Quoting Martha Nussbaum

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And what if it is love one is trying to understand, that strange unmanageable phenomenon or form of life, source at once of illumination and confusion, agony and beauty? Love, in its many varieties, and their tangled relations to the good human life, to aspiration, to general social concern? What parts of oneself, what method, what writing, should one choose then? What is, in short, love’s knowledge—and what writing does it dictate in the heart?

Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature

Craig Allen joins us on the Utton Center’s Water Matters! podcast

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Formed in a series of volcanic eruptions between 1 and 2 million years ago, the Jemez Mountains dominate the cultural and environmental history of central New Mexico.

For more than four decades, forest ecologist Craig Allen has studied them, engaging in what has come to be known as “place-based ecology,” with deep roots in what the Nuevo Mexicanos would call “querencia” – a deep love and sense of place.

The resulting of Craig’s passion is a vast body of scientific work that shed light on the impact of climate change on a forest landscape. The results also reflect a deeply personal journey for Allen, as aridity and fire change a place he loves.

Episode 4 of the Rin Tara/John Fleck Water Matters podcast

The 86-pound catfish of Lake San Marcial

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Old newspaper headline: 86-Pound Catfish Hooked at San Marcial

Albuquerque Journal, June 17, 1951

If you have ever been to modern San Marcial, New Mexico – or what is left of it – the notion of an 86-pound catfish requires some explanation.

The spot where D.C. George hooked his record catfish is today ragged scrubland. But for a brief, shining, extremely odd period of time in the 1940s and ’50s, Lake San Marcial was a big deal.

It was popular with the hook and bullet set, while on occasion also swallowing Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe locomotives (so, less popular with the railroad).

It was the subject of dueling litigation. The railroad was mad about the swallowed locomotives, blaming the federal government for causing the lake. The Hunters, owners of the fishing resort, got mad when the federal government decided to drain (or maybe fill?) the lake, so they sued too.

It is a useful example of a common sequence of events when we engineer a river:

  1. Change a river with engineering.
  2. Something weird happens.
  3. People and ecosystems improvise, optimizing around the new state.
  4. But the new state causes problems, too.
  5. Try to fix these problems.
  6. People who had optimized around the new state, or who value the ecosystem’s optimization around the new state, are pissed about the change.

Located 120-ish river miles down the Rio Grande from Albuquerque, the town of San Marcial was a happening place in the early 1900s – major railroad employment center, heart of a what was, in the romantic retellings, a lovely little farming valley with its sibling Tiffany just up river and Val Verde across the narrow desert valley.

As the retellings often point out, it had an opera house. (I’m a writer. I get it. How can you resist an opera house.)

Upstream from a geomorphic bottleneck – the volcanic Black Mesa to the east, a string of sediment-laden arroyos coming in from the west – the San Marcial reach of the Rio Grande has long been a trouble spot for those bent on settling on the valley floor. Flooding was not uncommon. But with the 1916 completion of Elephant Butte Dam to the south, the flooding got worse. Elephant Butte’s full pool elevation is downstream of the bottleneck, but as a reservoir encroaching from downstream slows a river, sediment deposition creeps upstream, often well beyond the reservoir’s actual high water mark.

Whether Elephant Butte’s presence, the sediment deposition, actually caused the flooding that in 1929 ended San Marcial’s opera house days would be the subject of some legal debate in the decades that followed. A federal judge in 1960 ruled that the federal government, builder of Elephant Butte, was not to blame but, as I said, further research needed.

Base Level, Aggradation, and Grade

The modern scientific consensus seems to be that, duh, of course Elephant Butte caused the demise of San Marcial.

Perhaps the most notable example of the aggrading wedge upstream of a reservoir is at the Elephant Butte reservoir, built in 1912 on the Rio Grande about 300 km downstream of Albuquerque, New Mexico (Eakin, 1936). By the 1930s, the Rio Grande had aggraded many kilometers upstream of the head of the lake. Because the sediment load was sand, most of the aggradation was in the channel with the creation of natural levees. Drainage from the distal land on to the floodplain was blocked from entering the stream by the natural levees and thus the floodplain became a wetland and was even ponded in many places. Near the reservoir, the stream level was superposed, or higher than the floodplain. By the 1930s, a local village, San Marcial, began to be flooded and was finally evacuated (Eakin, 1936). It was feared that the wedge of sediment would eventually extend all the way to Albuquerque but that never happened (Mackin, 1948).

