by Ellen Heyn, Communications Associate
What do you call a watercourse with a current, confined within a bed and stream banks? Rivers and creeks pop up as place names across the United States, but depending on where you live, you might have another answer.
A brook to Northeasterners is a branch in southern states. Runs in Pennsylvania are swamps in the coastal Carolinas. Bayous are localized to Louisiana, as arroyos and ríos are to New Mexico. And while sloughs and forks flow throughout the western states, here in the Southwest, we call them washes.
The term “wash” refers to the intermittent rainfall of the region. Parts of the Colorado Plateau receive fewer than 10 inches of precipitation a year, but on a geologic timescale, that’s been enough water to sculpt the plateau’s flat sedimentary layers into a landscape of sinuous canyons, terraced mesas, and towering buttes.
Water is scarce in the desert, but it is here. You just have to be willing to look for it.
Today, we celebrate the Colorado Plateau’s—insert stream name of choice—with these five hikes to watering holes, creeks, pools, and potholes. After all, a creek by any other name is just as sweet.