Last night, looked at Santa Fe National Forest map and could see path of Santa Fe River.  Map is such large scale that it's hard to see all the details so I'll study topo maps of the area at the library.  The river stays north of I-25, maybe passes through or near La Cienega and goes down La Bajada Mesa to the Rio Grande below Cochiti Dam.

Santa Fe County's plan is to continue the Santa Fe River Trail, from where the City of Santa Fe's paved trail ends, all the way to the wastewater treatment plant in Santa Fe County.  The whole project is called the Santa Fe River Greenway.  


It would be interesting to one day walk the whole length of the Santa Fe River.  Past La Bajada Mesa, though, it's on Cochiti Pueblo land and below where the river originates on Lake Peak high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, it's impounded in reservoirs that are off limits except for special tours.  Great, at least, that the section from Frenchy's Field to Alameda and St. Francis Drive is walkable!  No water in that section of the river when we walked along it but there were construction vehicles busily moving soil and boulders in the river bed to make the banks less steep and to install grade-control structures to control storm run-off damage to the river channel.


On Tuesday, buttonholed a Santa Fean (turned out she taught for seven years at Chamisa School in White Rock - small world!) and she advised if we ventured beyond the end of the paved trail at Frenchy's Field to take pepper spray and a cell phone.  I got the idea that this was to protect against both 4-legged and 2-legged roaming animals.  She said she walked that way by herself in November 2010 when the event Santa Fe EARTH Flash Flood was staged by 350.org and the Santa Fe Art Institute to show how the Santa Fe River would look with water running through it.  More than a 1,000 people stood in the dry river bed in Santa Fe County between San Ysidro Crossing and the Caja del Oro Grant Crossing and held up blue-painted cardboard and blue tarps as a satellite passed overhead.  This all came about after "the environmental group American Rivers designated the Santa Fe River as America's most endangered river of 2007" [quote from Wikipedia's entry on the Santa Fe River (New Mexico)].  


The City of Santa Fe gets some of its drinking water from the upper watershed of the Santa Fe River and the water is stored in McClure and Nichols reservoirs.  Now, with the soon-to-be-completed Buckman Diversion Project which takes water from the Rio Grande, there will be more water available to flow year-around in the Santa Fe River and there is definitely demand by Santa Feans for the river to become a "living river" again and not just a storm run-off channel.