– Trimble, Stanley W. “Streams, valleys and floodplains in the sediment cascade.” Sediment cascades: An integrated approach (2010): 307-343.

Graph showing sediment wedge puling up behind Ramah dam.

Sediment Wedge, Ramah, New Mexico.

In their seminal paper Base Level, Aggradation, and Grade, Luna Leopold and William Bull explained how a river slows and drops is sediments as it reaches a controlling base level. The most obvious example is the ocean, which on geomorphological time scales is relatively stable. The result is a wedge of sediment well upstream of the ocean itself. This also happens when we dam a river. The reservoir level acts like a mini-ocean, and the sediments back up well upstream of the of the reservoir level itself as water slows down and spreads out.

Natural constraints do this as well – constraints like the pinch point between the volcanic mesa to the east and arroyos dumping in their load from the west just downstream from the ill-fated community of San Marcial.

A tale of catfish and willow flycatchers

Topographic map showing Lake San Marcial and its surrounding area in New Mexico. The Rio Grande flows from the northeast to the southwest through the center of the map, bordered by wide green floodplain areas indicating riparian vegetation. Lake San Marcial appears as a large blue water body on the west bank of the Rio Grande, just south of the town of San Marcial. A railroad labeled “Atchison” runs parallel to the river’s west bank, passing between San Marcial and Lake San Marcial, and continuing south past Val Verde. The map also shows ruins, cemeteries, and geographic features like Mesa Peak and the Pedro Armendaris Grant boundary.

San Marcial Lake

The weird thing for today’s blog post is the lake, which seems to have emerged in the 1940s, perhaps following the floods of 1941 and ’42, which pushed Elephant Butte to its high stand, depositing sediment in this reach and in general causing a geomorphologic mess – not a mess for the river, the river’s just doin’ river stuff, but a mess for the humans who had taken on the obligation of managing the Rio Grande.

Like, trains kept falling into Lake San Marcial, but more importantly for the task of river management, water that humans wanted to hurry on down to Elephant Butte so folks downstream could water their crops was instead spreading out in the “lake” and surrounding swamps. The river no longer flowed here, and New Mexico as a result had fallen hundreds of thousands of acre feet behind in its obligations under the Rio Grande Compact to deliver water to Elephant Butte Reservoir for use in Southern New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico.

Draining the lake and those swamps was as a result a passionate imperative among New Mexicans in the 1950s, as we essentially agreed to federalize the river so the taxpayers of the nation, after helping create the problem by subsidizing Elephant Butte Dam for our benefit, were now asked to again subsidize the fix to the problem created at Elephant Butte’s upstream end.

The Middle Rio Grande Project

The Flood Control Act of 1948 (and a subsequent 1950 iteration) authorized the US Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers to, among other things, “fix” the San Marcial stretch of the Rio Grande- “river rectification” was the formal terminology of the day. To do that, the Bureau dug what amounts to a second river channel, which today we call the “Low Flow Conveyance Channel,” alongside the river’s old channel. Here’s the explanation from Chris Gorbach’s 1999 history (found in these conference proceedings):

In 1951, President Truman gave Reclamation special authority to start channel construction immediately. Work on the low-flow channel and clearing a floodway for passage of higher flows began in October of that year. Construction on the low-flow channel continued throughout the ’50s. A first phase, the so-called San Marcial Channel, was completed at the end of 1953. Diversions through a heading near the southern end of the Bosque del Apache began in November of that year. Extension of the low-low channel upstream to San Acacia was completed in 1959. When completed, the low-flow channel extended some 70 miles from San Acacia to a point just above the narrows of Elephant Butte Reservoir.

By 1956, the lake where D.C. George hooked that 86-pounder was dried up, turned to grazing land for cattle, and the Hunters were suing the federal government over the loss of their fishing resort. Further research needed on the demise of San Marcial Lake. The news coverage of the day suggests the Bureau of Reclamation diverted silt-laden Rio Grande water into the lake to fill it up. The Hunters called that negligence, the Bureau responded that, no, it was exactly what they intended, and were authorized by Congress to do.

Laguna de Fray Cristóbal

Three quarters of a century after the demise of San Marcial Lake, we’re experiencing a repeat. About ten miles downstream, a large body of water has emerged, apparently of some interest to anglers, certainly of great interest to Southwestern Willow Flycatchers (ecosystems improvise, optimizing around the new state), and also certainly of extraordinary interest to the water managers of 2025 charged with carrying out the obligations we took on as a community when we began engineering the Rio Grande more than a century ago.

