How an eroded neighborhood blight was transformed into a river-regenerating park

I'm going to show you how here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a blighted, eroding, litter-strewn, sun-baked storm drain was turned into this oasis-like storm park that's creating all kinds of amazing wildlife habitat, beauty, and a community gathering space, while at the same time helping recharge the aquifer and the flows of the Santa Fe River. So this is basically an ephemeral drainageway, alright? So what I mean by that, ephemeral, it's a waterway that only really flows during or just after storms. So I'm also going to show you how you can use a number of different erosion control rock work strategies that also harvest water that you could apply in an ephemeral waterway in your community at different scales, small and large. And what's more, I'm also going to show you how they push this even further to laterally move water out to increase the vegetative density and diversity on this site and how you could do the same with that. I'm also going to talk about how the community and political will was generated to make all of this happen and how you can create a living seed bank, a living gene bank that is resilient for climate change in your community as they did here with this project. watching to the end because I'm gonna keep showing more and more juicy little tidbits. So this is what it looked like in March of 2012 when the site was actively eroding. It was very barren, very exposed. This is what it looked like in May of 2012 just after the work was done and the small plantings had been planted. This is what it looked like in 2014 in a good storm event. And this is what it looks like today. None of this is on irrigation. All of this is watered for free just by the previously wasted, drained away storm water. It's all now infiltrating, feeding this life, cooling this area, enhancing the community. Let's see how they did it. Craig Sponholz of Watershed Artisans designed and implemented these transformations along with his team. So this storm drain, it collects the water from the neighborhood upstream. And from a big catchment area, that water then hits the storm drain. It's concentrated a massive amount of sheet flow water. And when I say sheet flow, I mean water that was not deep. It was really shallow. It was spread out. That water was then concentrated into this culvert. And by concentrating the amount of water, increasing its depth, its volume, and its velocity, it transformed the water flow into a very erosive, energy-intensive flow that would then scour out an ever-deepening gully on the downstream side. So what you're going to see downstream of it today helps diffuse and spread out and infiltrate that flow, transforming it from an erosive flow to a life-generating flow. Craig hired Mateo Garcia, a local street artist, to paint the mural on this. That then brought more community involvement through Mateo's art, and people appreciated that, so the graffiti was no longer an issue. As we come out, the first thing that happens is the water flow hits this rock that spread out. So we went from the very narrow culvert to a much more spread out channel. This is a rock mulch rundown. So basically it's an armoring of the steepest part of the drainage right here. So when we're dropping from that elevation of the culvert down to the first pool, we want to make sure that as the water is speeding up over that steeper area it doesn't erode. So the rocks take care of that. They're kind of laid like roof shingles, so the upper shingle is on top of the lower one, so the water just goes on by. You don't want to do the opposite, where if you laid it like this, the water coming down would go under that rock. So instead we're doing this way. The water keeps going, sheds over that rock, doesn't cut under that rock. Now in terms of what size rock do you use, if you were in a natural waterway that had rock and boulders within it. You would want to choose rock that is in the upper 90 percentile of sizes of rock. You know, the largest rock that you're seeing there that's less likely to move in a big storm event. As the water spills over the rock mulch rundown it spreads out and a lot of it infiltrates a pool. Then it steps down to another basin. Here we've got a hybrid between a cross vein and a rock mulch rundown. I'll talk about that a little more in just a moment. But the water spills over the steep part with this rock armoring and then enters a much larger pool and basin. Now in an ephemeral waterway, when I say ephemeral I mean water only flows during and right after storm events, the pools fill up with sediment, the sediment that the water is carrying And at the end of that storm event, when the water flow starts to subside, it loses its energy and it drops out its sediment into the places of lowest flow, such as a basin or a pool. This basin was dug six feet deep and then it was filled with two feet of mulch, wood chip mulch that was inoculated with beneficial mycelia to help bioremediate toxins and jumpstart soil life. that could really help the vegetation. That wood chip mulch was capped with one layer of rock cobble just to hold it in place, which has all worked perfectly. But what wasn't anticipated is just how much sediment is coming off of that neighborhood watershed. So that sediment has covered the tops of these pools. That's okay. Water still infiltrates through the sand and sediment and deeper into the root zone of this vegetation. So once the water spills out and overflows out of that basin, it hits another cross-vein rock mulch rundown structure and spills into another basin down below of equal capacity. A little more information on this cross-vein structure. So the cross-vein was developed, I believe, by Dave Rosgen. He does a lot of water restoration work. So the lowest point is here in the center of the waterway. Water will take the path of least resistance. So then the arms of the structure they start moving uphill as they're going downstream. So my fingertips are like the structure, my arms are the structure. So the lowest point would be here and then it moves uphill. That way in a really big flow event when water spreads out to the full extension of the structure, the depth of the water is going to be the shallowest at the ends and thus the energy of the flowing water and its ability to carry sediment will be its lowest, its least, out to the ends. So we won't have erosion there. We'll instead focus the bulk of the