a great expanse opens.

I came home to pour over Daniel Koning’s map of the Española quadrangle and I noticed something I’d missed before, that some of the places I’d read as Qay1 were really Qayi.

Qay1 is his code for alliuvial soils laid down in the first phase of the post-glacier Holocene period. The river bottom is Qay2, a younger layer.

Qayi turns out to be some intermediate phase of sand and gravel bands, the very strata I’d noticed along some of the taller walls in the far arroyo. The same pattern appeared in the shallow walls of the great expanses of both arroyos. This is precisely where he’d marked Qayi on the map.

Some passing reference in Ted Galusha and John Blick’s article on Española sedimentation that I’ve slowly been reading sent me to look up the Otowi lava flows they said had dammed the Rio Grande in recent times.

I discovered Steven Reneau and David Dethier’s work on area lakes created when landslides dammed the Rio Grande around the Otowi bridge. One occurred around 43 thousand years ago and created a lake some 15.5 miles long that lasted anywhere from a hundred to a thousand years.

Another landslide created a pool 13 miles long about 17.5 thousand years ago which broke suddenly. The most recent, formed about 12.4 thousand years ago, was also about 15.5 miles long and filled completely with layers of sediment.

During much of this time, the very end of the Pleistocene, there was greater rainfall than now, so the river levels would have been higher. The most recent lake was 100' deep.

This area is well within 10 miles of the Otowi bridge, probably much closer if you’re a crow or a drop of water.

One small mystery has been solved, the origin of those gravel bands. What still is unknown is why the channels that are being opened now in the arroyos and washes were there to be filled by Qay1 and Qayi in the first place.

Galusha, Ted and John C. Blick. Stratigraphy of the Santa Fe Group, New Mexico, 1971.

Koning, Daniel J. Preliminary Geologic Map of the Española Quadrangle, Rio Arriba and Santa Fe Counties, New Mexico, 2002, map and report.

Reneau, Steven L. and David P. Dethier. 1996. Late Pleistocene Landslide-dammed Lakes along the Rio Grande, White Rock Canyon, New Mexico.

The Cone

[I originally wrote this in October 2011, but never posted this series on the local geology. The pictures are still worth seeing.]

This afternoon I went back to the cone, determined not to be fooled again by its wiles. This time I took the simple path, the one from the near wash. As I walked up the easy grade, I realized the cone might just be the tip of the hill I live on, the one that had caused so many water problems in the past.

As soon as I got close I saw that it wasn’t bare because of erosion caused by the ATV rider. It was actually stone and not some soft soil. Daniel Koning had said it was tertiary, not the more recent quaternary. The two were there to see on the slope where the grass couldn’t hold its own.

I started climbing the cone. The more I climbed, the more the top receded into a face of gravel.

I felt no overwhelming urge to make it to the top and yodel. My knees were already making threats. The view of the black mesa was quite spectacular from where I stopped.

On the way back down I picked up some pieces of the grey, rough textured stone for the Rock Queen.

Hopefully she can tell me what it really is, something more useful than tertiary side of the geological change.

Daniel J. Koning. Preliminary Geologic Map of the Española Quadrangle, Rio Arriba and Santa Fe Counties, New Mexico, 2002, map and report.

Soot

[I originally wrote this in October 2011, but never posted this series on the local geology. The pictures are still worth seeing. The Las Conchas fire burned Santa Clara canyon in 2011.]

This morning I walked to the far arroyo for the first time since Wednesday’s rain. Everywhere there were signs of the Las Conchas fire.

When I entered below the ranch road I saw black soot laying in water paths left on the bottom.

As I walked up stream I saw the charcoal trails along the low left banks. As I came back down, they were also on the right side, swirling along the base of the high walls.

I could only think it’s a Goldilocks situation. Earlier this summer, when water scoured the bottom of the arroyo, it was passing through so quickly it left little behind. Other times, the rain was so gentle it only moved silt a few feet. The traces of black were slight.

Wednesday it rain most of the day and much of the night, a gentle rain that soaked in. I’m guessing that it washed a layer of sand from the surface of those blocks I noticed earlier where it had accumulated and the soot and sand landed somewhere down stream.

