For the first time in ~40 years (? – see below) New Mexico’s Rio Grande has “broken” – is no longer flowing – in what we call “the Albuquerque reach”. The river dries not with a bang, but with a muddy whimper and the dawn serenade of awakening birds. Battered by 100-degree days, with storage …
Continue reading ‘For the first time in four decades, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is dry’ »
Colorado has no plans to make additional cuts to water use next year to meet the Bureau of Reclamation’s demand to conserve millions of acre-feet of water, a step needed to preserve power production in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Instead, Colorado officials insist that other states should do the cutting. “I think that at …
Barr Irrigation District The home of the ill-fated “Barr Irrigation District” is not one of Albuquerque’s scenic destinations. Perched on low sand hills between Albuquerque’s soft industrial underbelly and the city’s “Sunport” (our marketing appellation for what a lesser metropolis might call an “airport”), the old irrigation district land is today home to an interstate, …
Where peaceful Rivers soft and slow Amid the verdant Landskip flow. – Addison My friend Mary Harner, who loves and thinks about rivers more/better than anyone I know, is in town. We found time this morning for a walk along our shared passion, the Rio Grande. After 78 days without rain, the monsoon bloomed on …
When Eric and I converge on a meeting, there’s always the “Are you gonna bring a bike?” conversation. This week it’s the Getches-Wilkinson Center’s Annual Colorado River conference, and the bike ride was a loop around Denver Water’s Dillon Reservoir, on the Blue River. It’s nearly full. The creeks feeding it were running. There was …
Continue reading ‘With Eric Kuhn’s help, I found a (nearly) full Colorado River Basin reservoir!’ »
I’ll let Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlin Touton explain this: In the Colorado River Basin more conservation and demand management are needed in addition to the actions already underway. Between 2 and 4 million acre feet of additional conservation is needed just to protect critical elevations in 2023. (emphasis added) That’s what Commissioner Touton …
In a sad but important way, the disastrous 2022 water year has been a gift to the writer, and I’m spending as much time as I can in reporter mode, sussing out the stories of this remarkable year. In the new book we’re writing, Bob Berrens and I are trying to make sense of the …
Sorry I didn’t have the presence of mind to give you something for scale. This little critter was a a bit smaller than my hand, crawling along the bottom of the drying Griegos Lateral, one of the 1700s-era irrigation ditches on the Albuquerque Rio Grande Valley floor. Drying kind early this year, because climate change. …
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A few notes on New Mexico’s Rio Grande in 2022, as I collect my thoughts for a TV interview later today: Snowpack and runoff Snowpack peaked at ~80 percent of the median Runoff into NM’s middle valley looks to be less than 50 percent (maybe quite a bit less?) Dry spell As I write this …
Albuquerque’s nod to its agricultural past, like much of the style we have adopted for ourselves, is in significant measure artifice. This is not to say that it is not in some vague sense rooted in a truth, an actual past. But we engage in the 21st century in significant embellishment, a story we spin …
Continue reading ‘Tobacco farming and swamps in early 20th century Albuquerque’ »