The Pecos River Flume: The River That Crosses Itself
Near Carlsbad, New Mexico
Half a mile north of downtown Carlsbad, a concrete structure crosses the Pecos River on a row of elliptical arches. It looks like a section of Roman aqueduct dropped into the New Mexico desert, and it was once featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not as the river that crosses itself.
The description is not entirely wrong. The Pecos River Flume carries irrigation water across the Pecos River in a concrete trough elevated high enough for the river to flow beneath it. Water diverted upstream from the river travels along the main irrigation canal, crosses over the river in the flume, and continues to fields on the opposite bank. The river and the canal share the same name, cross the same point, and flow in roughly the same direction, but one passes over the other.
The first flume was a wooden structure built around eighteen eighty-nine to serve the original irrigation system. A flood destroyed it in nineteen oh two. Civil engineer Thomas Taylor Johnston, working from Chicago, redesigned the structure in concrete. The rebuilt flume was completed in nineteen oh three at a cost of fifty thousand dollars. At the time, the four hundred ninety-two-foot-long, forty-seven-foot-high structure was described as the largest irrigation flume in the United States.
Floodwater damaged the new concrete flume just one year after it opened. The Bureau of Reclamation undertook major repairs in nineteen oh six. The Civilian Conservation Corps added stone masonry cutwaters in nineteen thirty-nine. The flume is still in use today.
