Access to water, a concern around the globe, is constrained in many areas of the Colorado River Basin (CRB) by water scarcity, pollution and lack of delivery and treatment infrastructure. These constraints disproportionately affect the basin’s Native American, Hispanic and Black populations, groups which often have lower access to resources for mitigation and recovery. Moreover, these groups historically have not been represented in policy processes where key decision affecting water access and water quality are made. A number of tribal governments, in recent decades, have been at the negotiation tables due to their status as sovereign governments with significant water rights. However, there is no consistent process for inclusion of low-income communities of color in the basin. The urgent high-level dialogue among tribal governments, federal interests, states, cities and agricultural water users (and, to some extent, environmental NGOs) focuses on allocating the ever-scarcer waters of the CRB, with little emphasis on disproportionate access.
From the excellent new report Dancing With Deadpool, a broad effort by a broad group of contributors to the Colorado River Research Group.
Jack Schmidt on New Mexico water managers’ pushing 1,700 cfs down the Rio Grande in the middle of December to tidy up our annual Rio Grande Compact accounting:
Thanks for the reminder of the tragedy of moving water at the wrong time of year when that water provides no ecological benefit. If that water were moved in spring, it would do so much good. Sad.
(Elevated from the comments here, where we also learn that our 1,700 cfs here, the highest sustained flows of the year, are about the same as the Palo Verde Irrigation District’s typical summer diversions from the Lower Colorado River. I love this blog’s readers.)
Happy Holidays from the Bridge Boulevard bridge, Albuquerque, Dec. 7, 2024
The Sunday bike ride included a brief detour to check out the river. The Rio Grande was flowing at 1,700 cfs, the highest sustained flows of the year, as water managers move water downstream to meet their annual Rio Grande Compact accounting goals.
The “Happy Holidays” graffiti is, of course, there year ‘round. I love bridge abutment graffiti . Tough to photograph, but I love the lines and shadows, very Charles Sheeler but less clean and triumphant, people leaving their place-making marks.
In Brief Unusually wet conditions in the Basin in October and November 2025, combined with reduced releases from some reservoirs, led to a basin-wide increase in storage for the two-month period. The combined contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead increased during the two months for only the second time since 2010, and storage in the San Juan River basin increased by 19%, especially in Vallecito and Navajo Reservoirs. These changes were a welcome respite from the relentless depletion of storage that has dominated the last few years. Nevertheless, the upcoming winter snow season is predicted to be below average, and total active storage in the Basin is less than a 2 year supply when compared with recent Basin-wide consumptive uses and losses.
The Details
The rains of October and November 2025 slowed depletion of the Colorado River’s reservoirs due to increases in stream flow and reduced reservoir releases in some places. Water levels rose in a few reservoirs, and autumn’s rains provided a small bit of flexibility for water managers at the beginning of what is likely to be a below-average winter snow season.
As of November 30, the Basin’s 46 reservoirs held 24.63 million af (acre feet) of active storage[1], of which 90% was in 12 federal reservoirs,[2] including 15.00 million af in Lake Powell and Lake Mead (hereafter, Powell+Mead) and 4.88 million af in 8 federal reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell (Fig.1). This amount of storage is similar to conditions in early 2022, a situation that was described at that time as a crisis. If we divide the total active storage in the Basin’s 46 reservoirs by the basin-wide total annual rate of consumptive use and loss that was 12.7 million af in 2024, the basin-wide reservoir water supply would sustain Basin-wide use for less than 2 years. We continue to live at the doorstep of crisis.
Figure 1. Graph showing active storage in Colorado River basin reservoirs between January 1, 2021, and November 30, 2025.
Basin-wide reservoir storage stabilized in October and November, because Powell+Mead storage stabilized and storage in the San Juan River basin increased. Total Inflow to Lake Powell exceeded releases for more than one week between October 11 and October 18, when Lake Powell increased by 105,000 af[3] which is a 1.6% gain (Fig. 2). Approximately 40% of the total inflow came from the San Juan River, and the monthly October inflows were the largest since 2015. The gain in storage in Lake Powell during this weeklong period exceeded depletions during the rest of the month, and Lake Powell gained approximately 52,000 af during the month. Lake Powell lost 147,000 af in November.
Figure 2. Graph showing inflow and outflow from Lake Powell and active storage between October 1 and November 30, 2025. Total monthly flow at Lees Ferry, representing the total releases from Lake Powell, were 490,000 af in October and 501,000 af in November.
