The Ditch and the Highway

[In February of 2012 I realized I didn’t know much about the local ditch, and so started hunting for it more systematically. Only the pictures are dated.]

Design decisions by road engineers are not intuitive. You’d think they’d find the easiest route through terrain that changes level because it would be the cheapest, require fewer technical skills and less heavy equipment. Politics and population density, of course, always override those factors.

The route of 84/285 into Española is a puzzle. According to the area USGS map, the highway is just down from a 5750' gradation line on a great Tertiary mound that immediately rises another 25' on the one side and drops 25' on the other.

Why did they chose that path when it required moving so much dirt, then stabilizing the banks on both sides? In addition, they had to put that dirt somewhere. At least some of it was pushed on down the road toward the Santa Cruz river, because several of the surviving houses along the highway near the river crossing are way below the grade of the road.

There had to some problem with that lowland alluded to by the use of checkered green squares on the map that made it more difficult to use than cutting through a great pile of unstable rock and sand.

I drove that stretch of road looking for some safe way to see the lower land. Most of the drives in that direction were private and looked steep enough to require a mountain goat to scale in bad weather.

When I did find one, I was totally surprised. About half way down the bank I saw the concrete banks of the local acequia.

Even more surprising, when I looked out over the lowlands I saw the rear addition of Iglesia de la Santa Cruz de la Cañada.

This section of road was just over a mile southwest of the village of Santa Cruz. The red line in the middle ground was the Santa Cruz river because those trailers are on the other side. Here was the river near my feet, not somewhere way north.

I started walking upstream along the ditch and discovered something else. Water from the highway was channeled into it. This means that, in an especially heavy storm, water from 84/285 is dumping into the near and far arroyos, digging those bottoms even deeper.

I stopped when I got to someone’s territorial marker, one that may have dropped accidentally, but deliberately hadn’t been cleared.

I looked beyond the tree. The ditch turned toward the river and began to go downhill. Down hill.

When I got home I looked more carefully at a map to see how I could have such a wrong idea about the course of the Santa Cruz river. The men who built the modern road from the Roman Catholic village of Santa Cruz to the Rio Grande made even more puzzling decisions than those made by the state engineers. Route 76 follows the river for a short time, then turns northwest to give the illusion the village is to the north.

It doesn’t meet 84/285 near the commercial area that developed around the Oñate bridge and the railroad, but comes out in what must have been comparatively empty land south of what was once a Mormon settlement at Fairview. Only a car would go there; not a man walking or driving an animal. This was where the Arrow Motel was located.

Photographs:
1. Road cut on 84/285 coming into Española, 27 January 2012.
2. Local acequia below 84/285, 3 February 2012.

3. Back of Iglesia de la Santa Cruz de la Cañada from the bank below 84/285, 3 February 2012. The line of red crossing the midground is sandbar willow growing along the Santa Cruz river. I drove over; those trailers are on the other side of the river. Santa Cruz badlands are in back.

4. Drainage for water from the highway dumping into the acequia, 3 February 2012.
5. Tree across the local acequia, 3 February 2012.

6. The local acequia turning in the direction of the Santa Cruz river, 3 February 2012; the fallen tree is in the center.

7. Intersection of Santa Cruz Road (route 76) with Riverside Drive (route 68).

The Ditch - Port of Entry

[In February of 2012 I realized I didn’t know much about the local ditch, and so started hunting for it more systematically. Only the pictures are dated.]

A highway created my view of the local landscape, a road that’s not even the original one that connected the colonial capital of Santa Fé with the Spanish settlement of Santa Cruz and the northern pueblos. According to the 1940 WPA Guide to 1930’s New Mexico that road originally went through Santa Cruz, but was moved west "a few years ago."

It was moved to speed tourists between Santa Fé and Taos who were impatient with the twists and turns of roads built for ox carts. When gas stations and stores and homes sprouted along the new road, 84/285 became a bottleneck made worse by drivers more intent on turning into badly graded parking lots than maintaining the flow of traffic. The need to watch them makes it difficult to notice the twists in the road.

