I was crammed into the back seat of a Subaru wagon Friday, bouncing down the tail end of the last dirt road along New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande when the big marsh buggies emerged in the distance, blocking up the road’s end. In the lexicon of the river’s “maintainers,” we were somewhere around “River Mile …
Deepening and widening of stream channels in the Southwest is a phenomenon that has taken place within the memory of men now living. It began at different dates from 1860 on and has progressed at different rates on several streams, as summarized in a recent paper.²? The flood plains of numerous minor streams are yet …
NEAR THE CONFLUENCE OF THE RIO PUERCO AND THE RIO GRANDE – The broad delta where the Rio Puerco meets the Rio Grande in central New Mexico has never been a great place to live, though people try. To the east, across the river, the Ancestral Puebloan Piro built the village Spanish colonizers named “Sevilleta” …
If you have ever been to modern San Marcial, New Mexico – or what is left of it – the notion of an 86-pound catfish requires some explanation. The spot where D.C. George hooked his record catfish is today ragged scrubland. But for a brief, shining, extremely odd period of time in the 1940s and …
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From USBR Albuquerque office chief Jennifer Faler’s report to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District board yesterday (Monday, July 14, 2025). The USBR Albuquerque office has, on paper, a full staffing contingent of 200 FTEs. That’s on paper. Operationally, the actual levels in the past generally hovered around 175. Current staffing level sits at 117 …
Rivers have a heritage but no beginning. Luna Leopold and William Bull, from their classic paper “Base level, aggradation, and grade.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 123.3 (1979): 168-202. That’s the juicy pull quote, but it’s maybe too cryptic. Here’s more context: Through geologic time even the first incipient channel system appearing on an …