energy in the water in the center and we've armored that waterway with the rock and then the pooled water downstream will further diffuse that incoming water flow and its energy. So another nice thing about this structure is in big flow events, when the water spreads out into the adjoining floodplain, we're getting more spread. Water spread, man. It's like butter. You want to spread that water, okay, because it tastes good. It's good for the soil. It's good for the plant life, all right? And so the more we get water to linger, linger longer, the better we rehydrate the whole system rather than rapidly drain and dehydrate the system. For more on this structure, be sure to check out my book Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2. Check out the In-Channel Strategies chapter. But one other thing I just want to point out again, this structure, it's got the ends, the downstream ends are pointed downstream. We're going to see another structure just a little bit downstream that's the opposite. Because when you design and place these structures, you're working with the topography. Here, the general topography is draining in. It's focusing the water into the channel. But when you get to an alluvial fan, where oftentimes the slope lessens, it reverses. It starts to fan out rather than funnel in. We're at the funnel in point. going to see the fan out point downstream. When this large basin overflows it spills over another cross vein structure to another large basin that spreads out that flow of water is infiltrating it very deep into the soil and then this one overflows over a different shape structure. So the ones upstream there they've got their arms and their fingertips facing downstream because there the topography is a funnel shape the water's concentrating into the channel but here the slope lessens a little bit and we're into more of an alluvial fan shape so we switched from the funnel to the fan so as a result these large boulders of the spillway they're going with fingertips upstream So the idea is to spread the water out in a sheet flow, you know, level equal amount all across the rock spillway so it spreads out not in a concentrated deep channel, but rather very shallow sheet flow all the way down the alluvial fan. And then that is helping freely irrigate willows. Love that! We've got riparian vegetation, the willows, the cottonwoods. I can't give you all the details of how to build these structures within this video. That's why I lay out in much more detail, step by step, how you can do it within my books, especially Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands Beyond, Volume 2, the In-Channel Strategies chapter. and the book is geared to how you can do this by hand okay the human scale using smaller rock and doing all the labor yourself just with hand tools but you can scale it up by you with machinery all the same concepts principles apply you're just using larger material and larger equipment to move that material all right so now let's go down and see where this meets the river the flowing river and how this is helping regenerate that flow. What? Flow in water? My feet in the water? Yes! So here we are in the Santa Fe River. Okay, for those of you back east in wetter areas, you might be like, what? River? Okay, well in our dry land environment, yeah, this is a river and this is a low flow event. It can really flow bank to bank in a big flow event. The key thing here is this flow is sustained in part by a dedicated release of water from the reservoir upstream in the mountains. A dedicated release of water to have the river flowing through town. But another thing that helps sustain and grow these flows is this effort here of turning that storm drain into a storm park. Because instead of water just shooting through really rapidly, it's slowing it down, it's infiltrating the water, and then there's a slow release from the subsoil storage into the above soil flow. And similarly, creating rain gardens at home in our front and back yards, sending household gray water in the times of no rain to those rain gardens, all of this is further banking more water in the soil. It's planting the rain rather than draining the rain. we can do the same thing in parking lots, in public parks. We can do this at schools, offices, everywhere where we live, work, and play. The whole idea is let's plant and reinvest the rain rather than rapidly drain the rain so that we can have more sustained flows longer into the dry spell. Here's a rock mulch rundown at a small river scale or a creek scale. And just look at the difference between the storm drain scale that we saw earlier. So another great piece about this whole system is that there's lots of activity. The neighbors, people from throughout the community are walking through this. There's three layers of public pathways. There's the concrete bikeway footpath above at the top. Then there's a parallel earthen footpath. And then below us in the floodplain, there's another earthen path. Plus there's the walkway of the bottom of the river bed itself. So there's always people moving through here. We're on a weekday right now, but on the weekend, it's just a constant flow of people. Not just walking through, biking through, skateboarding through, but also hanging out. So right here is, this was designed to be a little hangout nook. So this is the table, these are the seats. But people come out here on weekends and picnic and whatnot. I took a nap just down below in the sandy basin yesterday. Love it. On this terrace wall, this is creating a public seating area. We've got the little table, rock table at my feet. But this is not dealing with the water that's coming from the storm drain. This is dealing with the sheet flow of water coming from that property and that section of the neighborhood. And it's helping control erosion and spread the water out more here before it overflows into the storm drain turned storm park. So multiple functions here. Community gathering space, erosion control, water harvesting, and it looks beautiful. Craig Spohnholz did fantastic artwork or rock work here. With all these parallel pathways running through this project and up above the project you don't have crime issues because there's so many friendly eyes constantly checking out the site walking through the site and the way it's all been designed it's encouraging more of the activity you want which then lessens the activity you don't want. Because the whole point is getting people to interact, to