What a morning for a walk! It was 61° F. when I started and only 62° when I got back to my car. This portion of Rim Road from Kansas Street to Brown Street (MAP) gives a great view of downtown El Paso and the Juarez Mountains.
Rim Road was once on top of a stream terrace that has been around since the middle of the last Ice Age. A stream terrace is a flat topped sedimentary deposit that marks where the river used to flow. The hill (side of terrace like below Tom Lea) is where the Rio Grande cut into its own sediments. Yes the Rio Grande used to flow right over Tom Lea park, a few hundred thousand years ago. The area that it covered is now a big pile of Ice Age Rio Grande sediments and soils known as the Kern Place Terrace geomorphologically .
The last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago.
Sierra de Juarez
The walk can be much longer. I have run into people whom I know who start in Kern Place and walk down Robinson, down Rim, and back home via Campbell Street or vice versa. Quite a walk - certainly longer than the length of Scenic Drive for example. Today I ran into one of my favorite persons, Debbie Hamlyn, the former Assistant City Manager of El Paso. We ran into each other at the Upper Tom Lea Park. She was going full circle back to Kern Place with her very pretty Standard Poodle.
Below Tom Lea park and 2 blocks south of present-day El Paso High was Rous's Gravel pit, where in about 1906 Ice Age mammal fossils including a horse (Equus), mammoth (Mammuthus), and a giant tapir (Tapirus) were discovered.
Photo shows Rous’s quarry and another quarry to the north where apparently other pleistocene fossils were discovered.
See the Celebration of Our Mountains video about Ice Age El Paso.
A nice feature in Upper Tom Lea Park is an obelisk with a plaque that reads:
A similar plaque adorns Scenic Drive making the claim that Scenic Park is the tail end of the Franklins. Apparently, the Womens Department of the Chamber of Commerce asked a geologist who correctly identified the right spot. Just keep in mind that Upper Tom Lea is on Rio Grande sediments from the Ice Age. The actual southern tip of the mountain is below on Murchison.
The EPISD ballfield between Rim and Shuster below was constructed by CSA Constructors. One of the principals of the company, Eileen Karlsruher, is a board member of Celebration of Our Mountains.
El Paso High ballfield contructed by CSA.