Elephant Butte Reservoir, the main storage reservoir on the Rio Grande that provides irrigation and municipal water for southern New Mexico, the El Paso, and Juarez areas, starts the new year at just 13 percent capacity, down a hair from last year at this time. Some data points as we ponder a new water year …
Continue reading ‘The sorry state of Elephant Butte Reservoir’ »
Santa Fe’s oft-proclaimed “oldest inhabited home in the U.S.” may not even by the oldest house in Santa Fe, because tree rings! The building at 215 E. De Vargas St., famously named “the oldest inhabited home in the U.S.” byHarper’s Weekly in 1879, may not even be the oldest in Santa Fe. Tree-ring testing appears to …
Continue reading ‘The oldest house? Really? Tree rings strike again’ »
It was only a quarter of an inch, but boy’s gotta shovel the snow when he has a chance, eh? Happy new year.
The standard Bureau of Reclamation map of the Colorado River Basin has a series of red-dashed slivers beyond the physical boundaries of the basin itself, the places where we’ve chosen to artificially extend the watershed’s boundaries. In the process, we have created entire communities dependent on the success or failure of the basin’s water management …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: first-ever San Juan Chama Project shortfall’ »
With a sub-par snowpack once again in New Mexico’s high country, I got a Twitter question this morning about the last time we’d had a good snowpack. My favorite came in 2008, when I was just starting to track this sort of thing closely: SAN MARCIAL— Water was already lapping at the side of the …
Continue reading ‘On New Mexico’s Rio Grande, a brutal four years’ »
A riff in the morning paper on Albquerque’s beloved Tumbleweed Snowman, after spending the morning watching the flood control authority crew do his final assembly: Tumbleweed origin stories differ, but only slightly. German-Russian Mennonite farmers are believed to have inadvertently brought the seeds of our modern tumbleweed, also known as Russian thistle, mixed in with …
Continue reading ‘The Tumbleweed Snowman: An Immigrant Tale’ »
From this morning’s newspaper, a look at the latest proposal to pump rural groundwater to New Mexico’s populous middle (behind Google surveywall): Depending on your view of the issue, this is either: a) an innovative approach to bring new water to the Middle Rio Grande Valley, or b) an inappropriate attempt to privatize a public resource …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: NM water policy tools poorly suited for the job’ »
New Mexico has a relatively short part in the conventional story of the making of the United States from east to west. The older, longer-lasting story of a country made from south to north, or in gridwork and patches with contributions from all over the hemisphere and the world, has resumed there. It is a …
It’s a little thing, this new breed of drought-tolerant alfalfa bred on New Mexico State University research plots in the southern part of my arid state. But it provides another clue (behind a Google surveywall) about what the path forward in western water management might look like: Adoption of a new crop takes time, so don’t …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Drought-tolerant alfalfa’ »