I’ve driven by the spot in the picture a jillion times in the 30 years I’ve lived in Albuquerque, and never noticed the ditch squeezed between #1 Plumbing and Air and the Chevron station on the corner of Edith and Candelaria. My latest pandemic bike riding project involves scouring GIS data from the Middle Rio …
Continue reading ‘Ghost of Water: The Inauspicious end of the Alameda Lateral’ »
One of the traditional “tragedy narratives” of western water is the idea that thirsty cities are draining our rivers. But in two of the last three years, precisely the opposite has happened here in Albuquerque. We’ve been limping along on a very bad year on the Rio Grande, with some of the lowest flows through …
When there’s a lot of water in the Rio Grande, an extra 25 cubic feet per second is a “meh”. But right now, it matters a great deal. Figure 2 above is the output of a script I use to track river flows (code here for those inclined). You give it a USGS gauge number …
Continue reading ‘Visualizing Low Flows on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
Long story short, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque has dropped to its lowest levels for this time of year since the 1980s. The flow at the Central Avenue Bridge when I stopped to look on this morning’s bike ride was just 108 cubic feet per second. The last time it’s been that low at this …
The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority announced today that it will temporarily stop diverting water from the Rio Grande for our drinking water, shifting entirely to groundwater to meet municipal supplies through the summer. In itself, it’s no emergency for city water supplies – the groundwater is the reserve for use in dry years, …
Some years ago, when I first began riding bikes in Albuquerque, my office chum Jimmie took me riding south through Albuquerque’s Rio Grande valley floor along a street called Guadalupe Trail. It’s not a street I would have found by myself – following the contours of one of the early acequias, the irrigation ditches that …
Continue reading ‘Seeing Like a State: the corner of Ortega Road and Guadalupe Trail’ »
Faced with the challenge of teaching some or all of our coursework this fall on line, my University of New Mexico Water Resources Program colleagues and I have been having a think about what we’re trying to accomplish. A lot of the thinking revolves around translating our educational goals from face-to-face classroom discussion to the …
Continue reading ‘Tradeoffs: Colorado River water, flowing down the Rio Grande’ »
In the Time of Pandemic, the ability to refill my water bottles has become an unexpected bike riding constraint. Worst case, if I couldn’t find a drinking fountain, I used to pop into a Kwik-E-Mart and buy a bottle. So, yeah, pandemic, amiright? I hate those water pack things, and the discomfort of throwing extra …
Continue reading ‘Google Maps said there’s a uranium mine out here. Also, a Wendy’s.’ »
It’s been increasingly difficult to maintain a “social distance” at our neighborhood park, so the afternoon walks have begun to range. I guess, adapting my friend Maria Lane’s hashtag, we could call it #geographybyfoot. Headed north across the freeway last week, I found this in the flood control channel: It appears to be either an …
In the time of pandemic, I’ve been thinking a lot about small rural community water systems. This is in part because of work one of our University of New Mexico graduate students was doing in the Time Before, which seems super relevant now. Tucker Colvin just defended his thesis in UNM’s Geography and Environmental Studies …