|
News
Hundreds Pay Respects to King
Three Trails in 30 Years
Around the Area
Briefs
Range of Projects Displayed at Expo
Estancia Teen Gets Worldwide Education
CNM To Offer Courses in Edgewood
DWI Memorial Needs Help To Stay Open
Bidding Process To Start on Arts Center
Mother of 5 Arrested in Fatal Stabbing
More
News
|
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Science Class Explores Acequia Diversity
By Lee Ross /
Mountain View Telegraph
From Niagara Falls at the Canadian border to Angel Falls in Venezuela, flowing water seems to attract people.
In the East Mountains, it was the San Antonio Acequia that recently drew a class of about 15 students from East Mountain High School on Monday. Students in Bradd Schulke’s science class took a hike through the Ojito de San Antonio Open Space — an 88-acre area just west of N.M. 14 and about a mile north of Old Route 66. They wore shirts with everything from death-metal to humming birds emblazoned on them and as the young men and women trooped along they listened to short lectures on plant life by Reggie Fletcher, an ecologist from the nearby Carnuel area.
He explained why the area generally has less diversity than the San Pedro Creek area to the north.
“This doesn’t work as a normal riparian area does,” he said. “(The acequia) is designed as a conveyance.”
Along the hike the group stepped over the clear, burbling water of the acequia, which flows through metal pipes and channels cut into the earth.
Fletcher explained that the faster-moving water doesn’t have time to be absorbed and he described what might happen there if the acequia were removed.
“The diversity in this area would explode,” he said. “There’s been a cost to this (acequia) … that’s OK, as long as the cost is recognized.”
In spite of that cost, Fletcher was able to point of three types of juniper – alligator, Rocky Mountain and oneseed – in a single area near the acequia.
Shulke also shared a little bit of the history of the area and let a few of the boys climb in the trees.
Before the field trip the class studied the history of the area and the water system, which was built in 1819 and is maintained by the Acequia Madre de San Antonio Community Ditch Association.
The water system has delivered water in the same way for nearly two centuries, Schulke explained, and part of that history includes documents from the early 1800s establishing San Antonio that are signed by the king of Spain.
He said some residents of nearby San Antonio may still have ditches from the acequia running under their homes a traditional way, accessible by a hole in the floor covered with a wooden lid.
“It’s cool to see how well they maintain (the acequia),” said April Morgan, a student at EMHS.
She said she’d gone hiking in the area with her father two years before, but saw the area differently on this outing.
“I didn’t understand what it was about,” she said.
Morgan and three other students – Jennifer Hanson, Brittany Saiz and Monique Gonzalez – are working on a DVD about the acequia. When completed, they said the DVD will be given to Chris Jinzo, the current mayordomo of the ditch association, and can be used for education about the acequia.
|
E-mail Story
Print Friendly