In contrast, the autumn rains did not significantly increase inflow to Lake Mead, because most of the inflows come from scheduled releases from Lake Powell. These reservoir releases were supplemented by 101,000 af of inflows downstream from Lees Ferry[4] and 8000 af from the Virgin River.[5] The most significant changes in Lake Mead occurred at the end of November when releases from Hoover Dam were significantly reduced (Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Graph showing inflow and outflow from Lake Mead and active storage between October 1 and November 30, 2025. Total monthly flow inflow of the Colorado River, representing the total releases from Lake Powell and inflows within Grand Canyon, were 574,000 af in October and 550,000 af in November. Reservoir releases from Hoover Dam were 485,000 af in October and 415,000 af in November. Withdrawals and return flows of the Southern Nevada Water Authority were not included in these data.
Together, total active storage in Powell+Mead increased by 63,000 af during October,[6] and decreased by only 38,000 af in November (Fig. 4).[7] More significant than the gains, however, was that the the pace of reservoir depletion was significantly slowed. Storage in Powell+Mead increased by approximately 25,000 af in October and November, only the second time since 2010 that total storage in these two reservoirs increased during these two months.[8]
Figure 4. Graph showing active storage in Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and in Powell+Mead between January 1, 2023, and November 30, 2025.
Reservoir storage in the San Juan River basin increased more than in any other part of the Colorado River Basin. Five San Juan basin reservoirs increased by 197,000 af in October and November, mostly in Navajo and Vallecito Reservoirs.[9] Not much happened elsewhere, however. The 21 reservoirs of the upper Colorado River watershed lost 57,000 af during October and November, and 16 reservoirs in the Green River watershed lost 10,000 af during the same period.
[2] Taylor Park, Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, Crystal, Fontenelle, Flaming Gorge, Vallecito, Navajo, Lake Powell, Lake Mead, Lake Mohave, and Lake Havasu.
[3] Inflow to Lake Powell was computed as the sum of mean daily discharge of the Colorado River at Gypsum Canyon near Hite (gage 09328960), Dirty Devil River above Poison Springs near Hanksville (09333500), Escalante River near Escalante (09337500), and San Juan River near Bluff (09379500), as reported by the U.S. Geological Survey. Outflow from Lake Powell was computed as the mean daily discharge of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry (09380000), because stream flow is measured 15 miles downstream from the dam and includes ground-water seepage around the dam. Lake Powell storage increased between October 10 and October 20, as reported by Reclamation.
[4] Inflows within Grand Canyon were calculated as the difference between measurements of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry (09380000), Colorado River above Diamond Creek near Peach Springs (09420000), and Diamond Creek nr Peach Springs (09404208).
[5] Virgin River below confluence Muddy River near Overton (09419530)
[6] Between October 1 and November 1, 2025, active storage in Lake Powell increased 52,000 af and 11,000 af in Lake Mead.
[7] Between November 1 and November 30, active storage in Lake Powell decreased by 147,000 af and increased by 109,000 af in Lake Mead.
[8] During the previous 15 years between 2010 and 2024, total storage in Powell+Mead increased by 36,000 af in 2011. During the other 14 years of that period, the median depletion of Powell+Mead was 436,000 af.
[9] Storage in Navajo Reservoir increased 126,000 af between October 9 and November 8 and increased by 114,000 af in October and November. Active storage in Vallecito Reservoir gained 68,000 af in October and November. At the end of November, Navajo Reservoir was 60% of its 1.65 million af capacity. Vallecito Reservoir was 77% of its 125,400 af capacity.
Inspired by this morning’s Downtown Albuquerque News Climate and Transport Index (come for the bus boardings and river flow data, stay for the Shawarma restaurant news), I give you data, one of those “Science confirms the obvious, but with graphs!” things.
The overnight lows were 2.5F higher than the recent average. I wonder if that sensibly improves your quality of life if you’re sleeping rough?
After a dry summer, the Rio Grande is up through Albuquerque – ~900cfs as I write this, above the median flow for early December.
We are heading into “institutional hydrograph” season, as water management rules dominate the river’s flow. They always dominate, but December is when it’s most obvious. Water stored for Pueblo farmers but then not needed is moved from one bucket (Abiquiu Reservoir) to another (Elephant Butte) to meet Rio Grande Compact obligations to southern New Mexico and Texas.
