Driving back from southern New Mexico yesterday afternoon, I saw a lot of this: Video courtesy of Todd Shoemake at the National Weather Service’s Albuquerque office, where they enjoy the monsoon as much as anyone. Maybe more.
On a bit of a water nerd’s lark today, I ended up knee deep in a chile field outside Salem, New Mexico, in the area technically known as the Rincon Valley but more commonly called the Hatch Valley. It’s a ribbon of green (to borrow John Van Dyke’s memorable phrase) gripping the Rio Grande as …
Continue reading ‘How we use water in the desert: Hatch green chiles’ »
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s key August forecast, out today (pdf),projects that there will be enough water in the Colorado River system next year to release a bonus pulse of 770,000 acre feet of water from Lake Powell down to lake Mead above and beyond the legal requirements of the Colorado River Compact. But even with …
Continue reading ‘Bonus water likely for Lake Mead in 2015, but it’ll just keep dropping anyway’ »
On the scale of Colorado River water diversions yet unbuilt, the possibility of taking water out of the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico is small stuff – 14,000 acre feet per year, or maybe less if the water’s simply not there. But the current debate in New Mexico illustrates a common refrain as western …
Continue reading ‘USBR: Gila diversion costs exceed benefits’ »
I’m increasingly at a loss about how to do useful journalism because of the gap between the technical world I try to understand (risks associated with water contamination, for example, or the problem of drought) and the public reaction to my efforts to provide a nuanced but accurate explanation of the thing at hand. Mark …
Water released from Lake Mead, through Hoover Dam’s turbines, travels downstream about 150 miles to Lake Havasu. There, massive pumps on the river’s left bank push the water up on the start of a 336 mile journey that ends in groundwater spreading basins west of Tucson. The Colorado River’s water then recharges an aquifer, where …
Most of the land in these reservations is and always has been arid. If the water necessary to sustain life is to be had, it must come from the Colorado River or its tributaries. It can be said without overstatement that when the Indians were put on these reservations they were not considered to be …
Continue reading ‘Annals of Indian water: “hot, scorching sands”’ »
From last Sunday’s newspaper, a solutions-oriented piece on an effort to scale up forest and watershed restoration in the mountains around me: Trees being cut last week on Forest Service land near the Sandia Crest Road can be used as firewood, but there is not enough money to be made from cutting the small timber …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: forest health = watershed health’ »
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal: “You’ve got to deal with people, farmers, companies, everyone,” Sandra Postel told me last week when I asked about the work she’s doing trying to find environmentally sustainable solutions to western North America’s water problems. In other words, you’ve got to cooperate.