Out here in the inland arid western United States, water management is complicated by the convoluted question of what happens to the water after we “use” it. Sometimes it’s used up. Sometimes we put it back, in a way that allows others to use it. Regular Inkstain readers, all three of you, will recognize this …
I’ve got the sad honor today of writing an obituary for Cliff Crawford, the retired University of New Mexico biologist for whom the word “beloved” carries only a fraction of the baggage that it should. Cliff’s the dean of the dean of the bosque biologists, a group who study and love the riparian strip along …
In search of the juniper titmouse and random desert wrens, I headed up the Domingo Baca trail in the foothills above Albuquerque this morning. As is the case with most of the little canyons on the west face of the Sandias, there’s a spring near the bottom of Domingo Baca Canyon. The tilt of the …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert: Domingo Baca Canyon’ »
Lissa and I were walking in the Rio Grande bosque, the riparian cottonwood forest, last night when the sun dropped below the clouds just before sunset and lit the trees across the pond with the most exquisite light. All we had was a cell phone camera, so I went back this evening at the same …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert: not exactly nature, but close’ »
This week’s bit of western water history comes from the archives of the Library of Congress. Elephant Butte Dam (originally Engle Dam) is on the Rio Grande upstream from El Paso. Completed in 1915, it is currently the subject of a fascinating New Mexico water rights adjudication battle, nicely detailed by Sig Silber.
It’s been called the largest tributary in New Mexico’s middle Rio Grande – the outfall from Albuquerque’s sewage treatment plant. A friend loaned me his mountain bike for the weekend (I’m in the market for a new bike that I can ride off the pavement), so I took it for a test ride down in …
Continue reading ‘The Largest Tributary in the Middle Rio Grande?’ »
Saturday’s post about Phoenix and the need for proper institutional structures to sort out the West’s water problems was really a bit of shadowboxing with a piece I was working on for today’s paper about New Mexico (sub. ad req.) It’s about an ongoing argument here about a proposed water rights agreement between our Interstate …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: On Water and Institutional Structures’ »
We had a nice line of thundershowers move across Albuquerque this afternoon. After dinner, Lissa and I headed to the north end of town to view the results. The metro area’s North Diversion Channel drains roughly 100 square miles of city, and flood control engineers tell me it’s a relatively unusual terrain for a major …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert: Moving Flash Floods’ »
From this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req), a story about the new paper in today’s Science by Jonathan Overpeck and Brad Udall about climate change in the West. Udall and Overpeck have become fixtures on the western water meeting circuit over the last several years delivering this message, and the paper contains no real surprises. But …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Dry Times Ahead in the West’ »
The book project means I often pay more attention to the Colorado River, at least journalistically, than the river through my own back yard. But via the work blog, you can see that it’s dry over on this side of the continental divide as well: Over the last 14 years there have only been three …