In the end of it all, you are the art. The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you.
– Brandon Sanderson, via Simon Willison
Colorado River Assigned Water: Quoting Sorensen et al
For more than a century of development, Colorado River governance has lived under a
tension between individual communities’ desires to use more water and the collective
need to balance basin-scale supply and use for the benefit of the region as a whole.
Incentives favoring individual communities at the expense of the collective good have
brought us to the edge of the current crisis.
The latest project from our little Colorado River working group takes a deep dive into the arcane rules governing what Arizona State University’s Kathryn Sorensen has dubbed “assigned water” – water that results of conservation efforts, set aside in the Colorado River Basin’s reservoir storage accounts for the future use of whoever did the conserving. Sort of.
While most of of the attention right now is focused on the top line conflict among the basin states, there remains a need to get the down-in-the-weeds details right.
Originally developed as a tool called “Intentionally Created Surplus” in the 2007 Colorado River operating guidelines (who names these things?), Assigned Water has become a critical tool for managing water use reductions in a way that helps ensure reliability for the water users to whom the tool is available. It’s extremely valuable, but is not without its drawbacks – crowding out conservation efforts that might benefit the basin as a whole, inadvertently shifting system water that again might benefit the basin as a whole into an individual water agency’s savings account, and delaying shortage declarations that might have enforced deeper cuts, sooner.
Marsh Buggies in the Desert
Marsh buggy in the desert, Elephant Butte Delta Channel, January 2026.
I was crammed into the back seat of a Subaru wagon Friday, bouncing down the tail end of the last dirt road along New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande when the big marsh buggies emerged in the distance, blocking up the road’s end.
In the lexicon of the river’s “maintainers,” we were somewhere around “River Mile 55,” 32 river miles down the Rio Grande from San Antonio, which is the last reliably populated human habitation on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande; 55 river miles upstream from Caballo Reservoir, where the river mile counting begins. The marsh buggies, transplants from oil field work in coastal Louisiana, were a bizarre sight, perched on the edge of a desert river.
It was an odd party of adventurers, armed with a drone, some binoculars, cameras, a notebook, and the most important tool of our trade, a cheerful curiosity.
This stretch of the Rio Grande is not quite as forgotten as what we capitalize as “The Forgotten Reach,” the stretch of the river south of Fort Quitman, Texas. But it feels pretty forgotten, other than the odd Bureau of Reclamation or Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District maintenance crew, a few intrepid birders (and those paid to do Endangered Species Act bird surveys), the very occasional bike rider, and those skilled in finding out-of-the-way BLM camping spots.
Twenty-eight rivers miles downstream, Elephant Butte Dam plugs this stretch of the Rio Grande, an engineering feature completed in 1916 that defines the geomorphology of what I’m going to start calling my “forgotten reach.” The spot where we parked for lunch among the marsh buggies was underwater back in the late 1990s, representing the upper end of Elephant Butte’s near-full pool. The resulting sediment backup defines the strange back-and-forth of river behavior – what I love to call “the Rio Grande doin’ river stuff” – and “river maintenance.”
Beginning soon after Elephant Butte was built, the sediment backup here plugged the river channel, heavy flows of silt from the Rio Puerco, the Rio Salado, and myriad smaller desert arroyos filling the main channel, washing down until it hit the new base level established by Elephant Butte’s full pool, raising the valley floor, plugging the river.
In the 1950s, Reclamation dug a canal through the reach to move the water down more “efficiently,” where efficiency, perhaps rightly, was defined as getting water to the folks downstream who need it.
The pas de deux between the Low Flow Conveyance Channel and the main river channel has been going on ever since, not always happily from the point of view of the above-mentioned definition of efficiency. For nearly twenty years, the Reclamation and the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission have hired the marsh buggy operators to dig a channel through all the muck so the river has a place to be.
Beginning sometime in the late 1990s (further research needed) a secondary channel formed along the western bluffs on this stretch of the river, originating in a leak in the human-built Conveyance Channel, which has become very popular with the birds – with the efficiency-minded water managers not so much. There’s a bit of a war of words about what to call it. My vote is for “Rito de Fray Cristóbal”, with “Fray Cristóbal” the name of the mountains to the east, but my Spanish is weak, drop your suggestions in the comments.
Reclamation is in the environmental review stage of a big project called the “Lower San Acacia Research Improvements (LSARI, and yes we try to pronounce it like a word that looks weird when you type it out – “el-sorry”) Project. The idea is to effectively rebuild this stretch of the Rio Grande at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.