Upstream, there must have been other patches of ash waiting to move. Each time this year when some ash moved from higher up the arroyo, it replaced some that had been washed down stream. Perhaps it had slowly become concentrated in areas near the main water paths. Finally, there was enough rain to collect it and move it slowly where it could drop between Wednesday’s showers.

The fire was suddenly visible everywhere again.

The Wash

[I originally wrote this in October 2011, but never posted this series on the local geology. The pictures are still worth seeing.]

A bare cone stands back from the road, beckoning you to come discover. It’s sides have already been marred by ATV drivers who took the challenge. Yesterday, I heeded its siren call.

I was coming back from the near arroyo when I thought I spied a path to its base, a sort of gently sloping, lowland route. It had the right come hither look, a promise it wouldn’t be hard on the knees.

I started back. The grass covering disappeared to expose the usual tan sand and clay.

Then the bared ground turned into a dry arroyo, a wash completely hidden from the road.

The wash turned into a maze of washes that might somehow, if I followed the right one, lead me back to the arroyo.

The cone became harder and harder to approach.

I turned and found the wash also connected to one that crosses the county road close to my house. I chickened out and took the low road home.

The Near Arroyo

[I originally wrote this in mid-October of 2011, but never posted this series on the local geology. The pictures are still worth seeing.]

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, open sections of the ditch that runs back 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 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.

The River Runs

[I originally wrote this in October 2011, but never posted this series on the local geology. The pictures are still worth seeing. The weather has been drying this year, though it is raining at the moment.]

Wednesday it rained, day and night.

Thursday noon when I went to the post office the river was running higher and faster, the color of caffè latte.

I thought, ah yes, of course, the river’s running. It rained. I didn’t think, I’m seeing the great shaping force of this part of the country roused from a long seasonal slumber.

I didn’t connect even though I’d spent the morning looking at Daniel Koning’s "Preliminary Geologic Map of the Española 7.5-minute Quadrangle" which shows a lopped triangle with the Rio Grande and Route 285 on the sides, the Rio Pojoaque to the south and the Santa Cruz river on the north just above where I was driving over the Griego bridge.

He shows the road near my house skirts what he labels a "geological contact." The soils to the river side have recent alluvial origins. The ones to the east date back to an earlier Tertiary period. Since the time before the great glaciers when the river began to connect the discrete basins of the rift valley, water has been digging and padding its channel.

It’s removed or redeposited the existing tertiary sediments, or perhaps both at the same or different times, and left a boundary area that needs no geologist to recognize.

I went back to today to the Griego Bridge to see the river at the point the Santa Cruz enters. The current was slower, but the water was still carrying dirt. Gravel and sand have been deposited where the dammed and controlled water flow of the one meets the less tamed Rio Grande.

Then I drove home and looked again at that "geological contact" out the car window. You could imagine the grass as some great sea lapping against dunes. And like ladies of a certain age who once were rivals and now nod when they meet, you can only guess their pasts from the differences in their outerwear, their vegetation.

Running Water

[I originally wrote this in October 2011, but never posted this series on the local geology. The pictures are still worth seeing. Hurricane Rosa in the Pacific probably contributed to our moisture last week. The current Atlantic hurricane, Michael, is near the Florida panhandle.]

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 no longer was 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 of people also had their well houses inundated.

The curve is actually an intersection of three roads - or so the people who numbered the roads believed. 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, 10/20/11, 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. 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.

3. Water running down hill between dead grasses on the west side of my house to drain into the ranch road, 8/21/11.

4. Bank of ranch road, 8/21/11.

5. Arroyo bottom, 9/11/11, from the platform at the base of the right bank.

Atencio Land

The owner of the Arrow Motel was the estate of Mela Atencio. [1] José de Atienza Alcalá y Escobar along with his sons Juan de Atienza and José de Atienza Sevillano were recruited by Francisco Farfán in Mexico City in 1693 to move north with the Reconquest. [2] Juan was a weaver. [3]

Farfán’s group was assigned land along the Santa Cruz river by Diego de Vargas. At some time, descendants affiliated with Capilla de Santo Niño, [4] and claimed the last arable land to the west. Beyond, their holdings, the land dropped several feet to the flood plain of the Río Grande that was part of the Santa Clara grant.

