This open land on Albuquerque’s west side, a 20 mile drive from downtown but probably half of that as the crow flies, is getting a newly improved four-lane road and drainage. It’s currently home to a cluster of shooting ranges, the place where we turn our post-sewage plant poop into compost, and a small airport. …
I had a couple of pieces in the newspaper last week about New Mexico’s long term water usage trends. I wrote the stories because the data, a time series I assembled by reviewing state water use reports, surprised me: Water for household use peaked in 1995 and has been declining ever since, according to state …
Yesterday my sister and I busted Mom out of the nursing home for lunch and a drive down by the river to see the tail end of the fall colors. Down by Tingley Beach, an Albuquerque municipal park adjacent to the Rio Grande, the cottonwoods were still putting on a show, but they’re clearly tiring, …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert: the winter palette’ »
A storm blew through Santa Fe last night. Lissa and I drove up into the Sangres to see the snow:
Trying some stuff that I don’t want to do on my employer’s production server. Nothing to see here. Move along. Img 924111903 0001 (PDF) Img 924111903 0001 (Text)
There’s a newsroom joke that “we don’t write about planes that don’t crash,” but I think it’s important to think carefully about societal systems that succeed, because lessons learned matter: The flood pulse was impressive. But it is instructive to look at how much larger it would have been if not for a pair of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the flood that wasn’t’ »
A snowy egret showed up this afternoon amid the turtles sunning themselves on the Rio Grande Nature Center’s pond. We took some pictures.
From the work blog: Corky Herkenhoff, who’s been farming at San Acacia for half a century, told me he can tell where the runoff is coming from by the smell. San Acacia sits just below the Rio Puerco and Rio Salado, two generally dry tributaries that have been pumping water into the Rio Grande over …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the Rio’s smell’ »
In the midst of a very unusual storm (see my newspaper explanation of its unusualness here), I’ve spent much of the last 24 hours watching a big slug of water make its way down the Rio Grande Valley in which Albuquerque sits. A source yesterday afternoon pointed me to the readings on the USGS San …
Continue reading ‘Chasing water in the desert: the great Rio Grande “flood” of 2013’ »
From yesterday’s newspaper: The (San Juan) basin, in northwestern New Mexico, has every competing water interest you’d want in the mix if you were creating a recipe for conflict: Native American water rights (the Navajo and Jicarilla Apache nations), endangered species (the Colorado pikeminnow and razorback sucker), farming large and small, city water use and …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: water management tools we learned in kindergarten’ »