Chiricauhua

Ben Schoenburg

Chiricauhua Mountains, AZ 

October 25th, 2019

“It is not enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies [or gabions] at the bottom of it?” –Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, 1979.

My arrival to the Chiricuahua Mountains did not start well. In less than five minutes of being outside of the van I found myself back inside it, swearing in pain and laughing at my pitiful situation. In my awestruck stumbling I had stepped on a ground hornet nest and swiftly received a bombardment of stings that sent me scrambling for refuge. I eventually left the safe haven of Van 1041 and spent the next week where I had left off, wandering and being humbled, although this time I looked where I stepped.

The next morning we went hiking with the owner of the ranch we were staying at. She took off at a blazing pace, telling those who could keep up with her about the project she started 40 years ago to curtail the erosion that had cut deep into the hillsides. She described how initially the plan she had to build a system of rock piles known as ‘check dams’ or ‘gabions’ to slow the water down was dismissed as impossible by experts given the speed and ferocity of the floodwater. And for the first years they were mostly right, the damns in the eroded areas blew out time and time again. The owner told us how she kept rebuilding them as well as continually expanding the reach of the water harvesting system. After a while, the check dams began to hold, collecting the sediment that the water dropped as it slowed down creating a substrate for plants to establish themselves. The sub-surface water also increased, as the mat of vegetation and soil conducted water into the ground.

 I stood in a lush grove of Arizona White Oaks listening to our host talk to us about the near magical effects that the gabion system had on the land. But I scratched my head. “Your telling me these grassy meadows and shady groves where mostly patches of rock?” I asked incredulously. She patiently walked me to a place she had intentionally left bare so that neigh-sayers and poo-pooers such as myself might see with their own eyes what it had looked like before. I must say I was more than a little chagrinned to see a stream that had cut down to the bedrock and looked more like a waterslide than the other herbage-filled streams. In my defense, the success of the rock check dams was so drastic that they literally buried themselves in soil and vegetation. In some places rock piles four or five feet tall were barely poking up through all of the deposited sand and soil. I had to admit to myself that I had been mistaken, but I couldn’t quite let it go. “Well” I said, gesturing to a small drainage way up on a hillside “what about up there? Are there any gabions all the way at the top?” My patient and gracious host smiled, and said “why don’t you go see?” Game on, I thought and took off up the hill to find where the gabions ended. Soon the terrain became, steep, and I mean STEEP. Despite the punishing angle I was practically crawling up, I carried on, with determination to prove my theory and the willful denial that, at some point, I would have to find my way down. Looking up the hill I imagined an area where there were no gabions, but each time I crested a rise, there would be one there mocking me. The higher and higher I went the more certain I was that I would find the place where the gabions ended. When I got to the top of the ridge I felt elated that I had actually made it, but then quickly realized that I had been proven wrong. As I turned to head back down I looked out across the valley the green ribbons of drainages and perennial streams and thought to myself “damn all of those probably have check dams in them too.”