Continued from the
preceding post.
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| Looking down at the Rio Grande from the rim rock. (Photo by Tom Baugh) |
As I have said several times before in this blog, I’m attracted
to the study of water…I like to play in the mud. In early May 2013 this attraction led me,
along with my artist wife Penny Baugh (http://artjourney-penny.blogspot.com) to
the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge in an area referred to by the USDI Bureau of
Land Management (BLM) as the Wild Rivers Recreation Area. The Rio Grande and the Red River flow through
this region of sagebrush, pinyon pine and juniper. But it was the Rio Grande that called to us
this day. We had decided to walk down
into the canyon 800 feet below to visit Big Arsenic Springs.
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| Big Arsenic Springs on the Rio Grande. (Photo by tom Baugh) |
The trail dropped away steeply below our perch down through
layers and layers of ancient lava flows until rock flowed into water. From high above, the river looked peaceful
along some stretches and turbulent with white water along others. In driving along the miles of roads and through
the thousands of acres leading into the site we had not seen another human
since the community of Cerro some miles back.
The BLM visitor center was closed. And there were no other cars on the
roads or parked at the campsites. To the best of our knowledge, we were alone in
the immensity. It was a very liberating,
and I suspect these days a very rare, experience.
Our descent along the crumbly surface of the trail took
longer than any other mile-long stretch we have ever walked. But eventually we reached Big Arsenic Spring
at the river’s edge. According to the
story, possibly a myth, the spring was named by a hermit who wanted to keep the
water all to himself. Perhaps somebody
finally did the science, found out that this was not an arsenic spring, and the
hermit lost his exclusivity. A flow of
5000 gallons per minute makes Big Arsenic Springs a rarity in this parched
region of the earth. This artesian,
subaqueous spring rushes from the base of a great tumble of lava rock and
bursts out into the river in a white plume.
We had the spring all to ourselves
that morning and it was not until our journey back up the trail, when we had
almost reached the rimrock, that we encountered a party of four, the first
humans we had seen that day.
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| The canyon rim above the Rio Grande. (Photo by Tom Baugh) |