Off to the west of the end of the Low Flow Conveyance Channel are 100 acres of open water surrounded by wetlands that are, from a “water in the desert” environmental aesthetic perspective, a delight created by leaks and levee failures in a stretch of the river that doesn’t get a lot of love. The Bureau of Reclamation has even installed gizmos to divert some of the water now flowing down the Low Flow Conveyance Channel into this wetland, beloved by the endangered flycatcher. But in a world in which competing and conflicting values include a desire to move water to farms and cities downstream, in the process meeting the legal requirements of the Rio Grande Compact, the River Mile 60 pond is not universally beloved. Here’s Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District CEO/Chief Engineer Jason Casuga in a letter to the state last summer:

What was originally a failure in infrastructure has now become a managed habitat feature by the federal government. The breach channel eventually makes its way back to the river some 7 miles downstream of RM 60. MRGCD is concerned about the depletions taking place within the breach channel and adjacent floodplain habitat when you consider the area of inundation is likely between 900 to 1,500 acres and has a corresponding evapotranspiration rate of more than 5.5’ per acre annually (based on OpenET).

At a time New Mexico is falling farther and farther behind on its compact obligation to communities in Southern New Mexico and Texas, this is a problem. It is an example of the sometimes competing and conflicting values at play when we take on the enduring obligation of engineering a river.

In a letter last week (July 17, 2025) to the Bureau of Reclamation, New Mexico Office of the State Engineer General Counsel Nat Chakeres gently suggested that diverting water into the wetland was not in keeping with the aforementioned Flood Control Acts of 1948 and ’50, which authorized Reclamation to bail us out of the messes that Reclamation in part created by building Elephant Butte in the first place. Chakeres’ argument is that the acts of Congress setting the whole thing up explicitly prioritized delivery of Compact water.

In summary, the sole authorized purpose of the LFCC is to convey water to Elephant Butte for compliance with the Rio Grande Compact. If water is diverted from the LFCC and consumed for habitat purposes, that is water that could have been delivered but was not.

There’s been some discussion about what we should call the River Mile 60 pond. A number of names have been suggested, but none capture the grace of this much-maligned, often forgotten but, to my eyes, magnificent stretch of the Rio Grande.

Nearby is the old Paraje de Fray Cristóbal, a hardscrabble stopping point on the old Camino Real. I suggest we call it “Laguna de Fray Cristóbal.”

Quoting Bonnie Colby

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University of Arizona economist Bonnie Colby on why the enduring opposition to water transfers out of agriculture goes beyond price:

This is not surprising given third party economic effects when irrigated agriculture diminishes in a region. However, the enduring nature of the opposition is striking, even when seemingly generous compensation is included for third party effects. The opposition is about something beyond money changing hands and the workings of regional economies. Individual property rights in water that can transfer to other uses at the discretion of the water right owner clash with a cultural sense of water as an eco-social and community asset passed down across generations.

Colby, Bonnie. “Acquiring environmental flows: ecological economics of policy development in western US.” Ecological Economics 173 (2020): 106655.

Such a rich paper! Here’s another favorite bit:

In the western U.S., water is a key part of identity for indigenous tribes and rural farming communities. These parties articulate clearly that water is central to their collective identity, in addition to its economic importance (Colby et al., 2005; Deol and Colby, 2018). Water also contributes to identity for city dwellers, recreationists and environmental advocates. Some western U.S. cities are known for lush landscaping, golf courses and fountains, despite their arid climate. Those who enjoy kayaking and fishing have a sense of collective identity and form groups to argue for more water dedicated to these pursuits. Environmental and conservation organizations build identities, reputations and fund-raising campaigns based on their successes in restoring flows to rivers and wetlands. Where identity is tied to water, water trading encounters complexities beyond the norm for real estate transactions.

(Fall class for UNM Water Resources and Econ grad students starts in a few weeks, going back over favorite readings to prepare.)

 

Return of the Deadpool Diaries: The Colorado River news keeps getting worse

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abandoned boat at Lake Mead

“That boat is totally fixable.” – Greg

With the latest Bureau of Reclamation model runs highlighting the serious risks posed by the declining reservoir levels that Utah State’s Jack Schmidt has been warning about, there are signs that the closed-room discussions among the seven basin states, after brief glimmers of hope last month, are once again not going well.

