Best Of Tucson®

Best Place to Root for Flooding

Santa Cruz River

A water heater, mangled shopping carts, bright orange milk crates and old tires sit motionless on the river's floor-a graveyard full of dust and ghosts and memories. Homeless people camp under the Congress Street bridge. Sentinel Peak stands majestically to the west. High-rises glare in the sun to the north. A couple of horses on the east banks romp toward their gruel. It's eerily quiet when you ride your bike down the paved river path, peddling to beat the morning heat. You slip into a reverie, wondering what the deep riverbed would be like with water overflowing its banks as it did on Oct. 2, 1983: a haunting, bloated Santa Cruz, roiling, gray and ominous, an X-Files creature surely hiding beneath the surface.
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