Headed to Diablo Canyon? It’s gonna be a bumpy ride
Expect Old Buckman Road to be rough, officials say, as it doesn’t get enough traffic to justify improvements
Call it the road from hell. Or, more precisely, the road to Diablo Canyon. Old Buckman Road, a 10.2-mile test of spines and shock absorbers that leads to the Diablo Canyon Recreation Area and the shores of the Rio Grande in northwestern Santa Fe County, is an awfully bumpy dragway that forces motorists to endure one groove after another. The road, though, is anything but groovy. Old Buckman Road can shake vehicles apart and leave motorists feeling like they’re riding in a washing machine, arguably making it one of the roughest paths in the county.
“We’ve got three or four of the smaller trucks that we’re just going to have to replace because they can’t stand up to that road,” said Rick Carpenter, water resources and conservation manager for city of Santa Fe, which owns and operates several water wells along the roadway.
“There’s fatigue in the frame. The fenders are coming loose. Everything rattles,” he said. “It just literally shakes them apart — and it’s [10] miles — [10] miles in each direction of washboard road.”
Santa Fe County is responsible for maintaining the roadway, which isn’t one of the county’s priorities because traffic volumes are low and it doesn’t lead to any homes.
“I drove it [recently], and yeah, the washboards were probably a couple of inches high, but nothing that made the road impassable,” said Robert Martinez, the county’s deputy public works director.
“It’s a road that, last time I checked, probably had 50 vehicles on it in a 24-hour period,” he said. “That’s a pretty low volume compared to the major arterials and minor arterials or dirt roads that provide access to residences.”
Depending on the season and amount of moisture, the road’s condition changes throughout the year. County
crews graded the road four times last year, Martinez said.
“It was last graded in December,” he said. “It’s probably due for a grading now.”
The county maintains 560 miles of road, or about 1,120 lane miles. The district that maintains Old Buckman Road is responsible for 155 miles of road, 52 of which are unpaved and require routine grading.
“It takes about three days to grade that road,” Martinez said.
While some bemoan the quality of Old Buckman, others say it’s drivable enough and that anyone who thinks a road in a rural area of the county will be smooth as silk is on the wrong track.
Bernardine Padilla, a spokeswoman for the Buckman Direct Diversion water system, which includes a raw water lift station at the end of the road, said the condition of Old Buckman Road “has not hindered our ability to access any of our facilities.
“When it is a little unbearable, we will call the powers that be and ask them if they can please grade it,” she said.
Padilla said water system employees tend to avoid driving the full length of Old Buckman Road by taking another dirt road known as Old Dead Dog Leg Road, which intersects with the bumpy roadway.
“It’s got a lot of potholes, but it’s not so hard to drive,” she said. “It’s not as rough on the person to drive on that one as it is the other one that is so washboardy. The potholes, you can go around them.”
Carpenter, who is also the city’s acting Water Division director, said the condition of the road was an area of concern before and during the construction of the Buckman Direct Diversion. The Buckman diversion is one of the community’s primary sources of drinking water.
“We were concerned about the travel time that it takes to get up and down that road,” he said.
“Once we started talking to contractors and they were letting us know about the constructability of the project, that was one of their concerns as well, was what do when you’re trying to get great big equipment up and down that road? There’s travel time required for concrete trucks and things like that.”
Carpenter, who served as the Buckman Direct Diversion project manager, said the U.S. Forest Service and federal Bureau of Land Management, which own the land that runs along the road, were approached with the concerns.
“It didn’t make it into the [environmental impact statement] per se, but the regulatory agencies asked us to commission a study,” he said.
The study looked at, among other things, what improvements were needed to accommodate more traffic and heavy equipment.
“I don’t think anybody ever suggested that the road get paved,” he said. “But what was suggested was widening the road, putting down some base course to help with the ruts and the washboard, and straightening out some of the sharper corners and flattening some of the hills to improve line of sight.”
The engineering firm concluded the improvements would cost $5.5 million — money “that the taxpayers would have had to come up with,” Carpenter said.
At the same time the issue was being discussed, the Forest Service was in the initial stages of writing travel management plans for various national forests, including the Santa Fe National Forest.
“The issue was pretty sensitive to them,” he said. “The thinking went back and forth at the time, as I recall, over the course of a few years on whether or not it would be better for the environment, especially the pristine riparian area down near the river, if the road were to remain more in a primitive state like it is now or if it would be better to make those improvements that the engineering plan called for.”
Once a contractor was on board, the contractor insisted on at least some road improvements to allow for larger vehicles, Carpenter said.
“We did make some temporary improvements, and I would emphasize the word ‘temporary’ because the Forest Service said, ‘Once you guys are finished with your construction, we want you to return the road to the way you found it and remove those temporary improvements.’ Which we did,” he said.
Carpenter said the city is “grateful” when the county is able to grade the road, especially because resources are limited.
“That road is so incised in so many places you just can’t get out there and grade it every day or you’ll have a trench in the ground that’s 10 feet deep,” he said.
Carpenter said people “may want to think twice” before driving their vehicle on Old Buckman Road. He said he once took his wife’s “little car” on the road and used extreme caution.
“I just went real slow, and we did just fine, but it depends on whether or not you want to put your own personal vehicle through that or not,” he said. “I do a lot of hunting and fishing all over the state, and I just accept the fact that I’m probably going to be on some rough roads in order to get to where I need to go.”
Martinez echoed the sentiment, saying people should expect challenging terrain if they go outdoors.
“I hate to say it, but if they’re expecting a nice paved or smooth road to get to a campground where they can rough it out, that’s kind of contradictory of their intent to go into a campground and enjoy the outdoors,” he said.
Martinez said he saw a sign along the roadway that called it a “limited-use area.”
“It has a picture of a Jeep, a motorcycle and an ATV, so clearly, I think the sign is intended to show that it’s not, I don’t want to say a primitive road, but a road that is more rural than anything,” he said. “Because of the condition, we could probably blade this road one day and it’s probably going to return back to the washboard condition in a week or so. In order to provide a nice smooth surface that didn’t have any washboards, we’d probably have to blade this road every other week.”