“NPS warns visitors: Don’t search for corpses in Lake Mead’
Sadly for most of you, this story is behind Politico/E&E paywall.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
“Drouth had no terrors here.”
I dropped off the Santa Fe Overland at Albuquerque about a year ago during the drouth that prevailed over the southwest at that time. The range was as dry and hard as a table. Rivers and streams had dried up. Cattle were dying and the country seemed utterly desolate. Imagine my astonishment and delight when …
Does the Upper Colorado River Basin Routinely Take Shortages in Dry Years?
By John Fleck, Eric Kuhn, and Jack Schmidt As stakeholders negotiate the current crisis on the Colorado River, we believe the representatives of the states of the Upper Basin – our states – are making a dangerous argument. Their premise is simple. With deep cutbacks needed, the Upper Basin states argue that their part of …
Continue reading ‘Does the Upper Colorado River Basin Routinely Take Shortages in Dry Years?’ »
For the first time in four decades, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is dry
For the first time in ~40 years (? – see below) New Mexico’s Rio Grande has “broken” – is no longer flowing – in what we call “the Albuquerque reach”. The river dries not with a bang, but with a muddy whimper and the dawn serenade of awakening birds. Battered by 100-degree days, with storage …
Continue reading ‘For the first time in four decades, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is dry’ »
The poets down here don’t write nothin’ at all, they just stand back and let it all be.
Colorado has no plans to make additional cuts to water use next year to meet the Bureau of Reclamation’s demand to conserve millions of acre-feet of water, a step needed to preserve power production in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Instead, Colorado officials insist that other states should do the cutting. “I think that at …
“a veritable garden spot”
Barr Irrigation District The home of the ill-fated “Barr Irrigation District” is not one of Albuquerque’s scenic destinations. Perched on low sand hills between Albuquerque’s soft industrial underbelly and the city’s “Sunport” (our marketing appellation for what a lesser metropolis might call an “airport”), the old irrigation district land is today home to an interstate, …
Verdant
Where peaceful Rivers soft and slow Amid the verdant Landskip flow. – Addison My friend Mary Harner, who loves and thinks about rivers more/better than anyone I know, is in town. We found time this morning for a walk along our shared passion, the Rio Grande. After 78 days without rain, the monsoon bloomed on …
With Eric Kuhn’s help, I found a (nearly) full Colorado River Basin reservoir!
When Eric and I converge on a meeting, there’s always the “Are you gonna bring a bike?” conversation. This week it’s the Getches-Wilkinson Center’s Annual Colorado River conference, and the bike ride was a loop around Denver Water’s Dillon Reservoir, on the Blue River. It’s nearly full. The creeks feeding it were running. There was …
Continue reading ‘With Eric Kuhn’s help, I found a (nearly) full Colorado River Basin reservoir!’ »
Touton: On the Colorado River, we need to cut an additional 2 to 4 million acre feet of use. Now.
I’ll let Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlin Touton explain this: In the Colorado River Basin more conservation and demand management are needed in addition to the actions already underway. Between 2 and 4 million acre feet of additional conservation is needed just to protect critical elevations in 2023. (emphasis added) That’s what Commissioner Touton …
As Albuquerque’s Rio Grande dries, is the system simply functioning as we intended?
In a sad but important way, the disastrous 2022 water year has been a gift to the writer, and I’m spending as much time as I can in reporter mode, sussing out the stories of this remarkable year. In the new book we’re writing, Bob Berrens and I are trying to make sense of the …