Releases out of Abiquiu jumped over the weekend from ~100 cfs to ~800 cfs, so we should expect Albuquerque flows to rise in response soon. This is normal December practice, as we do the physical movement of water to accomplish the legal accounting task.
New Mexico began 2025 with a compact debtof 124,000 acre feet owed to southern New Mexico and Texas. We don’t have any official/public number for how we’ve done this year but the gossip (We only bring you the highest quality gossip here at Inkstain, but it’s just gossip.) is that New Mexico will fall another 10,000 acre feet deeper into the hole when the 2025 accounting is completed.
The forever task
Getting the water currently parked in Abiquiu down to Elephant Butte requires us to confront a fascinating set of questions that are at the heart of what’s looking like my/our next book: when you take on the “management” of a river, the unruliness of geomorphology makes it a forever obligation. A river is sediment as much as it is water, and you can’t manage one without managing the other. Forever.
The Rio Chama
Exhibit 1 is the Rio Chama below Abiquiu. In June 2024, a storm blew out the Arroyo la Madera and dumped a mile-long pile of sediment deep enough to completely block the Chama. A technically complicated, and even more bureaucratically complicated effort followed to clear the channel to allow water through that segment of the river. By the start of 2025, river managers (that appellation needs such careful qualification) thought they had the capacity to move a thousand cfs, but this year was so dry we still haven’t been able to test it.
Now’s our chance! 800 cfs and counting!
River Mile 60 and the Lower San Acacia Reach
Exhibit 2, the other geomorphologic bookend on this stretch of the Rio Grande, is what is called, in the poetic language of the engineers, “River Mile 60,” at the head of the Elephant Butte Reservoir delta.
Reclamation over the holiday weekend dropped the 302-page draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Lower San Acacia Reach Improvement Project, a hundred-and-umpty-million dollar project to realign the river at the bottom end of the Rio Grande Valley because the marriage of sediment and water management is not going real well down there.
I played with that sentence for a while, because the metaphor is tricky. The “marriage of sediment and water” is going just fine – the river doin’ river things. As at the confluence of the Rio Chama and the Arroyo la Madera, the problem isn’t the sediment and the river, the problem is that we’ve built a bunch of stuff that requires rivers to act one way to support human flourishing, which becomes stunningly expensive when rivers want to behave in a different way.
In the Lower San Acacia Reach, we have huge sediment inputs from the Rio Puerco and the Rio Salado (glorious ephemeral desert rivers, mostly dry but impressive in full flower), plus lots more side arroyos that happily contribute more clays and sands and gravels. Rivers doin’ river things.
For our purposes as humans who have built a metro area of a million people upstream of the Lower San Acacia Reach, and another metro area of many more millions to the south, keeping the water moving between A and B poses a forever challenge.
It’s important to understand that the Rio Grande is not a natural system. It’s an engineered system. It’s managed on a daily basis by a consortium of agencies at all different levels of government plus municipal water users and irrigation districts. So partly, (drying is) a product of decisions.
It is also clearly a product of climate change because really, we didn’t get any snow (last winter).
The snow we do get disappears on the way down because it’s hot and the soils are dry. We just can’t really get water down into this desert anymore.
On top of that, we have infrastructure problems like El Vado. It doesn’t store water anymore. Now, we’ve made a temporary fix so we could put water into Abiquiu Reservoir — if we had it.
But the El Vado problem kind of eliminates a longer-term problem: For the foreseeable future, we’re not going to be able to store water because of the Rio Grande Compact.
That does mean when we do have water in the mountains, we do let it run down through the system. But climate change is telling us that’s coming earlier. There’s less snow, and more of it gets lost along the way. Every single place where there’s water use, the water use is more. And so, by the time it gets down here into the desert landscape, there isn’t anything left.
The dog came out of nowhere. The best ones always do.
I was bicycling the McCoy Dam service road in Albuquerque’s far South Valley, off the Gun Club Lateral irrigation ditch, past an ambiguous Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control authority gate, down the hill from the old Vanderploeg Dairies property.
Earthen dam to my left, horse corral to my right. We call the flood control authority ”AMAFCA.” Knowing the name is part of the game. AMAFCA’s gates are blue. The gates are ambiguous in their intention, physically permeable in practice.
Dogs are part of the game.