The Reservoirs

The latest Bureau of Reclamation 24-month studies show a clear risk of Lake Powell dropping below minimum power pool in late 2026, with Lake Mead dropping to elevation 1,025 by the summer of 2027. This should be hair on fire stuff.

The “clear risk” here is based on Reclamation’s monthly “minimum probable” model runs – what happens if we have bad snowpacks next year, and the year after? These are probabilistic estimates, not predictions. But the whole point of Reclamation doing this is so that we can be prepared. We need a robust public discussion about what our plan is if we end up on this fork in the hydrologic road.

The warning signs are clearly there in Jack’s analyses. Frustrated by the delay in the traditional metrics we use for measuring and monitoring the Colorado River, Jack’s been doing routine updates on reservoir storage contents. The traditional metrics we use – the Upper Basin Consumptive Uses and Losses Reports, the Lower Basin Decree Accounting Reports, the Natural Flow Database – have significant lags. The reservoir data is there in real time, integrating how much the climate system provides and how much humans use. The data here are all public. Jack’s value add is to sum them up and slice and dice the resulting data structures.

The somewhat arcane but incredibly useful framework he’s been using his his recent analyses is the period of accumulation, when reservoirs rise as river flows exceed human uses above them and extractions below them, following by the period of decline, when we’re drawing down the reservoirs. This is a tool, or a way of thinking, that we could use in real time to adjust our behavior, noting bad reservoir conditions and reducing our use. This is not something our water allocation framework is well suited to do.

The Negotiations

For more than a year, those involved in the delicate interstate negotiations over future Colorado River water allocation rules have repeatedly asked that we give them space to have the hard conversations they need to have in private. The results, or lack thereof, have done nothing to earn our trust.

When Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke moved the up-until-then super secret “supply driven” allocation concept into public view a month ago, it seemed like a good sign along two dimensions. First, the idea of basing the amount of water delivered from Upper Basin to Lower Basin past Lee Ferry on actual hydrology, on a percentage of how much water the climate is actually providing, seemed like an eminently reasonable approach. Second, Buschatzke was talking about this in public.

Folks from the Upper Basin followed suit, and a round of positive press followed.

Talking to Alex Hager, I called it “a glimmer of hope.”

But as this shifts from the brief sunshine of public statements back to the closed door negotiations, any glimmer appears dim indeed.

The problems were already visible in that brief, glorious bit of sunshine of public discussion last month.

There are two critical questions that need to be settled to make this work. The obvious one is the number – what percentage of the three year natural flow are we talking about shepherding down past Lee Ferry? The second is more subtle: What happens if the Lee Ferry flow falls short of that number?

Speaking to the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, Buschatzke was clear that whatever percentage number they settled on would be an Upper Basin “delivery obligation” at Lee Ferry. Becky Mitchell, speaking on behalf of Colorado, (but effectively as the de-facto Upper Basin voice, the role the other Upper Basin states seem to have for all practical purposes ceded to her) said (per Heather Sackett’s excellent reporting) it was in no way to be considered a delivery obligation.

When I suggested in a blog post that Upper Basin states might need to curtail water users in order to ensure the agreed-upon-percentage (whatever that is) is met, I got an angry call informing me that the Upper Basin was considering no such thing.

What this makes clear is that the same disagreement over the irreducibly ambiguous legal question in Article III of the Colorado River Compact – does the Upper Basin have a Lee Ferry delivery obligation or not? – is simply being shifted to a new modeling framework.

Never mind the equally intractable question of what the Lee Ferry don’t-call-it-a-delivery-obligation percentage might be. I don’t know anything more than gossip, but the gossip suggests the attempt to settle on a number, or even a range of numbers that Reclamation might model as part of its NEPA analysis, also is not going well.

If I was talking to Alex Hager today, I would no longer describe a glimmer of hope.

The Failure Mode

One of the most useful questions I learned to ask as a reporter covering water involved drilling down to the question of what happens when scarcity finally bites. What is the failure mode? Who actually doesn’t get water? How does that work?

The combination of Jack’s analysis and Reclamation’s latest 24-month study suggests that we need to be asking that question in the near term. When Powell approaches minimum power pool, and Mead drops below 1030, whose water use will be curtailed to protect the system? If your answer involves a defense of why your own water supply should not be reduced, you’re doing this wrong. Everyone needs to be realistic about their risk of a legal outcome different from their agency lawyer’s position. But we also need to recognize moral obligations here, to find ways to share in this shrinking river. How are we going to come together, as a community, to respond?

