In this valley, which drains the Pinos Altos Mountains to the north and the Continental Divide to the west, summer monsoons sometimes brought violent rain to the arid Southwest. Town founders, unfamiliar with local conditions, placed Main Street in the path of the watershed's natural drainage route, and repeated floods caused disastrous damage. As rainstorms struck year after year, residents repaired the unpaved thoroughfare, but the deeper problem was not simply rainfall; uncontrolled wood cutting and grazing in the surrounding watershed, along with soil collection for adobe bricks, made flooding more regular and more severe. Main Street gradually wore deeper with each storm, becoming an arroyo, then a gully, and eventually a gorge, even as residents spent huge effort and vast sums on breakwaters and other flood-control structures. After the major flood of 1895, the town abandoned Main Street and built a pedestrian footbridge over what is today San Vicente Creek, and another devastating flood in 1902 carved the deep gulch now called the Big Ditch.