Donna Roy said the family restaurant originally was located in a stable tack room. [5] The associated residence may have been the territorial farmhouse that stood between the old Long John Silver building and El Paragua.

After the house was torn down in 2015, its lot has been used for parking by the restaurant.

The border land became valuable after the road from Santa Fé to Taos was upgraded. The construction would have involved creating a grade from the bottom lands to drier uplands gentle enough for trucks of the period. The extension to the Arrow Motel was built along that grade.

On the other side of the road, the developers of the 78 Plaza Shopping Center built a retaining wall and filled the area from it to the Chimayó road to create a level lot. The picture below shows the land sloping both to the south and the west. The truck bed gives an idea of the high of the drop; the buttresses may have been added when the weight of the building put too much pressure on the soft foundation land.

I suspect the land just north of the Arrow Motel that was used by Larry’s Auto Sales once was part of the family holdings. Wild pink roses grew in front of the used car dealership and the motel. I’ve found the continuity of plants often signifies older land ownership patterns.

Larry Martinez’ land was level and graveled, with only a small office building. Such barrenness on a busy road usually means something has been torn down. By the front sidewalk he had a cemetery grave enclosure. I assume he either made them himself or represented the welder-craftsman who did. His business disappeared 2017 during the time the city was negotiating with Atencio’s estate to have the fire damaged laudromat building removed.

Photographs
1. Territorial farm house from south side facing road to Chimayó, 30 March 2014.
2. Territorial farm house from north side facing back of Long John Silver, 30 March 2014.
3. Wall seen in # 1, 19 August 2018.
4. Arrow Motel addition, 30 March 2014.
5. 76 Plaza retaining wall, 4 August 2018.
6. Cemetery grave enclosure, Larry’s Auto’s, 28 February 2016.

Notes
The Arrow Motel was discussed in the post for 3 October 2018. The fire damaged Speedway Laundromat was featured in the most for 30 September 2018.

1. Santa Fe County Assessor’s Office. Attachment to City of Espanola Resolution No. 2017-18.

2. Farfán, Francisco. "List of New Mexico Colonists, Mexico City," on or before July 1693. 245. In John L. Kessell, John L.Rick Hendricks, and Meredith Dodge. To the Royal Crown Restored: The Journals of Don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1693-1694, 1995.

3. Kessell. 320.

4. Donna Roy. "In Española, a Restaurant and a Tradition Are Reborn." The Santa Fe New Mexican. 26 July 1992. 9.

5. Roy

Arrow Motel

The Arrow Motel was torn down the same time as the Speedway Laundromat, mentioned in the post for 30 September 2018.

It probably wasn’t built until after Riverside was paved in the late 1950s. [1] Then, it’s likely it grew in phases. The basic rectangular building was stuccoed. The shake roof and decorative tiles could have been added later.

To the north was a small, octagonal building that looked like it had been a food stand of some king. There was a small window on the street side that could have been used for sales. Donna Roy said El Paragua began as a roadside stand in 1963 "where the Arrow Motel now stands." [2]

Behind the restaurant was a long low structure which may have been added later. Then, west of that was a home built in a style that became popular nationally in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Like everything in New Mexico, the Arrow Motel changed with conditions. What might have been the office was converted to shops. One was last used by Becky’s Styling Salon.

Beyond the office, another building was added on the south side with stucco that was only a near match.

It’s purpose remains a mystery. The wide opening suggests vehicles were able to enter it. Perhaps it was added after the motel closed. I’m sure someone out there knows more about the history of these buildings.

End Notes
1. Kevin Huelsmann. "The Villages of Española." Rio Grande Sun. 29 May 2008.

2. Donna Roy. "In Española, a Restaurant and a Tradition Are Reborn." The Santa Fe New Mexican. 26 July 1992. 9.