The longer term argument also needs to begin to take this form.

Let us imagine going to the Supreme Court to settle the question of whether the Upper Basin does or does not have a legal delivery obligation under Article III of the Colorado River Compact to deliver 75 million or 82.5 million acre feet per year past Lee Ferry. If you lose that litigation, what is the failure mode? Who actually doesn’t get water? If your groupthink has convinced you that this is not a meaningful question, that you’re sure to win, and the other basin is the one that needs to be thinking about failure modes, you need a second opinion, to get out of your groupthink bubble.

Whatever “bring it on” enthusiasm for litigation you’re hearing from your groupthinkers needs to be tempered by an honest discussion about what happens to your communities’ water supplies if you lose.

I’ll also make a modest pitch here for a need to recognize moral obligations, to find ways to share this shrinking river.

USBR Albuquerque staffing update

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From USBR Albuquerque office chief Jennifer Faler’s report to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District board yesterday (Monday, July 14, 2025).

The USBR Albuquerque office has, on paper, a full staffing contingent of 200 FTEs. That’s on paper. Operationally, the actual levels in the past generally hovered around 175.

Current staffing level sits at 117 “and counting,” by which Faler seemed to mean “counting down,” thanks to a hiring freeze – the Bureau’s not able to replace people as they leave. We should expect this to settle around 100 in the next few years.

Staffing holes mean some projects simply can’t move forward.

Work on the Lower San Acacia Reach Project has slowed, but NEPA analysis for that project (critical to getting water through the desiccated mess at the upstream end of Elephant Butte) is basically wrapped up, and Faler said construction will start in the next year or so.

The Rio Grande has gone dry in Albuquerque

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Muddy river bed with a small meander of shallow water, lined with green trees receding into a distant sky line.

Rio Grande looking upstream, taken from Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge, 2:15 p.m. July 14, 2025

The “official” call: the Rio Grande went dry in the Albuquerque reach, just upstream of the city’s wastewater treatment plant (click here for the map), on Sunday evening (July 13, 2025), for only the second time in the 21st century.

“Dry” in this case has a formal definition. The thinning ribbons of water you see in the picture above, taken mid-afternoon Monday (July 14, 2025) have to break. It’s still a muddy mess; the river’s subsurface manifestation, the shallow aquifer, still has water in it, the trees (look at their lovely green!) still have access to that part of the river. But if you’re a fish or a turtle, these are sad times.

The fact package

We got an excellent update on river conditions (as we do every month) at the meeting of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, the government agency responsible for river flood control, drainage, and irrigation in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande. Most of what follows I learned by attending that meeting.

The last time the river dried in the heart of New Mexico’s largest city was 2022. Before that, it hadn’t happened since the 1980s.

Drying is common to the south, between Albuquerque and Elephant Butte Reservoir. Happens most every year. What’s new is drying in the heart of this large urban area.

Imported Colorado River water, via the San Juan-Chama Project, delayed the Albuquerque drying. The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District used that water to supplement flows and get water to irrigators from June 16 to July 6, when their San Juan-Chama supplies ran out. (Source: Anne Marken’s report to the MRGCD board)

The Conservancy District is currently operating under the rules of “prior and paramount” operations, meaning a subset of the lands of the valley’s six Native American Pueblos get water, while all non-Indian irrigators upstream of Isleta Pueblo are being curtailed. (Source: Marken, if you wanna understand what’s happening on the Rio Grande, you can do no better than Anne’s monthly report to the board)

As of July 8, the federal government had ~31,545 acre feet of P&P water in storage in El Vado (there’s a bit of space available despite the dam’s problems) and Abiquiu. (Source: USBR report to the MRGCD board)

Downstream from Isleta, once the Pueblos have gotten their P&P water, some irrigation is possible using return flows. Because of the structure of the plumbing, this favors the river’s east side communities. (Source: Matt Martinez report to the MRGCD board, ditto what I said about Marken: “If you wanna understand….”)

The pumps that have kept water flowing to Corrales in the absence of the rickety old siphon that used to get water there were shut down June 26. (Source: Matt Martinez)

Current flow at the Central Avenue Bridge, as measured by the USGS: is it even worth trying to measure this? What does “1.78 cubic feet per second” mean in a river like the one you see in the picture above?