My image of the road from Pojoaque, described in a posting for 7 November 2018 on the "Santa Fe Group," was that it went through Tertiary sediments laid down, after the Velarde half graben dropped, but before the Rio Grande existed, from debris washed down from the Peñasco Embayment north of the Picuris river. Animal fossils date to the Miocene Barstovian period of 14 to 15 million years ago.

To understand how Arroyo Seco could possibly cross my local ditch, I had to imagine what the land was like before those sediments were disrupted and rearranged by faulting events. I tried to think of the area as a rolling plain with the Santa Cruz river, Arroyo Seco and Pojoaque Creek flowing down from the Sangre de Cristo. The bones of extinct large mammals have been found in the badlands near those ancient rivers.

This week, I drove down to the Nambé exit north of Pojoaque and came back trying hard to see through the dramatic present to the past when the arroyo first carved its bed.

Route 84/285 rises some 125' as it leaves the -5825' valley of Pojoaque Creek to peak somewhere around -6000' west of a 6073' peak called Nambé on the USGS map. In a quarter mile, the road angles left and begins its descent into the valley of Arroyo Seco. It’s crossed the watershed between the two waterways.

For a short distance it levels around -5925' with a wide open space to the right. This is where those feeder arroyos are flowing somewhere out of sight in the hills.

Within a mile, the road is forced east by the intrusion of a -6000' pile of sediment, something you would expect if you were following a river through the herringbone pattern of alternating east and west ridges. This is just before the tributary arroyos reach the main one.

From there the highway goes left again, and drops to the valley floor at roughly 5725'. The tributaries have now joined Arroyo Seco and it becomes visible from the road. It’s banks are low. The alluvial soils must be so soft, what water flows through there simply spreads.

 

From there it flows west as described in the previous post.

Note: Elevations are estimates based on the USGS map. It’s quite possible I’ve misread the gradation lines in places. These maps are not my area of expertise.

Photographs:
1. McCurdy Road near Iglesia de la Santa Cruz de la Cañada,7 February 2012. There are no shoulders and no passing room between walls that block the view of curves.

2. Los Barrancos on the west side of 84/285, north of Pojoaque on Pojoaque pueblo land, 2 November 2011.

3. East-west ridge you cross on 84/285 as you enter the Arroyo Seco valley from Pojoaque, 2 November 2011; view to the east.

4. Arroyo Seco valley to the east from route 84/285, 2 November 2011.

5. 284/285 getting ready to swerve around the formation on the west, 2 November 2011.

6. Arroyo Seco from Bar D Four Road looking south, 6 February 2011; 84/285 is the grey line behind the trees.

The Ditch - Arroyo Seco

[In February of 2012 I realized I didn’t know much about the local ditch, and so started hunting for it more systematically. Only the pictures are dated.]

When I found the main part of the local acequia by the Santa Clara golf course, I followed the banks a little upstream only to discover it turned toward the badlands that exist by my house.

I looked in the other direction and saw a huge mound of dirt, some 80' high, behind an arroyo bridge.

My mental map was shattered. The ditch was heading south when I believed its source was to the north. I’d gotten that idea from driving though Española.

After you cross the bridge on 84/285 where the Santa Cruz river turns to enter the Rio Grande, you drive three-quarters of a mile along the Rio Grande to reach route 76 that goes to the village of Santa Cruz. From there, it’s more than a mile to McCurdy Road and the church. You don’t actually see the river until you’re on your way to Chimayó.

I always assumed the river got to the bridge the same way I did.

Suddenly I realized, if the ditch did come from the north, it had to get around that mound and cross an arroyo where there’s no sign of a flume. With everything I believed in disarray, I repeated a mantra from the laws of physics.

Water does not flow uphill.
Water does not fly.
Water does not flow uphill.
Water does not fly.

I couldn’t believe that arroyo near the ditch was the source of the acequia. It’s just too insignificant. It almost never has any water in it, even after a hard rain. The banks are low, the bottom wide. There’s no way it could be feeding the water that carved the high banks of the far arroyo, unless there’s some dam hidden somewhere.

