One of the epic Colorado River stories involves the Great El Niño of 1983, the year they almost lost Glen Canyon Dam. With a massive snowpack melting off in a hurry in June of that year, Lake Powell filled to the spillways, which couldn’t handle the load, and it is said we came close to catastrophe. …
Here’s a picture of the Rio Grande, at Embudo, with water: Here’s a newspaper story about the Rio Grande, at Albuquerque, without water: Without good summer rains, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque could see its lowest sustained levels since the 1970s, water managers said Wednesday. In the midst of the fourth consecutive year of extreme …
Continue reading ‘stuff I wrote elsewhere: a dry summer on the Rio Grande’ »
Water is energy, and in arid lands it rearranges humans and human ways and human appetites around its flow. Groundwater is a nonrenewable source of such energy. These facts are the core of the impact when groundwater is developed in such places. Humans build their societies around consumption of fossil water long buried in the …
Jonathan Thompson takes High Country News readers to his home town of Durango for a reprise of a western saga we’ve seen before: who gets to define the Animas River around which his city was built? [I]t’s somewhat luxurious, maybe even decadent, to be able to have a community-wide fight over whether a park has …
From the morning paper: With revenue down as a result of dropping water sales, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority board at its Wednesday evening meeting will consider a 5 percent rate increase beginning July 1. The average homeowner’s water bill would rise roughly $3 per month, according to a report to be presented …
The Desert Sands Motor Hotel on old Route 66 in Albuquerque has all the modern amenities. If you look closely, you’ll see a small television satellite dish.
This is my favorite border picture from my trip last month to Arizona-California-Sonora-Baja. You can see the old border fence on the right, one of those repurposed metal landing strip things, which as near as I can tell is where the actual border is. The big new fence is pulled back 50 yards or so …
Now that I’ve figured out how to easily download NASA Landsat imagery, (thanks, USGS!) I don’t think I’m going to get much else done this weekend. It’s an amazing conceptual tool for helping to think about how water moves through western North America. Here’s Albuquerque on April 13, with the colors tweaked to highlight growing plants. …
Continue reading ‘Down the Landsat rabbit hole, Albuquerque edition’ »
I’ve apparently got more time on my hands than skill, but I figured out, somewhat crudely, how to downland LANDSAT maps and make some pictures. Here’s the largely dry bed of the Colorado River on February 27. Apologies for the large file size, but it should have enough resolution to click and zoom if you’re …
In Sacramento, you no longer need fear getting a citation for letting your lawn go brown. What’s next – water meters?