Helping keep clean stretch of S.F. River
Dog walker annoyed by trash spurs others to help her clean up debris
Lisa Farrand took her dog for a walk along the Santa Fe River Trail one day in 2021 and was struck by the heaps of trash piling up by the water.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, there’s so much trash,’ ” Farrand recalled.
“Is there anything we can do to clean this section up?” she remembers thinking. “Because it was so depressing to walk there and see all this trash, like just so much trash.”
Two years later, Farrand is responsible for keeping part of the river clean. After getting in contact with staff from the Santa Fe Watershed Association and taking part in a cleanup — during which volunteers collected 14 shopping carts along with mountains of trash and lost belongings — Farrand became a steward for the Agua Fría stretch of the river, which runs from Frenchy’s Field Park to Siler Road. Now the nature-loving environmentalist spends her free time recruiting others to join her cause and organizing her own cleanup projects.
“Sometimes I just do spur-ofthe-moment stuff and just get a couple of people,” Farrand said. “Sometimes if I can plan a little ahead, I’ll post on [the website] Nextdoor and then … I have this little pool of volunteers I can reach out to.”
Farrand said she started her cleanup efforts during the coronavirus pandemic at a time when homeless shelters were closed and people were forced to camp outside.
“All the homeless people were camping [along] the river,” Farrand recalled. “When it would rain, all their stuff would get washed down, like sleeping bags, shopping carts, clothing and then of course regular trash.”
Since Farrand took control of that section of the river, some locals, like Rebecca Álvarez, started to notice how much it had changed and decided to volunteer. Álvarez said she first heard about Farrand’s efforts through the Nextdoor app and decided to get involved.
“I remember how it was before she started working that section; she’s just done so much, and she really takes it seriously,” Álvarez said in an interview. “In my experience, it’s rare to see somebody that isn’t actually paid to put that much work into it and that much effort.”
Farrand said one of the main purposes of the Santa Fe River
Trail — besides serving as an outdoor space for residents — is to restore the area’s wildlife corridor and natural vegetation. That’s why she was delighted to see plants sprouting after last year’s rain, until she realized they were growing out of control.
Now, Farrand and her volunteers have set their sights on combating a new, thorny enemy that has rolled its way into the river — tumbleweeds.
“Tumbleweeds are an invasive species; they’re taking water from where people have planted natural native grasses and wildflowers,” Farrand said. “So I need to get rid of these tumbleweeds, like it’s my mission.”
She recently enrolled the help of Santa Fe Preparatory School students in need of community service hours to take on the task. In January, 35 of them gathered 14 33-gallon bags of trash and eight giant piles of tumbleweeds. Farrand noted that while cleaning might not have been the most exciting way for these teens to spend their time off, they still had fun jumping and stomping on the massive tumbleweed piles so they could be thrown away.
Now, Farrand hopes other members of the community will join their efforts by grabbing a bag and picking up some trash.
“It really makes the difference between a beautiful community resource for all of us to enjoy, and a trash-strewn river,” Álvarez said.