 

 

Summer Update on the Colorado River Water Supply

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Jack Schmidt

Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University

14 July 2025

Water stored in the reservoirs of the Colorado River represents the account balance from which we draw water for use. The amount in the account is especially important during dry times when the demand by water users throughout the Basin exceeds income to the account, primarily snowmelt runoff, and is met by account withdrawals.

The annual cycle of reservoir hydrology includes two seasons – a relatively short season when reservoir storage increases and a relatively long season when storage decreases. In wet years, the season when storage increases typically begins in March or early April and may last until late July. In dry years, this season might not begin until May and end in mid-June. During the rest of the year, the Basin’s reservoirs are progressively depleted.

Snowmelt in 2025 was low, similar to what it was in 2012 and 2013; in early June, the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center predicted that this year’s unregulated snowmelt inflow to Lake Powell will end up being 54% of the recent 30-yr average. In the 21st century, only 2002, 2018, and 2021 had lower inflows to Powell. Not surprisingly, the amount of water that accumulated in the Basin’s reservoirs during the 2025 snowmelt season was also unusually low.  There are a few ways to consider the Basin’s reservoirs. We can consider every reservoir for which data are readily available[1]; we can consider the major reservoirs actively managed by Reclamation[2]; or, we can consider just Lake Powell and Lake Mead (hereafter, Powell+Mead). Considering only Lake Powell or only Lake Mead doesn’t tell us much, because all of the Rocky Mountain snowmelt is first stored in Lake Powell and subsequently transferred to Lake Mead. In 2025, the 46 Basin reservoirs gained only 0.55 million af (acre feet) of water, of which only 0.28 million af accumulated in the 12 federal reservoirs and only 0.11 million af accumulated in Powell+Mead. That is a very small amount, especially compared to 2023 and 2024 (Fig. 1). That accumulation is being quickly consumed. By 1 July 2025, all of the 2025 accumulation in Powell+Mead had been released downstream or evaporated.

Figure 1. Graph showing reservoir storage in different parts of the Colorado River Basin since 1 January 2023. Total storage in March 2023 was the lowest in the 21st century. Storage significantly increased due to 2023 snowmelt, but the accumulation from the 2024 snowmelt was entirely lost. This will also happen in the coming months. On 30 June 2025, active storage in 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell was 8.58 million af, active storage in Lake Mead was 8.05 million af, and storage in Lake Powell was 7.88 million af.

In contrast to previous dry years, however, today’s account balance is unusually low, about the same as in late July 2021 (Fig. 2). Depending on how you think about the reservoir system, today’s contents are between 34 and 45% full in relation to their condition at the beginning of the 21st century (Table 1).

Figure 2. Graph showing reservoir storage in different parts of the Colorado River Basin since 1 January 1999. On 30 June 2025, total basin storage was comparable to what it was in late July 2021

 

Table 1. Present storage contents of reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin in relation to past conditions.

Storage contents, in million acre feet
on 30 June 2025 Last time storage was as low Present storage as a percentage of storage in late July 1999
entire Basin (n=46) 26.8 25-Jul-21 45%
federal reservoirs (n=12) 23.64 4-Sep-21 42%
Powell + Mead 15.93 20-Nov-21 34%

 

The implications for Lake Powell depend on whether Reclamation decides to emphasize water storage in Lake Powell or in Lake Mead, and whether water presently in Flaming Gorge reservoir will be released to supplement storage in Lake Powell.  As of June 30, 32% of the reservoir storage in the Basin was in 42 reservoirs upstream from Powell, 30% was in Mead, and 29% was in Powell (Fig. 1). if past management practices prevail, storage upstream from Powell will be quickly reduced, and storage in Powell and Mead will be reduced more slowly. If Reclamation emphasizes storage in Lake Powell by reducing releases to Lake Mead through the Grand Canyon, hydropower production at Glen Canyon Dam will be maintained and the risk of entrainment of smallmouth bass through the turbines will be reduced. But this management approach will cause Lake Mead to fall more quickl, thereby reducing hydropower production at Hoover Dam and perhaps the quality of water withdrawn to southern Nevada. Water storage can’t be maximized in both reservoirs at the same time. Indeed, we are living in dry times!

[1] There are 46,  https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/hydrodata/reservoir_data/site_map.html.

[2] There are 12 included in Reclamation’s monthly 12-month study reports (Taylor Park, Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, Crystal, Fontenelle, Flaming Gorge, Navajo, Vallecito, Lake Powell, Lake Mead, Lake Mohave, and Lake Havasu).

