Embudo Stream-Gaging Station

The panel's 1888 is the camp; the gage itself followed. Powell's Irrigation Survey had found topographers and engineers but no one trained to measure rivers, so in December 1888 Frederick Haynes Newell opened a camp here with fourteen student hydrographers. With no current meters at first, they sounded the Rio Grande from a raft floated on four empty barrels and held by a rope across the river, and in January 1889 the station became the Survey's first streamgage. A railroad agent kept the readings until 1904; the Survey took the station back in July 1931.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Embudo Stream- Gaging Station Established in 1888 Site of the first United States Geological Survey training center for hydrographers. Those trained here made some of the earliest hydrological studies in the nation, leading to stream-gaging of many streams throughout the country, and thus providing important eval- uations of the nation's surface water resources.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• El Santuario de Chimayó — 16 mi
  A small adobe shrine on the High Road to Taos, built around 1816 over earth that pilgrims still carry away in hope of healing.
• San Francisco de Asís Church, Ranchos de Taos — 20 mi
  The adobe church at Ranchos de Taos that artists always paint from behind, kept standing by the mud its parish spreads over it every June.
• Rio Grande Gorge Bridge — 21 mi
  A steel truss strung across a slot in the basalt west of Taos, 565 feet above the river by the careful measure and 650 by the signs, built when the road beyond it did not yet exist.
• Taos Pueblo — 27 mi
  Two terraced adobe houses facing each other across Red Willow Creek, lived in for something like a thousand years, with no electricity or running water inside the old walls.

More markers nearby

• Velarde — 3.5 mi
• Pilar — 8.7 mi
• Los Luceros Hacienda — 9.0 mi
• Doña Margarita Martín — 9.0 mi