Usually rivers get bigger and bigger as you go farther downstream. But the Colorado just keeps getting smaller. That’s Will Stauffer-Norris in the Aspen Times talking about the trip he and Zak Podmore made down the Colorado River, from end to end. In this case, a dusty, had-to-walk kind of end. It’s a a great line …
Continue reading ‘usually rivers get bigger as you go downstream’ »
Writing in the Sacramento Bee, Newsha Ajami of the Pacific Institute and groundwater guru John Bredehoeft ask, in relation to the proposed Cadiz aquifer pump-and-sell project in the Mojave Desert, who owns the groundwater? The company plans to extract 2.5 million acre-feet of the water, a public good, over the next 50 years and sell it back …
This feels a bit unseemly, but I’m frankly enormously proud to have won a Society of Professional Journalists “Top of the Rockies” award for my work last year on forest health, fire, politics and policy in the mountains of the West: The driest January through June in New Mexico history came down to this: For …
Continue reading ‘unseemly bragging and links to my award-winning work’ »
In an email last week, Kevin Werner at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center called March 2012 “one of the warmest and driest on record in the Upper Colorado Basin.” The Forecast Center’s April 1 numbers are the ones you can start taking to the bank, with the bulk of the snow accumulation season behind …
If Kelly Redmond had a nickel for every time I’ve quoted his definition of drought, he’s have enough money for lunch today: Wet years have a way of covering up a multitude of water management sins. Drought exposes them for all to see. Back in the 1990s, we had all the same underlying water management …
I put out the hummingbird feeders Saturday, then felt stupid for putting them out early. In 2009 (the first year I kept track) the first sighting was April 16. In 2010 April 16. In ’11, April 17. For 2012, it’s April 9. Just a quick stop and then disappeared.
The ubiquitous Connie Woodhouse (one of the stars of The Tree Rings’ Tale) has been working with a team using tree rings to reconstruct the flow of the Indus River: Dr. Woodhouse did the reconstruction of the water flow level in River Colorado in the US. She is working on a similar project for River …
I’m kicking myself thinking I may have already missed the Rio Grande’s runoff peak. Earlier in the week, the river’s flow jumped up over 2,000 cfs through Albuquerque, which ain’t much as rivers go, but there’s at least a chance that’s the best we’ll see this year. The peak usually comes much later, late May-ish, …
From the morning paper, a report on the April Rio Grande runoff forecast plunging off a cliff: Gary Esslinger’s chosen profession, delivering irrigation water to southern New Mexico farmers, looks like some sort of cruel joke these days. The latest punch line came this week in the form the federal government’s April Rio Grande runoff …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: lousy runoff on the Rio Grande’ »
From this morning’s newspaper, my story about the New Mexico state engineer’s decision to deny a proposal to pump rural groundwater from rural western New Mexico to the Rio Grande Valley: By failing to be specific about where the water was going, the project’s backers failed to meet the requirements of state law, Verhines ruled. …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico rural-urban groundwater project denied’ »