We have spent many enjoyable hours wandering through Albuquerque’s bosque, the riverside wooded area along both sides of the Rio Grande. Some areas of it we can walk to from our apartment, other areas that are further away we access by first driving to a parking area, and still others we enjoy as part of a bike ride. This morning we had an opportunity to put in some time working on improvements to the bosque, as part of the city’s 21st annual Dia del Rio (Day of the River) event.
The area of the bosque chosen for this year’s event is one that we pass by every time that we ride our bikes across the Rio Grande on the bike trail that parallels Paseo del Norte. We glance at it on the south side of the trail as we ride by, but we had never taken the time to walk through it. After spending the morning working there and realizing how extensive it is, I think we will walk there more often in the future.
Dia del Rio event participants had half a dozen projects to choose from, including trail maintenance, trash pickup and revegetation. I thought trash pickup would be about my speed, but with Lee’s encouragement, we joined one of the groups doing a revegetation project. The project was in an area that had been a temporary road through the bosque, but was now being replanted with native shrubs to restore it (hopefully) to its original, natural state.
The physical effort expended in this morning’s work was more than paid back to us by all that we enjoyed. And even if only one of the dozen or so shrubs that I put in the ground survives, it will have been worth it because that one shrub can grow up and reproduce many more.
Living Wonderously 