The Secret Knowledge of Water by Craig Childs

Author:Craig Childs [Childs, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: NAT000000
ISBN: 9780316055307
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Published: 2008-12-12T07:00:00+00:00

1st firefly at 7:45

many more by 7:49

dazzling by 7:54

Finally, in the dark, the gurgling sound of the creek became loud enough that the bottom of the canyon had transformed. Through a parade of fireflies and the dance of fish and diving beetles, the water had come. Tomorrow, in the sunlight, all of this would again be gone.

I should not give the impression that all the creeks here appear and disappear completely. Like the creek of the fireflies, many have surface water for twenty yards or ten feet or half a mile, with dry stretches between. At night these grow and sometimes connect, and during the day they recede, but not all of them entirely. Small waterfalls can still be found in the deepest shade during the day, and some of the creeks keep miles of water on top day and night.

I had come walking the creeks below the Galiuro Mountains, one of the more remote ranges in Arizona, northeast of Tucson and northwest of Willcox. Depending on what you count, there are well over ten good, running streams here. In the winter they run full steam, bank to bank all the way to the San Pedro River, a river that flows north out of Mexico into the Gila River, which runs south of Phoenix, curving across the state to meet the Colorado River before returning to Mexico. In the summer these small creeks are piecemeal, consisting of wet and dry sections scattered haphazardly through the canyons.

Although the Galiuros reach as high as 7,663 feet, they do not account in size for the amount of water produced in the springs and creeks below. These desert creeks, all around a 4,000-foot elevation, are too numerous. Even larger mountain ranges that feed the surrounding deserts cannot produce this volume of water. For the number of cattle historically grazing this area, about twenty-five windmills would be expected. There are only six. Much of the water is actually a remnant of Ice Age water. Stored and doled out in the increments of small streams, this Pleistocene water slowly drains from aquifers buried in the mountains, joining banks of much more recent runoff water. Radiocarbon dating on the groundwater here places it back ten thousand years, while the oldest water goes back to over fifteen thousand years. Hydrologists call it fossil water.

The Nature Conservancy in 1982 purchased forty-nine thousand acres of private land and government land leases below the Galiuros. Even as a neighboring rancher sued the Conservancy for not grazing cattle on this leased land, the conservation outfit talked the Bureau of Land Management into a five-year riparian and grassland restoration plan for the area. The plan mostly involved doing nothing, letting the place get back about its business. The boldest moves were the removal of cattle that had been grazing the area heavily since the late 1800s, and an experimental controlled burn program. The canyons at the northern boundaries of the Conservancy property are within two federal wilderness areas, which, when combined with the Conservancy's Muleshoe Ranch land, encompass the entire watershed of these desert streams.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.