The year with no runoff. (The four peaks you see in the 2025 graph are four rain storms.) I added 2022 to the graph so we can compare with the only other time it’s dried in recent years. See below for the log scale version.

The Rio Grande gage at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge is reading 20.5 cubic feet per second this afternoon (Sunday, July 13).

The last time we saw river drying in the Albuquerque reach, back in 2022, 25 cfs at Central wasn’t enough to make it to the wastewater treatment plant outfall, as flows dwindled in the hot summer sun. My hypothesis (I haven’t been down to look today, went hiking up in the foothills instead) is that we’re seeing drying as I write this, meaning the continuous ribbon of trickling water is finally breaking. If not today, then soon. We’ll get an official report from the River Eyes people – they go out and actually look – prolly tomorrow.

The ditches are a similar story.

• MRGCD diversions, which were over 400 cfs a week ago, are down to 245.
• All the distribution ditches with gages in Albuquerque’s North Valley are reading zero.
• Flows through the Atrisco siphon, which carries water down the west side of the south valley, are way down.
• Flows in the Socorro Main, which were 175 cfs a week ago, are down to 50.
• Flows in the weirdly wonderfully named Unit 7 Drain, which collects tail water out of the bottom of Valencia County and the top of Socorro County, carrying it through my current favorite reach of the river, are collapsing.

I don’t know what’s happening with leased San Juan-Chama water for minnow flows. If you do know, drop it in the comments.

I wrote this back in April laying out what I’m watching, and by implication what I think we as a community need to be paying attention to. It holds up pretty, no need to repeat myself here.

Log scale. Different graphing approaches are useful to different segments of the Inkstain audience, but bits are cheap, so why not do ’em all!

As Anne Marken says, pray for rain.