Games
The philosopher Bernard Suits defined games thus: “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. For Suits, this is a good thing.
Consider golf:
The utter ridiculousness of making it harder to drop a ball in a hole — as if there were a reason to do that in the first place! — by requiring you to use a stick to do so… we are creating a system full of complexity for ourselves. A toy system where the rigidity and weight of the stick, the chaotic interference of the swirling wind, the mental impact of the oohs and aahs of the spectators, the way the dew fell across the grass and reflected sun in our eyes, even how to deal with that cramp in our leg from walking all this way — where all these things are present in the toy.
“Tiling,” as the bicycling game is known, is what sociologists would call “ludic geography” – a game of place. It seems obvious in retrospect. The ubiquity of GPS devices by the middle of the last decade, first mounted to a bicycle’s handlebars, now miniaturized in watches, made it feel inevitable.
Ben Lowe, of Veloviewer, seems to have landed first on the idea of a map of tiles colored in after visited on one’s bicycle. (I rely here on the terrific history article on Ride Every Tile.) Simply coloring in the map was fun, and one of Lowe’s users quickly snapped to the possibilities: what was the largest NxN square of tiles all colored in? It was the first step toward Suit’s “unnecessary obstacles” – turning it into a game.
But the NxN square, for many, quickly became an unsolvable puzzle. My maximum Albuquerque square quickly hit 10×10, with the land of the Indigenous Sandia Pueblo to the north, where one does not trespass, and the military industrial complex (Kirtland Air Force Base) to the south, where the guards are heavily armed and the barbed wire doubled in protection of elements of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Message board discussions ensued in response to the shortcomings of “largest square” as a game: Should unattainable tiles just be automagically ticked off as having been visited? This seemed unsatisfactory – the whole point of the game was to visit the places, not to merely color in the map. One could, for example, wait for the annual base open house to bag the military installation tiles, or persuade a friend with a pass to get you in. A new challenge was needed.
The resulting innovation, the “clump,” or “cluster,” as it finally came to be known, is an interconnected collection of visited tiles, each surrounded on all four sides – north, south, east, and west – by a tile that has also been visited. The cluster became a puzzle challenge, a geometric problem worked out on the landscape. Find a way around the edges of the military base.
Via Squadrats, an explanation of clusters (also known as “yards”)
A group of Polish tilers added a layer of complexity by mapping smaller tiles. Original tiling used Open Street Maps’ zoom level 14, roughly a mile on a side. The Polish Squadrats group added zoom level 17, 1/8th the size of traditional tiles, dubbing the little ones “Squadratinhos” (and incorporating lovely mapping graphics). Zoom level 17 clusters are a blast, lots of intricate little tiling problems – how do I get into the edges of that golf course? How do I get my cluster through that mountain pass? I have literally stuck my arm, with its GPS watch, through fences – more than once! – to get a tile.
The norm had long been “human powered” only – Jonathan France, the British tiler, famously paddled the Thames to fill in its London tiles. I had a friend take me out paddling the Rio Grande for some particularly tricky tiles in central Albuquerque.
The Squadrats team eventually loosened their rules, allowing e-bike rides – a nod to old people like me, for whom a pedal-assist e-bike is often the ride of choice for long Sunday outings.
The group (person?) behind Ride Every Tile added other zoom levels, all the way from zoom level 0 (one tile, the entire planet) to zoom level 17 (~250 meters on a side, depending on your latitude). Ride Every Tile also recently added hexagons, a fresh challenge.
Red is my largest zoom level 18 cluster, smaller orange clusters waiting for a puzzle solution to connect them, and blue are all the other tiles I have ridden.
Zoom Level 18
As my age has gone up, my range, the distance I can ride, has gone down. So I recently coded up a tiling app that runs on my Mac that ingested the more than 7,000 activities I’ve recorded, 50,000 GPSed miles, mostly bike rides but also walks and hikes and runs and stand-up paddles, since I started GPSing things in 2008. The app allows me to tile at zoom level 18, which is ridiculously small – about the size of a typical crime scene – and therefore ridiculously challenging. I can’t just ride the road in front of the motel out by the interstate. To get the zoom level 18 tile clusters to connect, I need to circle around through the parking lot to the back: “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” I’d largely solved the zoom level 17 challenges within easy range of my house, but at zoom level 18, there remain a delightfully large number of crime scenes left to visit.
