There’s so much going on in this picture. The buildings on the horizon, downtown Albuquerque, are a couple of miles away – foreshortened by the camera’s zoom. It’s a modest downtown, which grew up in that spot 140 years ago because the real estate entrepreneurs collaborating with the newly arrived Athchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe …
Continue reading ‘Watching Albuquerque’s Rio Grande go dry’ »
August 8 is more than a little late for Albuquerque’s first solid monsoon rains to break our weirdly hot flash drought, but we’ll take it. Typical monsoon onset here is early July, plus or minus a week-ish. At the risk of overstating because of a lack of precision, Aug. 8 is record late. I was …
Continue reading ‘Breaking Albuquerque’s flash drought: Biggest monsoon storm in a decade’ »
Area water managers were informed this morning that the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority will shut down its diversion of water from the Rio Grande for use in the municipal drinking water system, switching over to groundwater pumping to meet municipal needs. The reason is low flows in the river. Albuquerque is constrained by …
The Rio Grande, already dry in the San Acacia reach south of Socorro, has begun drying in the Isleta reach south of Albuquerque. And with a record hot dry summer, we could see it dry in Albuquerque again this year, as it did last year for the first time in 40 years. Via Dani Prokop: …
Continue reading ‘Rio Grande through Albuquerque could dry again this year’ »
Breaking out of my old “water policy writer” habits is hard. The bridges of Albuquerque are helping. Counting and Measuring Prepping for an appearance on this Friday’s New Mexico In Focus on NMPBS, I’ve spent a bunch of time the last few days digging through agricultural water use data. (Spoiler alert: Ag water use has …
Continue reading ‘Ribbons of Green: what we mean by “water policy”’ »
The fancy new Barelas Bridge, built in 1910 across the Rio Grande on what was then the southern edge of Albuquerque, was a big deal. The Albuquerque Museum photo archive (some on line here, more that I’ve begun studying at the museum for possible use in the new book) has a bunch of pictures of …
My mental map as I ride my bike across Albuquerque’s Rio Grande Valley floor has grown increasingly complex in the last six months as we’ve added layer upon layer of historic maps to the research for our forthcoming book Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of a Modern American City. Yesterday morning, …
Nearly every time I ride past this place, I take a picture and try to remember to write about bananas in Albuquerque history. I have quite a few pictures. Today is the day I remembered. It’s at First and Roma downtown, backing up on the railroad tracks, around the corner from the new at-grade railroad …
Out for an early walk this morning to the Rio Grande, we found a river settling nicely back into its main channel after a couple of months during which we allowed it to play a bit. Since April, the river’s been up and out of the 600-foot wide channel dug for it in the late …
We’ve been having a great year on the Rio Grande through Albuquerque, with overbanking flows to delight the river nerds and mosquitos alike. But this is about to change. Beginning next week (June 26, 2023), the Army Corps of Engineers will begin dropping flows out of Cochiti Reservoir, the main stem dam upstream of town. …
Continue reading ‘After a high-flow spring, Albuquerque’s Rio Grande is about to drop in a hurry’ »