From the Ground Up

The abrupt line between La Cienega and its other Santa Fe County neighbors happens because of the way that water flows underground out of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and toward flatter plains, and then it gets pinched up to the surface by impenetrable volcanic rock.

But lately, water has been much more scarce in the community.

And rather than waiting for government officials to do something about it, area residents are teaming up to hire experts to try and figure out why.

Four generations back, Sean Paloheimo's family started building the ranch that would eventually become El Rancho de las Golondrinas. The 35-acre Leonora Curtin Wetland Preserve, named after his great-grandmother and managed today by the Santa Fe Botanical Garden as a public open space, is nearby.

Now 33, Paloheimo works as the director of operations at Golondrinas, maintaining its authentic character as representative of what life along the Camino Real was like in the 17th and 18th centuries. For years, they've used flood irrigation to grow crops on the ranch, for example. Soon, however, Paloheimo expects to install a drip irrigation system because the spring-fed acequia just doesn't get the volume it used to.

"We will try to hide the drip irrigation the best we can, because it's not how it was traditionally done, but it's just what we have to do," he says, noting the ponds on the property that brimmed with water when he was a kid now lose up to 4 feet in depth each summer.

When it comes to sharing water among all the farmers in the valley who depend on the land for their livelihood and whose families have been there even longer than his, he says there's more tension than ever before.

That's why Paloheimo encouraged the museum's board of directors to put up $10,000 for the first year of what other backers hope is a five-year sentry well monitoring project that will provide measurements of the water table in La Cienega for a public database. That information could help determine the extent to which drilling new wells and allowing continued pumping in certain areas north and east of the village could spell even bigger trouble for the community.

Yet the science of hydrology quickly takes you down a rabbit hole. How state laws determine who has a right to water is largely dependent on mathematical models that are sometimes based more on assumptions than on the reality of how it moves beneath the surface.

"My analogy for the science right now, of understanding where the water supply comes from for this water that comes out of the hillside, is that we are looking through cracked and funky binoculars. You are looking around, trying to understand what is going on around you, and you think you can see some things, but it is very hard to perceive because the tools we have are that bad," says Kyle Harwood, who lives adjacent to Las Golondrinas with his wife and three sons and other members of their extended family.

Harwood also happens to be a lawyer who specializes in New Mexico's convoluted laws about water. A member of the museum's board, he's been trying to rally people in the area to get serious about documenting changes in La Cienega. It's personal in more than one way.

"This is a big natural system that is under stress from a lot of places, and it is hard to see how it kind of rolls up and blows away in a day or a year, but you can see over 10 years or 20 years, certainly in the lifetime of my children," Harwood says. "If the trend continues, it's a little hard to know exactly what it looks like, but they will see it."

And because local governments haven't acted to get more robust data, he says, his neighbors are forced to "do it bottom-up, to even get the information that then leads to changes in the modeling that could lead to changes in the administration of water."

Members of the La Cienega Valley Association are helping to get the word out via GoFundMe.com to raise another $10,000 for the next year.

Stacy Timmons, hydrogeologist and program manager at the aquifer monitoring project at New Mexico Tech, says it's rare for communities to raise private funds for this kind of endeavor.

"The state maintains water monitoring networks in areas that are more populated," Timmons says, "but on a community scale, this is definitely fairly unique. This wetland geology is also very unique in the state of New Mexico."

The valley is a sort of canary in the coal mine about the region's aquifer, Timmons adds, so vulnerable that "you feel the effects in La Cienega when there is over-pumping or climate change. This is the end of the line."

Santa Fe Reporter