Last updated: February 5, 2024
Place
Vantage Point: Desert Landscape
Quick Facts
Location:
Along the inner loop trail between the Cultural Center and Paisano Drive
Significance:
Vantage point of the park landscape and the broader urban Chihuahuan Desert landscape
Amenities
4 listed
Benches/Seating, Cellular Signal, Pets Allowed, Wheelchair Accessible
The rolling hills on the Chamizal National Memorial grounds were constructed in the late 1960s to provide quiet areas for contemplation and a landscape that would appear to flow seamlessly from this commemorative park into the neighboring Mexican Chamizal park. A well provided abundant access to water that was needed needed to maintain a carpeted lawn of nonnative grass on which visitors could rest and recreate.
Decades later, the park faces some unintended consequences in the context of a changing climate, growing demand for water, increased salinity in the soil, and a more acute environmental awareness. In more recent years, a former superintendent and landscape architect created a plan that proposes replanting areas of the park with native Chihuahuan Desert plants. Several years later, park rangers and volunteers planted a variety of native plants in the bare area north of you, between this vantage point and the road. Most of the plantings eventually died except for several four wing saltbushes and a couple of other small plants.
There's likely a good reason that the four wing saltbushes that survived. This shrub's name in Spanish is chamizo, and a place where chamizos grow is a chamizal. This salt tolerant shrub was common. The disputed farmland was located in an area generally referred to as "El Chamizal," so the name of the disputed land was transferred to the treaty that finally resolved the dispute and the national park that commemorates the historic event.
While the treaty was a model of diplomacy and resolved a thorny dispute, it led to some consequences perhaps unintended and less beneficial. The Rio Grand used to meander back and forth creating braids up to two miles wide of natural channels through this area. Now, the concrete lined channels that keep the boundary from moving and protect the surrounding cities from flooding also remove natural banks that provide shelter and sustenance for plants and wildlife. People whose lives were daily tied to the river for centuries can no longer access it with its steep channeled sides and fences.
Have you ever been faced with a problem where the solution came at a price?