Santa Cruz Dam History - Part 1

[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.]

The Santa Cruz dam was a consequence of the Denver and Rio Grande railroad opening a station in 1881 in an area west of the Río Grande it called Española. It introduced men looking for economic opportunities into an area where local Spanish-speaking settlers saw land as their only source for food.

Surpluses moved between villages at different altitudes with different growing seasons. Truchas raised wheat, Santa Cruz grew fruit, Chimayó supplied chili, Colorado provided beans and potatoes. What cash existed came when men went to the mines in Colorado and Utah or worked as sheep herders in Colorado or Wyoming or section hands in Colorado and Arizona.

One man who followed the railroad from Pueblo, Colorado, was Frank Bond, a Canadian immigrant who had failed in the wool business there. In 1883, he bought land from the railroad for a stock shipping facility. He also opened a local store where people could pay for goods by raising sheep for him. Within a few years, most were indebted to him.

Another was Johann Block who arrived from Kansas around 1890. His father, Jacob Block, was a West Prussian who had migrated there with his family. John married Sofia Vigil Valdez and became a local landowner. His cousins, Heinrich and Jacob Jantz-Johnson, also moved here; Henry was a bee-keeper, Jake a dairy man.

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, England could no longer import food from Russia and Germany. Prices rose in this country, even in the Santa Cruz valley. W. P. Cook came in 1915 and started work for Frank Bond as a stable boy.

Prices fell as soon as the war was over, and stayed depressed through the 1920s. Commercial farmers like to think the war years were the new normal and the present was an anomaly. One way to address it was produce more, and over-production throughout the decade kept commodity prices low nationally.

The new men weren’t deterred by the fact the easiest land to farm was taken. They believed all you had to do to make dry land productive was add water. In 1919, the commercial farmers petitioned the courts to revisit the distribution of water.

They didn’t understand demand for that water was already increasing. 1917 and 1918 had been dry years. The local population hadn’t been able to send its young to settle the frontiers after the United States took control of the land east of the Sangre de Cristo. Chimayó was taking more of the water before it could reach the valley. The court ruled in Chimayó’s favor.

Then, a man named Conger wanted to bring more land into production by building a 14 mile ditch from the Río Grande. The years between 1920 and 1925 were drought years in the state. When the ditch was completed in 1924, farmers turning chili into a commercial crop in the Mesilla Valley in the southern part of the state successfully protested the diversion of common water.

Notes:
Calkins, Hugh G. The Santa Cruz Irrigation District - New Mexico, 1937; best history of the dam.

Scurlock, Dan. From the Rio to the Sierra: An Environmental History of the Middle Rio Grande Basin, 1998.

US Department of Interior. Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975; best source for social and economic conditions in the Española valley in the 1930's.

Photographs: Santa Cruz Lake, 14 February 2012, with boulders placed around the parking area.

The Ditch - Headwaters

[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.]

In the year of the American Revolution, before there were dams or modern roads to confuse one’s sense of geography, Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez visited the church at Santa Cruz as part of a general review of their missions by the Franciscans.

He noted the village was near a "river, which, although it arises in the aforesaid sierra from three not very large springs, is joined from very high up by three or four rivulets which feed it more water than it brings from it source, and therefore it is permanent."

The sources are today called the Río Frijoles and Río Medio which join before the river enters Santa Cruz Lake, and the Río Quemado which joins soon after it escapes impoundment.

The Picuris-Pecos fault that Patrick Sutherland says occurred during the Laramide Orogeny when the Sangre de Cristo were being formed the last time defines their origins to the east. On its west side, the fault thrust Precambrian rocks of the Ortega Formation over existing Pennsylvanian strata to the east. Embudo granite exists to the west.

The Jicarilla Fault, which dips in the opposite direction, lies a few miles to the east. It also appeared in Laramide times and now separates the Pennsylvanian from the Precambrian quartzite of the Truchas Range.

The Frijoles arises before the Picuris-Pecos Fault and curls south and west through the widening Panchuela West.

The origins of Río Medio lie farther north and east in the watershed before the Río Grande and Pecos known as Trailrider’s Wall that runs from Truchas Peak to Pecos Baldy. From there it crosses both the Jicarilla and Picuris-Pecos faults.

Río Quemado begins east of the Picrus-Pecos fault, with the south fork coming from somewhere between Middle Truchas Peak and Truchas Peak. The north fork leaves a glacial cirque near North Truchas Peak and falls 100' at the Quemado Falls.

