Arroyos

A defining feature of Santa Fe is the system of arroyos that snake from the mountains through the city and out into the basin. These big open drainage routes have place names and are maintained as recreation routes. Not great for biking, since they are essentially sand washes, but great for walking and hiking. 

When rains come they fill with rushing water, channeling it out through the city and away from buildings and roads. But mostly they are completely dry and sandy.

The biggest is the Arroyo de los Chamisos and it goes right through our housing development. In 2018 it flooded catastrophically during a 45 minute raging downpour, tearing up chunks of asphalt from the walking trail behind our clubhouse and flooding homes near us. The city finally fixed it this summer, berming the sides, digging giant trenches, and redirecting the route with earthworks. It was major. They repaved a long section of walking trail too.

The sandy corridors divide sections of the city. Some roads just stop, they don't cross an arroyo, but start up again on the other side and you have to drive several streets over to get where you want to go. Other streets have bridges that cross and recross the winding ditches. It all seems a natural element of the city and surrounding landscapes.

So it was interesting to read this article about how the arroyos are not natural, and are in fact a sign of a severely degraded environment.

 

Especially where they are steeply eroded, you can see the scouring out of land by water, and none of that is normal. (A brand new condo was just built near us at the edge of a steep scoured wall of the big arroyo and I wonder how long those buildings have before they slide down the wall.)

It wasn't like this before Europeans arrived. In fact the juniper and piñon pine scrubland that surrounds us didn't exist either. 

This article posted on the Santa Fe Botanical Garden's site was also interesting about how the land around Santa Fe was grassland, with pine trees on the uplands and in the mountains, but meadows just below. Like these shots of scenes in northern New Mexico, uneroded and still meadowy:

But the Spanish brought grazing animals to Santa Fe -- horses, cows, goats and sheep -- and the Pueblo natives adopted sheep farming too. Over centuries the grasses were depleted, and bare earth was exposed. Junipers and pinions took over, and runoff from the mountains no longer soaked slowly into covered grassland. It started etching rapidly flowing ditches in the sand that became giant arroyos.

As the city grew over 400 years, paving and houses redirected even more runoff into channels that became arroyos. Now we are a built up city of 70,000 people, and maintaining the arroyos is a full time city concern. Water has to be directed away to save homes and streets; the more we do that the more the ditches scour and it seems a never ending cycle.

It was really interesting to read these two articles and see the land around me in such a different way. The juniper-piñon scrubland etched with arroyos is our current world, but it is in no way timeless or natural. 

Juniper-pinon scrubland at Santa Fe Botanical Garden (photo Andrea Neal)