Sunday Reflection - Land Sculpture

Betty and I went out for a walk this afternoon (Sunday).  We decided to walk over to the arroyo that is just South of us.  We haven't been there in a long while and we wanted to see what all the recent rain did.  Water can be pretty powerful and we were curious as to how it looked now.

We walked to the natural part of the arroyo.  Just a little to the East (toward the mountain) the concrete, maintained channel starts to funnel the water down under Corrales Road to a drainage area just short of the Rio Grande.  Last year they dug a deep retention pond at the end of the arroyo to catch silt before the water entered the channel.

Normally, the empty depth of that concrete channel under Corrales Road is about 10 feet.  With all the rain recently, and the silt that came down the arroyo from Rio Rancho to the West, the silt build up was over 7 feet deep.  There was only a 3 foot clearance between the top of the silt and the bottom of the bridge.  There was a real concern about flooding of the homes around the bridge, but fortunately that didn't happen.

The dirt pile behind Betty in the picture above is from the channel under the bridge.  It's an accumulation of about three year's worth of rain and silt and is over 30 feet high now.  The plain of the arroyo itself is almost twice as wide at this point as when we first moved here.  You're also looking at where the large, deep retention pond was - it's no longer there.  So, I guess it did it's job and caught that amount of silt before it could add to the 7 feet of silt in the channel under the bridge.  If they had not dug the retention pond, the flooding around the bridge might have happened and been a disaster for the families that live close to the bridge.

The power of water can be pretty awesome.