All the mountain rivers are accessible to hikers and fishermen who aren’t intimidated by Forest Service warnings that a trail is not only difficult but hard to locate.

For common folk, the last you see of the Frijoles is in a valley that lies some 75' below route 503. Settlers in Cundiyo have dug ditches from the curving river to water what look like flattened hay fields.

The Medio is less visible as it wanders along the edge of a privately owned meadow just north of the confluence with the Frijoles. Even fisherman can’t get through there.

Río Quemado is hidden by the settlement of Cordova and by scrub that’s grown along its banks, but, away from the road, flows there through a fairly broad valley.

This is as far north as I can follow the Santa Cruz, and it’s as far north as settlement had penetrated when Domínguez counted 125 families living in the village of Santa Cruz, 71 in Chimayó after the confluence, 52 in Quemado and 26 in Truchas just beyond.

Notes:
Francisco Atansio Domínguez. Republished 1956 as The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, translated and edited by Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez.

John P. Miller, Arthur Montgomery and Patrick K. Sutherland. Geology of Part of the Southern Sangre de Cristo Mountains, New Mexico. Socorro, State Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources. New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, 1963.

Photographs:
1. Río Frijoles as it joins the Rio Medio, 14 February 2012.

2. Río Frijoles below 503 east of Cundiyo, 16 February 2012; the river is marked by the red willow; the differences between the near hills and the Sangre de Cristo may be marked by the differences in vegetation in back.

3. Río Medio just before its merger with the Río Frijoles along route 503, 14 February 2012.
4. Río Quemado at Cordova just off county road 83, 21 February 2012.

The Ditch - The Dam

[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.]

The Santa Cruz dam sits near the edge of an uplift of Mesoproterozoic granite topped by early Pleistocene sandy gravel.

Daniel Koning’s geological map for the Cundiyo quadrangle shows the uplift lies between two north-south faults with the western one through the reservoir and the eastern roughly along route 503. Both are moving east. Between them, northeast of the lake, is another, shorter fault that curves and is moving northeast.

The sedimentary land at the top of the dam basin is 6300'. The structural and hydraulic heights of the dam are 151' but only 100' is available to hold water. The width of the dam at its base is 103.6'. That means the crack in the uplifted rock, at its narrowest, is something like 150' x 100'.

The lake covers 121 acres at the top and looks to be roughly 4000' long from the face to the point where the bowls narrows and water is white in the picture below. The opening widens to 600' in places.

From there the Santa Cruz river runs for a mile to the point it forms at route 503. It first goes south where the land above is 6400', then curves to go northeast where the surface land is 6600'. It flows through what Craig Martin describes as a "narrow, rocky canyon."

The 10' to 15' wide river has "shallow runs and many holes 4 to 10 feet deep" for brown trout. That means, the crack goes more than 10' below the surface and the river bottom is rock fill.

Martin say’s it’s possible to walk the river, nearly to the dam, if you’re willing to wade through the water and navigate those openings.

You don’t need to venture so far to see the rocks that form the walls of the reservoir. They’re visible on route 503 where the river begins it narrow journey. Daniel Koning says the granite and granitic pegmatite has a "distinct reddish weathered surface" and consists of potassium feldspar, quartz, muscovite, plagioclase feldspar and biotite.

Outcrops can also be seen when you follow the river back from route 520 to the dam at the southern end of canyon fault.

The Bureau of Reclamation says that the "quality designations" of the dam’s supporting rock "ranged from poor to very poor; however, with depth the fractured zones are locked in and will provide adequate foundation."

That’s as reassuring as it can get it an area striped with faults. A collapsed dam would spread disaster all the way to the Rio Grande.

Notes:
Daniel J. Koning, Matthew Nyman, R. Horning, Martha Cary Eppes, and S. Rogers Preliminary Geologic Map of the Cundiyo Quadrangle, Santa Fe County, New Mexico, May 2002, map and report.

Craig Martin. Fly Fishing in Northern New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

Photographs:
1. Santa Cruz lake and dam, 14 February 2012.
2. Santa Cruz dam from the other side, 16 February 2012.
3. Santa Cruz lake looking towards the north opening, 14 February 2012.
4. Walls of the Santa Cruz river canyon from route 503, 14 February 2012.
5. Santa Cruz river from route 503, 14 February 2012.
6. Exposed rock on route 503, 14 February 2012.
7. Exposed rock from other side of dam, near route 520, 16 February 2012.