El Camino Real project revives historic pathway
15-mile trail will skirt west side of Santa Fe, honor road’s heritage
SANTA FE — A $4.4 million project to develop a portion of El Camino Real — the historic route between Mexico City and the Santa Fe area — as a trail for hikers, bicyclists and horse riders got underway on Thursday with an official groundbreaking.
About 15 miles of trail will be developed skirting the west side of Santa Fe through federal, county and city land. The northernmost point will be the existing popular Diablo Canyon trailhead off Buckman Road northwest of town.
Backers of the project say it will provide a “vicarious experience” of how people settled and traded throughout New Mexico hundreds of years ago.
The trail will follow El Camino Real south from Diablo Canyon down Old Buckman Road, or County Road 77, along the edge of the Caja del Rio plateau. That 9.5-mile stretch retracing the historic use of the trail will be a 30-inch-wide natural surface.
The route veers east onto a paved path along County Road 62 and Caja Del Rio Road that will go under N.M. 599 in south Santa Fe to connect with the Santa Fe River Trail, just off Airport Road.
Colleen Baker, project manager for the county’s Open Space, Trails, and Parks Program, and National Park Service staff are working with a contractor to create about 10 informational panels at trailheads and other spots along the route that will display information about who came through El Camino Real, and what they saw and did.
“We’re hoping to get people out and connected to the land, and highlight what brought us together here,” Baker said.
Baker said the goal is to acknowledge both the Spanish and Native American history with the trail.
The El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail is the U.S. portion of the 1,600mile route from Mexico City to Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo used heavily by traders and settlers from the 1600s through the 1800s. The Santa Fe project will be the longest portion of the historic route to be developed so far.
In 1598, conquistador Don Juan de Oñate used the El Camino Real to travel to New Mexico and claim the land for Spain. Prior to Oñate, Native American tribes used it for trading.
Though most of the new trail will be on either Santa Fe National Forest or Bureau of Land Management property, Santa Fe County made a deal to oversee the entire trail, once completed, for at least five years. Construction is anticipated to be completed in May or June, according to Steve Burns Chavez, a landscape architect with the National Park Service’s National Trails Intermountain Region office in Santa Fe.
The Park Service is a project partner alongside the county, city, BLM, the Forest Service and the Federal Highway Administration’s Federal Lands Access Program, which provided most of the funding.
The county’s Baker said the long-term goal is to complete a non-stop trail along the Santa Fe River within the next 10-15 years. That, and the El Camino Real trail, would allow recreationists to hike or bike from Santa Fe’s downtown Plaza to Diablo Canyon.
The Camino Real trail will hook up with the Santa Fe River trail about a half mile from an existing river trailhead on Constellation Drive off Airport Road.
“We were able to extend that trail system we were already working on to federal lands,” Baker said of the Camino Real project.
In addition to Diablo Canyon and the Constellation Drive location, other points of entry for the Camino Real trail will be Forest Service’s Headquarters Well Trailhead on the edge the Caja Del Rio on County Road 62 and a new trailhead that will be constructed near the Forest Service’s Dead Dog Trail off County Road 77, with a parking lot, said Baker.
She said a small entryway to a paved section of the El Camino Real is also planned for near the city’s Municipal Recreation Complex.
During the groundbreaking ceremony Thursday afternoon at the Headquarters Well Trailhead, Miles Standish, a recreation technician with the Forest Service, said he hopes the new trail attracts more “recreation-minded” people and county patrolling to the Headquarters Well area.
That would help prevent vandalism at the trailhead, which has increased over the past year, he said.
The trailhead’s picnic table has been set on fire, people have put bullet holes in the signs and bathrooms, and beer and liquor bottles are left around. “When you start investing into something, you take better care of it,” Standish said.
Burns Chavez, of the Parks Service, noted that segments of the trail are currently accessible, but it’s not officially developed. “(We are) developing the trail for public use, so it’s no longer invisible,” said Burns Chavez.
About $3.7 million for the project came from the Federal Highway Administration’s Federal Lands Access Program. The county provided about $475,000, the city put in $150,000 for the parts of the paved trail near the MRC and the National Parks Service added about $100,000, according to Baker.
The funding available now provides only for simple, interpretive panels along the trail, but the developing agencies hope to obtain grants in the future to create more exhibits or multilanguage panels, with feedback from both the Hispanic and Native communities on what should be included.
“This history is very long and very deep, and we want to make sure we acknowledge that,” said Baker.
Burns Chavez emphasized that walking in the same place that history occurred allows visitors to best connect with it, rather than driving along in a car.
“What this trail does (and) what is really magical about historic trails is it allows you to experience some semblance of what is nationally significant in our country in a way that nothing else can do,” he said.
“When you’re following in the footsteps in history, you have a visceral experience. That’s why we preserve this.”