relate, to be invested in all of this. Take a sense of ownership, take a sense of stewardship and works out better for everybody. The vegetation alongside this installation is really benefiting from the infiltrated water. So we've got a ponderosa pine here. That's not something you would typically find here. It's in the area. It's native to the area. But what Craig Spohnholz was doing is he wanted to kind of experiment with the plant palette. He's using all native plants to the area. Native plants are the best adapted to the climate, soils, and wildlife. They're also the best plants to support that wildlife because, well, for example, let's say we got a cottonwood tree. So if you plant a poplar that's native to the area, there's all kinds of beneficial life that's co-evolved with it adapted with it over time and there's caterpillars that can eat the leaves and caterpillars are the primary food of songbirds well all birds as they're feeding their young and but if you were to plant a non-native poplar there's a really good chance that the butterfly moth species and their caterpillars will not have adapted to adjust their metabolism to the plant's defenses. And thus you might only get one species of caterpillar that can survive on a non-native, but you might have dozens or more, maybe hundreds, that can sustain themselves on the native. So it's key to plant the native. So the cottonwood, thriving. It was not planted. It took advantage of the planted water and it's taking off. And I want to point out that these trees, they're very young. They're going to get much larger. This is going to be a true cottonwood gallery over time. The ponderosa, that was pushing it. This is more common for higher elevations. So Craig planted both species you already find in Santa Fe on a regular basis, and then he also planted species you find at a higher elevation in a colder, wetter microclimate and he planted species that you would find in lower elevation such as the desert willow which you would find in a drier environment a warmer environment now this one is a this is a volunteer it came from the mother plant that he planted all right so as I walk down here I'm going to walk up to the mother plant and, you know, by experimenting with that, he's learning. He's learning what species do better, what don't do so well. And he found that it's these plants from the lower, hotter, drier areas that are doing better than those from the wetter, cooler area as our climate unfortunately changes to a warmer climate, a hotter climate. But yet that's information we can use to create a plant, to plant a plant palette that we'll be more successful with. For more on the benefits of native vegetation, check out the book by Douglas Tallamy, which is Nature's Best Hope. Another intent of this installation is to create a living seed bank, a living gene bank, so the seeds that are dispersed from this native vegetation can help revegetate areas downstream, downwind, and upstream carried by people and wildlife. What's more is in the wet season, the rainy season, people could dig up volunteer seedlings and transplant those around the area. And in terms of irrigation, the plants that were planted in this project were watered for the first two years and then never watered again. So everything you see is now passively irrigated by the passive water harvesting. So the key thing here is instead of continually extracting water from the aquifer to support and irrigate those plants, we're now, by cutting off that supplemental irrigation and infiltrating far more water through the water harvesting strategies, this is helping recharge the aquifer rather than extracting from the aquifer. And that's a key strategy to help enhance the flow of the Santa Fe River. Now, how did they irrigate those first two years? They had a water tank above the culvert and then they had drip irrigation lines and they would gravity feed the water out of that cistern above the culvert to these plants And that system has now been abandoned because it's no longer needed They would bring in a water truck to fill that rain tank at the top and then gravity feed it below No pumps love that so behind me and upstream. We've got the mountains which is the top of the Santa Fe River watershed So, what we want to do is we want to plant the rain, infiltrate the rain from the top to the bottom, all of which will help recharge the flows of this river, the creeks that are inputting into it, springs, the groundwater table, and more. The storm drain turned storm park is part of a much larger regeneration of many parts of the watershed. So we've got the neighborhood off in the distance, then we've got the storm drain turned storm park, and then within the whole corridor of the Santa Fe River, we've got cottonwoods, willows, the native vegetation coming back, and we've got the flow of the water coming back, where before it was an ever-deepening, eroding, barren gully. So vast improvement, and everyone can take a different part, a different piece of the role in enhancing this even further still. So I would love to see more of what people can do on their private property before the water hits the storm drain. So how do you generate the community and political will for beneficial change like this to happen? So you just start asking for it. You start visioning it. So neighbors, individuals, nonprofits, they all started thinking of a better future. Many of them talked. The Watershed Association created conceptual plans to show people, to show visions of how this could be better. And they approached their local politicians. The other key thing is you can start with a very small installation. It could be in your yard, your front yard where people can see it and see how you change from a draining landscape to a water harvesting, lusher landscape. That was what was done with this storm drain turned storm park. And as people saw on the small scale what was possible, they started asking more for that on the large scale and putting funding towards it. So we can start at any point in the scale, but all of it helps the efforts at all scales. For more information on all this, including step-by-step implementation strategies, how you place these, how you design them, how you steward them over time, be sure to check out the full-color editions of my books, Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, available at deep discount direct from me at my website, harvestingrainwater.com, which has a whole lot of other resources.