Ranch Road

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

Yesterday I walked out the ranch road towards the Black Mesa. I went as far as the pueblo boundary where it branches, with one prong going through a gate to the ranch and the other through an arroyo and on toward the mesa.

The road looks and feels like the arroyo bottom, but the neighboring soil is the usual erodible mix of clay and sand. When you get to the Y, the road on pueblo land becomes two tracks of uncovered dirt that would be difficult for a car to negotiate in wet weather.

As I walked back on compacted soil veneered with fine gravel, I wondered if the ranch owners had dredged the bottom of the far arroyo to protect their road, and if others had also done that in the past here and in the other arroyos.

If that were true, I wondered if the arroyo bottom had once been filled with gravel, had been bare like it is now, or had once supported vegetation like the arroyo on pueblo land. I also wondered if their mining had widened or flattened the bottom, or if the general shape had been carved by nature and only slightly been modified by them.

Bottom photograph shows the land to the side of the road, taken when I stopped to take the middle picture of the road.