Maps show the red bridge crosses the Arroyo Seco. I never connected the arroyo I cross daily with the Arroyo Seco near the highway to Pojoaque and Santa Fé. Dry Ditch is an even more common name than Black Mesa.

I just assumed the one on 84/285 meandered off west somewhere toward the Rio Grande after it passed under the road at the La Puebla exit. After all, it’s impossible to see north of Boneyard Road, the next road going west. Even when the camera’s zoom lens is pushed beyond its limits, the arroyo is nearly invisible.

Between Boneyard Road and the approach to Española, small, commercial buildings block the view to the west. In that stretch, there can be no arroyo because there is no landscape.

The other arroyo, the one on the side road, has always simply existed as some primordial presence. If I ever thought anything, it was that it formed from drainage from the immediate badlands.

I realized when you’re driving to some destination, the passing landscape is merely a backdrop that’s changed between the different scenes of your life. There’s no continuity in stage setting because there’s no mental connection between where you pass during the week on your way to work and where you go shopping on weekends.

But, of course, continuity exists outside one’s experience, and there is only one Arroyo Seco in this area. The USGS map for the Española quadrangle shows it forms from three intermittent creeks that flow north through those hills to the east of 84/285 north of Pojoaque. Each of those has two branches. There’s also one short tributary coming from the north.

They merge with another arroyo coming from the east into a northwest tracking sand bed.

Soon after, the arroyo goes under the road before the La Puebla exit, parallels 84/285 for a short distance then continues to flow between the badlands and the mound before if somehow intersects the ditch.

It is the same arroyo. There is no secret dam holding back water. Its two appearances, on two different roads, create the illusion of bifurcation. And, it’s not the source for the acequia.

Photographs:
1. Local acequia heading back toward the distinctive badlands formation, 20 January 2012.

2. High mound of Tertiary sediment behind the red side road bridge that crosses Arroyo Seco, 7 February 2012.

3. Arroyo Seco on the other side of the red bridge, 6 February 2012; no flume is visible.

4. Arroyo Seco disappears before the boundary between private land on Boneyard Road and Santa Clara pueblo land, 7 February 2012. It’s probably that band of sand on the left below the buildings. Color is distorted by the camera’s overextended zoom lens.

5. Arroyo Seco reappears as the sandy streak below the badlands looking west from the 84/285 access road, 7 February 2012. The feeder was probably created by drainage from the highway.

6. Arroyo Seco before the white La Puebla exit bridge, 6 February 2012; highway is on the left.

7. Arroyo Seco downstream from the distinctive badlands formation and before the bridge shown above, 6 February 2012; there is no flume visible.

A Watershed

[I originally wrote this in January 2012, but never posted this series on the local geology. The pictures are still worth seeing.]

Sometimes a watershed is more than a parting of the waters.

This week I drove southeast from Santa Fe toward Clines Corners on route 285. After passing the rump end of the Sangre de Cristo, the road passes through the Galisteo basin where grasses spread from both sides of the road.

Then, volcanic debris reappears with juniper trees. I stopped somewhere near mile marker 268 where an open expanse of four-winged saltbush outlined what must have once been flood land.

Snow from last week’s storm still veneered the land, but didn’t cover the taller plants. A few black cattle were visible in the distance. It was considered range land.

Just a few miles down the road glazed snow spread to the horizon. Shrubs were half-buried. The wind picked up. Just beyond Clines Corners plows were out keeping the right lane to Vaughn cleared from blowing snow.

When I drove back I noticed a sign somewhere between the two points where I’d stopped to take pictures that indicated I had crossed into the Galisteo watershed.

Apparently, this didn’t just mark the boundary between the volcanic Rio Grande valley and the great plains. It denoted a change in climate as well.

Pictures taken 29 December 2011. Top taken about mile marker 277. Second around mile marker 268. The others near mile marker 263, less than five miles away.