For the purpose of the new book idea Bob Berrens and I are exploring, LSARI’s goals reflect, for storytelling purposes, a perfect mix of competing and conflicting goals:
- improve the efficiency of getting water to Elephant Butte for downstream users
- “enhance ecosystem health”
- manage future maintenance costs by getting the river itself to do most of the geomorphic work
For the purposes of the new book project, it’s also a delightful place to have lunch with one’s fellow river nerds.
A truly awful Colorado River snowpack so far in 2026
2002 (orange) and 2026 (blue) for the snow stations above Lake Powell
Via Eric Kuhn, the snowpack above Lake Powell is miserable. 2002 was the lowest year on record for unregulated April-July inflow into Lake Powell. This year is starting off even worse.
The bus as method
“Driver where you taking us?”
We took the 27 the way you take a local bus when you are not trying to “get somewhere” so much as trying to be somewhere. The bus as method. The bus as ritual. Travel defined by attention rather than distance. – Ben Yeoh
I used to love riding Albuquerque’s blue buses. Not so much any more. They trigger my motion sickness. Without evidence, with no way to falsify (Karl Popper would call this a meaningless assertion), I hypothesize that the drivers are more pissed off – they accelerate fast and stop hard, pushing me to the edge of comfort, sometimes over.
Before we had the blue bus, there was the “Rapid Ride”:
Overheard on the 766 Rapid Ride bus as it pulled into downtown Albuquerque….
Guy standing in the aisle: “Is that a good book?”
Guy seated: “I don’t know, I haven’t read it yet.” Pause. “It’s as old as fuck, though.”
I look over to see the guy sitting across the aisle from me has a beat up paperback Beowulf. “It’s a poem,” the guy says, opening it randomly, pointing to text. “Old English” – he points to the left page, then to the right, adds – “translation”.
They both got off the bus.
You don’t learn shit like that when you drive.
In one of those essays that rockets through the discourse these days, Jasmine Sun offered a riff on parkour:
To most citydwellers, stairwells are stairwells, and walls are walls. But hostile architecture is no deterrent to the traceur. They develop what’s called parkour vision: “walls become nothing more than ‘vertical floors’ for example, there to be run up or along; metal handrails seem to morph into intricate pathways to be walked; gaps in architecture become spaces to be filled with dynamic jumps.”
In reaching for the riff, Sun seems to have missed the point of parkour, which is to create one’s own puzzles out of the urban furniture for the puzzles’ sake. But it’s a good riff nonetheless, I would have tweeted it in the olden days, cheerfully ripping it out of its context and repurposing it for my own needs, like a piece of parkour urban furniture.
The practical value of Albuquerque’s blue buses for me is in service of my old man legs: my bike rides take me down to the river, and if I’m tired I can just throw my bike on the bus to get back up the hill. The blue bus has low overheads, no need to really worry about the schedule, a through line between the downtown/river neighborhood and my neighborhood. The low overhead means I never have to wait long, and the wait is always interesting – my mental parkour, making my own sense of the urban furniture of the beer place turned coffee place across from the Sixth Street stop, or the tourists out by Old Town, or the urban circus that is the Alvarado Transportation Center.
Alvarado is the best, but there’s always a risk that by the time I get there the bike slots on the bus will be full, so I usually pick an early stop just to be sure I can get on.
“On to Chicago.”
On a Sunday, if I go to the Alvarado and I’m lucky, the randomly timed Amtrak is up on the rail platform (there is a “schedule”, but it’s loose), which is my favorite bit of mental parkour, and I’ll go watch the tourists de-train and re-train and on the best days, if I’m not too hungry and can stay, I get to watch the Southwest Chief pull out, headed for Chicago.
The route of the bus is so deeply familiar that there is nothing new to learn, which is part of the mental parkour too, because there is always something new to learn, that is the puzzle. And the people-watching on the bus is precious, a shared humanity as we all nestle together in a big tube of metal, our separate purposes converged for a few minutes on a shared purpose before pulling the yellow cord to ring for our stop and going our separate ways.
Expect another dry year (2026) on New Mexico’s Rio Grande
I added the year to the title of this blog post for the search engines. Because what’s going on right now applies to a lot of years since I’ve been writing about this stuff at Inkstain.
I’m gathering string today for the first Water Matters podcast of 2026 (available on Buzzsprout and wherever fine podcasts are downloaded). One string I pulled: total 2025 flow at Otowi, the gateway to New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, was just 494,000 acre feet, the lowest since 1981 by my “danger John Fleck doing math” calculation.
Jan. 1 is early to be talking with any confidence about the coming year’s Rio Grande runoff, with another three-plus months of snow accumulation season ahead of us. And I walked to the market this morning to buy carrots in the midst of very light snow flurries! There’s snow on the Sandias! But I’ve got a podcast to help make, and yowza is the first-of-the-year runoff forecast from the NRCS lousy!
Median forecast for Otowi for the spring runoff: 48 percent of the 1991-2020 period of record. Best case (a one in ten chance on the wet side) is that we hit the average. Worst case I don’t even want to think about. San Marcial? Median forecast is just 17 percent of the 1991-2020 period of record. Worst case is so bad that the model breaks, spitting out a negative number.
Quoting John Prine
When I think back, it’s no wonder I’d become a songwriter. I saw everything as being connected. Movies, dreams, imagination . . . It was all one thing. It was all one circus tent. It took me a long time to find out it wasn’t that way with other people. They went to the circus—once. For an hour. How do you do that and leave it behind? Once you get to the circus you don’t leave.
–John Prine, from Tom Piazza’s Living in the Present with John Prine
Ribbons of Green, now available for pre-order
Our new book, getting realer.
We need a tl;dr here, because I’ve got three or four different versions of this post on my hard drive half written, or in my head, half written.
Actual publication as a physical object you can hold in your hands is still five-plus months away, but our new book is now available for pre-order (click the “forthcoming” link here).
Here’s the racket: pre-orders help convince the algorithms of the book’s worth. Which helps the book reach the widest possible audience. Bob and I are confident of the book’s worth. I also recognize, as Roland Barthes might have argued, that it doesn’t matter what we intended, or what we think about the results. It’s in your hands now.
But the algorithms!
The map and the territory
The map is not the territory, but is useful for identifying bus lines.
“What a useful thing a pocket-map is!” I remarked.
“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”
“About six inches to the mile.”
“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
—Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
When I was a teenage cross-country runner, I hung a topographic map on my bedroom wall—a nail through the house, a string marked in miles to measure my runs.
It was not about wayfinding. There was no place we hadn’t already wandered as kids; wandering has long been my practice. It was an effort to bring order, to measure and tally, to suss out the relationship between territory and map.
In Boy Scouts, we learned compasses and topo maps and I loved it—reading stories of up and down in the maps’ contour lines, then going into the mountains and living those lines, the hike an exercise in matching map with territory.
The topo maps were reliable representations of the territory, worthy of absolute trust as my teenage buddies and I climbed Mount Whitney and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. Alfred Korzybski’s aphorism—“The map is not the territory”—was of no use. Yet here I am, in the twilight of my years, still puzzling over the epistemic relationship between the two.
The Quik-E-Mart on Christmas Day
Out riding Christmas morning, I ended up at the Maverik gas station and mini-mart nestled where Interstate 25 and Interstate 40 cross in the heart of Albuquerque. Zoom out on a map of the nation to what web cartographers call “zoom level 6,” and the only visible organization of space will be state borders, maybe rivers, but always interstate highways.
The tools available on my iPad are stunning in the variety of information they present: property boundaries and zoning; flood control channels and land ownership; bus lines and soil types; city council districts; historical points of interest and bike trails; aerial photos taken by Charles Lindbergh (they say) in 1935.
And yes, topographic contour lines.
But none show this: The truckers were working on Christmas, at least some of them; the woman behind the mini-mart counter was working; the unhoused who live in the area were working at staying alive. I watched a young couple walk off with a Christmas breakfast of microwaved pizza slices.
None of the mapping tools, in other words, show the totality of the territory. This is not meant to denigrate the mapping tools, and the knowledge they are able to convey, but to illustrate the epistemic challenge, the challenge of being mindful of what it is that we’re doing when we’re doing knowing.
It’s a neighborhood I’ve become fond of after discovering one of my favorite new “longcuts”—like shortcuts except instead of a shorter route from A to B on my bike, it’s a safer one. Piecing together sidewalks and parking lots and a dirt field, up past the cemetery, by a construction yard, beneath the freeway, around behind the piano repair shop, through the parking lot behind the bedraggled hotel, beneath another freeway, through the ever-present pile of sand covering the bike trail where I have to walk my bike—it provides a route across the automotive landscape we call “The Big I”, a tangle of freeway and frontage road and busy streets.
One of the important evaluative criteria for longcuts is their level of interesting. This route scores high.
There’s a municipal plan for the area with some nice maps. The maps don’t have my longcut, nor do they have the footpath into the Quik-E-Mart that the homeless couple used, heading home with their pizza slices. The planners did not anticipate anyone walking to the Quik-E-Mart. In my wanders, I watch for these little informal paths—territory encoding what James Scott calls “the vernacular,” standing in opposition to the plans of high modernist engineering and architectural planning, evidence that the map is ever not the territory.
Quoting John Entsminger
If you distill down what my six partners just said, I believe there’s three common things: Here’s all the great things my state has done. Here’s how hard/impossible it is to do any more. And here are all the reasons why other people should have to do more.
As long as we keep polishing those arguments and repeating them to each other, we are going nowhere.