Apologies for the pixelated image. I just had the phone, not a camera, and the great blue heron flew before I could get close enough to get a good shot. I got to the river just as the sun crested the Sandias this morning, and the light was gorgeous. I’m giving a kinda important talk …
Continue reading ‘Thinking about the Rio Grande, remembering history’ »
I’ve emerged from my cozy book writing cave (The new book’s going well, thanks for asking!) to some stunningly optimistic Lower Colorado River Basin water use data. Forecast use in 2023 (based on the Sept. 18 USBR forecast model) has dropped below 6 million acre feet, currently just 79 percent of the total baseline …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: Lower Basin use on track to be lowest in nearly four decades’ »
There’s so much going on in this picture. The buildings on the horizon, downtown Albuquerque, are a couple of miles away – foreshortened by the camera’s zoom. It’s a modest downtown, which grew up in that spot 140 years ago because the real estate entrepreneurs collaborating with the newly arrived Athchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe …
Continue reading ‘Watching Albuquerque’s Rio Grande go dry’ »
I spent a couple of days last week out of Pagosa Springs in southern Colorado, touring forest restoration work in the headwaters of the San Juan-Chama Project, which produces critical water supplies for central New Mexico. In others words, water for my neighhbors and me. We’ve learned over and over in the last couple of …
Doing the usual just-in-time tweaking of the fall class (like my old artist friend from L.A. who made a living scraping and painting freighters while they shipped up and down the West Coast), I’m updating the course’s Colorado River module. I’d never actually pulled together a bibliography of my own stuff. Books, academic literature, significant …
Continue reading ‘A John Fleck Colorado River Discography’ »
Something remarkable is happening this year in the Lower Colorado River Basin that provides both a glimmer of hope about what durable basin solutions might look like, and also a clear demonstration of the obstacles still standing in their way. Nevada’s Colorado River water use is on track to be the lowest it’s been since …
Where no one asks any questions Or looks too long in your face In the darkness on the edge of town. – Bruce Springsteen Do you believe in ghosts? Or crows? Do you at least believe in crows? Three of them. Possibly four. Crows, or possibly ravens. But I’d rather they be crows, so let’s …
When I first got serious many years ago about the project of writing (in the newspaper at the time) about New Mexico water, I went looking for the numbers. How much do we have? Who uses what? It’s a task that became central to my work. Eric Kuhn and I spent three years writing an …
Continue reading ‘On the shortcomings of the way we measure water “use”’ »
August 8 is more than a little late for Albuquerque’s first solid monsoon rains to break our weirdly hot flash drought, but we’ll take it. Typical monsoon onset here is early July, plus or minus a week-ish. At the risk of overstating because of a lack of precision, Aug. 8 is record late. I was …
Continue reading ‘Breaking Albuquerque’s flash drought: Biggest monsoon storm in a decade’ »
Area water managers were informed this morning that the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority will shut down its diversion of water from the Rio Grande for use in the municipal drinking water system, switching over to groundwater pumping to meet municipal needs. The reason is low flows in the river. Albuquerque is constrained by …