Rio Grande drying through Albuquerque

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Graph showing Albuquerque's Rio Grande going dry.

The year with no runoff. (The four peaks you see in the 2025 graph are four rain storms.) I added 2022 to the graph so we can compare with the only other time it’s dried in recent years. See below for the log scale version.

The Rio Grande gage at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge is reading 20.5 cubic feet per second this afternoon (Sunday, July 13).

The last time we saw river drying in the Albuquerque reach, back in 2022, 25 cfs at Central wasn’t enough to make it to the wastewater treatment plant outfall, as flows dwindled in the hot summer sun. My hypothesis (I haven’t been down to look today, went hiking up in the foothills instead) is that we’re seeing drying as I write this, meaning the continuous ribbon of trickling water is finally breaking. If not today, then soon. We’ll get an official report from the River Eyes people – they go out and actually look – prolly tomorrow.

The ditches are a similar story.

  • MRGCD diversions, which were over 400 cfs a week ago, are down to 245.
  • All the distribution ditches with gages in Albuquerque’s North Valley are reading zero.
  • Flows through the Atrisco siphon, which carries water down the west side of the south valley, are way down.
  • Flows in the Socorro Main, which were 175 cfs a week ago, are down to 50.
  • Flows in the weirdly wonderfully named Unit 7 Drain, which collects tail water out of the bottom of Valencia County and the top of Socorro County, carrying it through my current favorite reach of the river, are collapsing.

I don’t know what’s happening with leased San Juan-Chama water for minnow flows. If you do know, drop it in the comments.

I wrote this back in April laying out what I’m watching, and by implication what I think we as a community need to be paying attention to. It holds up pretty, no need to repeat myself here.

Log scale. Different graphing approaches are useful to different segments of the Inkstain audience, but bits are cheap, so why not do ’em all!

As Anne Marken says, pray for rain.

The Village People, Barthes, Sontag, MAGA

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Album cover for ‘The Best of Village People’ featuring six band members dressed in iconic costumes: construction worker, cowboy, police officer, Native American chief, soldier, and leather-clad biker, with a blue background and song titles listed at the bottom.

The Village People

Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content.

  • Susan Sontag, Notes on “Camp”

Macho Types Wanted. Must Dance and Have a Moustache.

  • Advertisement in the Village Voice, 1978, as quoted in Midgley, Alex. “‘Macho Types Wanted: The Village People, Homophobia, and Representation in the 1970s,” Australasian Journal of American Studies (2014): 104-119.

A friend last week (ironically, I think, and/or with disgust) texted a link to the U.S. Department of Interior’s July 4th video – all fireworks and Mount Rushmore and eagles and shit, a peppy presenter talking about America’s awesomeness, with the thumping disco beat in the background of the Village People’s 1978 pop cult classic YMCA.

Wait, what? YMCA is a camp queer anthem, right? I mean, look at those guys! I don’t think that song means what you think it means.

The Death of the Author

In her 1964 essay Notes on “Camp,” Susan Sontag said this, in discussing how to understand camp: “One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.”

Sontag’s point is a side road in a complex attempt to get her arms around the aesthetic of what she called “camp.” Writing three years later, the French literary critic Roland Barthes was more direct, arguing in his essay “The Death of the Author” that what matters in understanding a work is what ends up in the brain of the reader, viewer, listener, not who the author was or what they intended. But, holy moly, the Village People were pretty explicit back in the late 1970s about what they intended. Here’s Alex Midgley in a marvelous 2014 essay about YMCA (Can I share my delight in the fact that there’s a scholarly literature on “YMCA”?):

[W]hen first interviewed by Rolling Stone in 1978, the French producer Jacques Morali – the mastermind and chief songwriter of the group – outed himself and emphasised that increased cultural visibility was to be the very point of the Village People. ‘I think to myself that the gay people have no [musical] group,’ he said, ‘nobody to personalise the gay people, you know?’ Here, Morali had found a culturally unsatisfied, commercially unexploited niche in popular music, and determined that the Village People’s mix of iconic American masculinity, gay innuendo, and maddeningly catchy disco hooks was the perfect fit.

In his book A Queer History of the United States, Michael Bronski details how the YMCA became such an important institution for male gay culture in the U.S. In a rapidly urbanizing United States, the YMCA was a place for generally young single men (there are parallel stories for women) to gather. By the 1930s, Bronski writes, the chaste and spiritual nature of the “C” in the institution’s name was living side by side with what had become “a visible and internationally noted place for homosexual men to find one another for sex and socializing.”

