They turn off the river every year to build a small dam.















At this point you can literally walk across it and not get your ankles wet.

It's only knee deep on Amy.

They "Turn Off" the Rio Grande River? How?


Anyways, great pictures. I'd have more to say, but I'm confused at what you meant to say.

lol, nothing like bumping an old topic. My guess snowy is that they have a control gate somewhere higher up on the river, (usually north) and when the river gets flooded the older dams that are meant to keep the water in a certain location to refill the local aquifer are destroyed. Then then dam the river higher up, and at preselected location, rebuild the dam, and keep the brunt of water in the local soil instead of the ocean. or at least thats my guess. :whistle:

Up stream there is Elephant Butte Dam with a power plant in the center of it. They open and close the gates to regulate the amount of water that goes through to Texas.

I'm pretty sure that I have posted some pictures of the dam somewhere on here.


Seek and ye shall find..... ;)

Alright guys here's what they do. Once a year, usually at the end of spring, they shut off the flow of water out of Elephant Butte Lake into the river by closing the valves that are built into Elephant Butte Dam, the dam that has the power plant in it. Then they go downstream about 2 1/2 to 3 miles and build a rock dam across the river. The pictures my mom posted show the temporary rock dam. Then at the end of the monsoon season they push all the rocks back up onto the bank of the river, after all the runoff from the mountains has passed, and open the valves to the spillways on Elephant Butte Dam back up. They do this to help control the size of the river and prevent flooding because the town is built so close to the river in fact a good portion of town is built in the original river bed on the path that the river once took. If they didn't do it the town would suffer flooding every summer do to the fact that it is surrounded by mountains and during the monsoons even if we don't get rain in town the surrounding mountains always seem to get e ton of it and all of the runoff goes directly to the river via numerous different creeks. in fact if we walk through the back gate to the property that we live on and about twenty feet straight out we are standing in the bed of one of those creeks, Cuchillo Creek to be exact. Anyways they do all this to protect our little town here.

Snowy,I hope this description is a bit more helpful than the one that my mom gave.

:pft: Smart alec!

:laugh: nice write up. thanks. :drunk: