Another day, another hike up the first two miles of Camp May Road. Got another late afternoon start but was back to the car well before dark. On the way up, saw the B couple. They cross country skied Pajarito yesterday and today. I'm always cheered by seeing them and they always stop to say hello!
Someone has dumped a jacket, a hoodie, denim shorts and a child's car seat at the beginning of FR2998. Wonder if the spring thaw will reveal more trash.
The snow on the ridges above Pajarito Canyon shone in the afternoon sunlight.
On the way down, maniac raced past me at high speed. Heard squeal of brakes but saw no bodies strewn in the roadway. Miss a turn and you'll end up in the deep freeze of Los Alamos Canyon! I didn't think kind thoughts about the driver!
Yesterday, walked off the road onto the snow to look at snowman at intersection of West Road Bypass and Camp May Road. Family built it - I saw tiny boot prints and snow angels. Walking in snow back to road, my right foot suddenly sunk - that's the bum foot and I kind of wrenched it but it was OK today. Snow is not my right foot's friend!
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Looked at these topo quads today at the library: Aqua Fria, Tetilla Peak and Santo Domingo. Looked at a lot more but these were the relevant ones to follow the course of the Santa Fe River to the Rio Grande.
Here are my notes: Cienega Creek is a tributary of the Santa Fe River. Santa Fe River comes toward La Cienega from the northeast and travels between Cerro Seguro and the Las Tetillitas peaks. Santa Fe River then runs through the Cañada de Santa Fe which skirts southern edge of Tsinat and La Bajada mesas. Tsinat Mesa has Tsinat Ruins on it. La Bajada Mesa seems to be the southern edge of the Caja del Rio Plateau and Tsinat Mesa is a small part of La Bajada Mesa. On its way to the Rio Grande, it appears that the Santa Fe River crosses (over or under?) a spillway of Cochiti Dam but Cochiti Lake is well north of the Santa Fe River. The Santa Fe River, which originates in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, goes into the Rio Grande (usually as a dry riverbed) catty-corner across from where Peralta Canyon, which originates in the Jemez Mountains, intersects the Rio Grande.
It seems the Santa Fe River would get an infusion of water from spring-fed Cienega Creek but it it's complicated. I found online a Channel 4 KOB-TV news report about the village of La Bajada, west of La Cienega and Santa Fe. The villagers, many who subsistence farm their land, complained last July about no water in the Santa Fe River. According to the TV station's story, when Santa Fe tore out invasive salt cedar and Russian olive trees further upstream along the Santa Fe River and replaced them with native willows and cottonwoods, beavers toppled those trees and built dams which dried out downstream La Bajada!
Here are my notes: Cienega Creek is a tributary of the Santa Fe River. Santa Fe River comes toward La Cienega from the northeast and travels between Cerro Seguro and the Las Tetillitas peaks. Santa Fe River then runs through the Cañada de Santa Fe which skirts southern edge of Tsinat and La Bajada mesas. Tsinat Mesa has Tsinat Ruins on it. La Bajada Mesa seems to be the southern edge of the Caja del Rio Plateau and Tsinat Mesa is a small part of La Bajada Mesa. On its way to the Rio Grande, it appears that the Santa Fe River crosses (over or under?) a spillway of Cochiti Dam but Cochiti Lake is well north of the Santa Fe River. The Santa Fe River, which originates in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, goes into the Rio Grande (usually as a dry riverbed) catty-corner across from where Peralta Canyon, which originates in the Jemez Mountains, intersects the Rio Grande.
It seems the Santa Fe River would get an infusion of water from spring-fed Cienega Creek but it it's complicated. I found online a Channel 4 KOB-TV news report about the village of La Bajada, west of La Cienega and Santa Fe. The villagers, many who subsistence farm their land, complained last July about no water in the Santa Fe River. According to the TV station's story, when Santa Fe tore out invasive salt cedar and Russian olive trees further upstream along the Santa Fe River and replaced them with native willows and cottonwoods, beavers toppled those trees and built dams which dried out downstream La Bajada!
Chris Isaak has two new-to-me CDs in the library - Lucky Man and Beyond the Sun. I'm on the list for Beyond the Sun and have listened to Lucky Man. It was good but I'd need to listen to it again to really appreciate it. Just love that man's voice as it wraps around me!
The hiker with stage 4 lung cancer - just like state representative Ben Lujan - died Tuesday. What a shock. She was always warm and kind when I talked with her on hikes. The funeral home website shows a recent photo of her and one when she was younger - what a knockout beauty she was!!
Thoughts on life and death: Going quickly would be OK if I made it all right with my life as I lived it and the people that I lived it with. Haven't quite achieved that. I'm often wishing for other circumstances rather than appreciating what is. Linger and you'd want to hold on to life - too much time to ruminate and torture self. Or, maybe time to set things right and accept death? Thinking of death makes one appreciate the ordinary like chopping an onion or calling husband to discuss what's for dinner. Sometimes, though, I make life a struggle. How to make it less so? All the things we hate about our life, dying would put in perspective but, of course, it would be too late!
I must say that yesterday, I really relished the many people I knew that I ran into at the library and senior center. Life is meant to be lived, or something like that my friend in her late 70's once said.
The hiker with stage 4 lung cancer - just like state representative Ben Lujan - died Tuesday. What a shock. She was always warm and kind when I talked with her on hikes. The funeral home website shows a recent photo of her and one when she was younger - what a knockout beauty she was!!
Thoughts on life and death: Going quickly would be OK if I made it all right with my life as I lived it and the people that I lived it with. Haven't quite achieved that. I'm often wishing for other circumstances rather than appreciating what is. Linger and you'd want to hold on to life - too much time to ruminate and torture self. Or, maybe time to set things right and accept death? Thinking of death makes one appreciate the ordinary like chopping an onion or calling husband to discuss what's for dinner. Sometimes, though, I make life a struggle. How to make it less so? All the things we hate about our life, dying would put in perspective but, of course, it would be too late!
I must say that yesterday, I really relished the many people I knew that I ran into at the library and senior center. Life is meant to be lived, or something like that my friend in her late 70's once said.
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.
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.
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