The signalling could not, to my ears, be more clear:

It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
They have everything for young men to enjoy
You can hang out with all the boys

Here again is Midgley:

From the Stonewall Riots of 1969, to the election of Harvey Milk in 1978, and at countless points in between and after, gay people were being seen affirming their rights as citizens and creating strong queer communities. Being ‘out’ emerged as a more viable option, if only by degrees, as groups such as the Village People provided models of successful, positive, happy gay men that countered the spectre of sin, criminality, and illness that had accumulated around homosexuality over centuries.

Two decades separate John Rechy’s Cooper Do-Nuts Riot and the Village People, with Stonewall wedged in between, decades of a long and often painful emergence from the closet. So it’s easy to see why the camp genius of YMCA caught on in the discos of New York and San Francisco. But then something weird happened that is what makes Barthes so important, Sontag ever confusing, and YMCA a remarkable modern cultural object.

YMCA became a hit in still-homophobic middle America. And the Village People embraced this. Again, Alex Midgley is our guide:

While ‘Y.M.C.A.’ was written partly as a paean to the opportunities for gay socialisation and sex that the YMCA facilities provided, nothing was ever made explicit. Audiences so inclined could easily interpret the song as an anodyne appreciation for the Y, an organisation that promoted good Christian masculine values and responsibilities, rather than having anything to do with homosexuality. With ‘Y.M.C.A.’ the Village People became what the historian and self-professed ‘discologist’ Alice Echols calls America’s ‘first gay-to-straight crossover group. That is, the first (and only) disco act whose image and original following was gay but managed to cross over into straight discos.’ With their newfound audience, the Village People – who had never shied away from discussions of their sexuality – suddenly changed tack, refusing to comment on their sexual orientations.

Barthes and the question of authorial intent

The question raised by Roland Barthes is important to me, the “author” whose thousands of deaths (for each of the thousands of thing I have written and sent off into the world) he is summoning.

Very early in my career as a newspaper reporter, I learned an empirical version of Barthes’ concept: I wrote. People stayed up late into the night editing, typesetting, and printing my words, then driving around town throwing them on people’s driveways. When readers plucked the morning paper off of their driveway, they saw only my words, with no access to my intent. They would often work backwards from the words to infer my intent: the newspaper is the voice of The Man, Fleck’s clearly liberal/conservative (generally the opposite of the reader’s self-identity). But most importantly for my craft, if I wrote clumsily the goods I intended to get into a reader’s brain didn’t arrive undamaged.

So, yeah, Barthes resonates for me in a very practical way.

But in the last decade, as I left newspapering for the contemplative life of A Guy Who Writes Books, my relationship to Barthes, to the question of authorial intent, shifted. My books don’t stand alone, but rather exist in relationship to the public persona I present about them: I speak at conferences, and talk to reporters, and write blog posts, and appear on podcasts. The work here is not the book itself. Rather, the book is the platform on which the work as a whole stands – all the stuff I have to say, where my explicit signalling of authorial intent becomes part of the work.

While I can’t claim the stature or revenue stream of the Village People, the relationship to authorial intent is similar. It’s not just the song. It’s the stage show, the public statements, the explicit way in which they group revised their signals of authorial intent as YMCA moved out of the Haight and into the Holiday Inn. “No,” they seem to be signalling to the crowd cheerfully doing the Y-M-C-A arm gestures during the seventh inning stretch, “we’re not the gay band.”

But we get the camp wink, as my family joins in to the seventh inning stretch pantomime, what we joyously call “the gay song.” Which is why my “moved out of the Haight” metaphor breaks down, because the song now lives a double life as both a queer anthem and a MAGA anthem, simultaneously in the Haight* and in the Holiday Inn. It doesn’t matter what the authors intended. What matters is the way the audience embraces the work, and lordy but haven’t we embraced YMCA with a rich enthusiasm?

Acknowledgments: A special thanks to the four anonymous individuals who helped me workshop this material (my family and friends are kind and thoughtful with my practice), with particularly useful Bill Evans on vinyl and avgolemono chicken stew.

* Haight-Ashbury seems to no longer be “the Haight” of my cultural reference, grant me a nostalgia for the 1980s, my young adulthood, a time before AIDS and San Francisco’s decline.