I have a whole new world of unnecessary obstacles within an hour’s ride of my house.
trespassing, and dogs
A friend who cheerfully indulges my passion for tiling (if not exactly sharing it, though they appreciate the oddities when we ride together) recently texted me a picture of this passage from the artist Sally Mann’s new memoir Art Work. It is a disquisition on trespassing:
To be an artist means you must declare a loyalty to your art form and your vision that runs deeper than almost any other, even sometimes deeper than blood kinship, and certainly deeper than those trifling laws protecting land ownership.
I was on my Sunday morning bike ride when I got the text, near the top of Albuquerque’s Nine Mile Hill. It’s a fast highway with wide shoulders and the sort of marginal light industrial activity that thrives, or at least survives, where property values are low. It is not our most scenic of rides in conventional aesthetic, but it’s delightfully weird, and there were tiles to be had near the top. I stopped and texted my friend back a picture of the entrance to one of the tiles: “Beware of Dog” tacked to the telephone pole on the left, “Posted: No Trespassing” on a fence post to the right.
I’ve been eyeing that dirt road for a while. Once again, I didn’t have the nerve to get the tile.
The dogs are part of the game. In video games, we would call them “pursuer enemies,” like the ghosts in PacMan that chase you around the maze while you gobble up the – what are the things called that you gobble up in PacMan?
That is how I made the acquaintance of the dog along McCoy Dam, the one that came out of nowhere. I was never a strong bike racer, and I’m long removed from whatever sprinting ability I did have in my younger days. I wasn’t on the e-bike either (so no “dog mode”, the most powerful pedal assist). But my legs, spurred on by the barking, did their work, and my bike handling skills were up to the challenge posed by the sandy road, and the dog did what they always do, which is chase me just far enough to get beyond their self-understood perimeter of obligation.
The dog made clear that I was not to return via the road I came in on, posing a fresh puzzle – how to get out? Cutting back across the top of the dam under the watchful eye of the dog, an occasional desultory bark to remind me, I found an alternate route, got four new zoom level 17 tiles, and increased my cluster by 3.
The view from the dam, the valley cottonwoods stretched out before me, was lovely.
Scholars who study consumer protection and environmental governance have described transparency as a coevolutionary race, where multiple actors compete to accomplish their goals by advancing science, preventing it, and evading ever-novel barriers to transparency. In this model, successful governance arises from an equilibrium in these knowledge-generating efforts.
J.N. Matias, & M. Price, How public involvement can improve the science of AI, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (48) e2421111122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2421111122 (2025).
Wednesday family lunch included tacos at El Paisa on Bridge just west of the river, and then a drive to the Los Padillas Cemetery in the far south valley.
I love cemeteries because they speak to some deep values, and I’ve taken to using them as a teaching tool for our UNM Water Resources Program class as we think about the value of water in alternative uses.
Why are some cemeteries green, and some not?
My favorite example of the entanglements are Mt. Calvary Cemetery, on Edith NE against the freeway in Albuquerque’s northeast. In 2016 the Catholic Cemetery Association filed a formal plea with the state asking for time to put its paper water rights to “beneficial use,” arguing that, while it wasn’t using the full amount now, people kept dying, and over time they would need more water to keep the additional graves green. (The first well at Mt. Calvary seems to have been dug in 1913.) New Mexico water law is famously silent on what actually counts as “beneficial use,” but the state seemed to agree that irrigating lawns out of reverence for the deceased was OK. The state gave Mt. Calvary a thumbs up. Mt. Calvary pumped 81 acre feet in 2024 in service of this value.
To the north, across the freeway, Sunset Memorial Park is lush (cemeteries, along with golf courses and some of the more affluent neighborhoods with domestic wells, pop out on satellite maps of urban greenness). But Santa Barbara Cemetery, immediately to the south, is brown. It’s my favorite of the three – old graves, rich with Albuquerque history.
Los Padillas is in the middle of that range – more trees than are usual for dry Albuquerque cemeteries, with an irrigation ditch down one side (I think for the alfalfa field to the south, but still, a cemetery with an acequia!), the Gun Club Lateral winding down its western edge, a scattering of trees (the shade was lovely Wednesday), and obviously beloved gravestones. We found some Turrieta family gravestones (a family that makes a brief but important appearance in our forthcoming book Ribbons of Green) and lots of Padillas.
n.b. Al pastor at El Paisa is my favorite Albuquerque taco. Cash only.
