A warm fall.
Inspired by this morning’s Downtown Albuquerque News Climate and Transport Index (come for the bus boardings and river flow data, stay for the Shawarma restaurant news), I give you data, one of those “Science confirms the obvious, but with graphs!” things.
The overnight lows were 2.5F higher than the recent average. I wonder if that sensibly improves your quality of life if you’re sleeping rough?
Rio Grande, rising. Nov. 30, 2025, by John Fleck
After a dry summer, the Rio Grande is up through Albuquerque – ~900cfs as I write this, above the median flow for early December.
We are heading into “institutional hydrograph” season, as water management rules dominate the river’s flow. They always dominate, but December is when it’s most obvious. Water stored for Pueblo farmers but then not needed is moved from one bucket (Abiquiu Reservoir) to another (Elephant Butte) to meet Rio Grande Compact obligations to southern New Mexico and Texas.
Releases out of Abiquiu jumped over the weekend from ~100 cfs to ~800 cfs, so we should expect Albuquerque flows to rise in response soon. This is normal December practice, as we do the physical movement of water to accomplish the legal accounting task.
New Mexico began 2025 with a compact debtof 124,000 acre feet owed to southern New Mexico and Texas. We don’t have any official/public number for how we’ve done this year but the gossip (We only bring you the highest quality gossip here at Inkstain, but it’s just gossip.) is that New Mexico will fall another 10,000 acre feet deeper into the hole when the 2025 accounting is completed.
Getting the water currently parked in Abiquiu down to Elephant Butte requires us to confront a fascinating set of questions that are at the heart of what’s looking like my/our next book: when you take on the “management” of a river, the unruliness of geomorphology makes it a forever obligation. A river is sediment as much as it is water, and you can’t manage one without managing the other. Forever.
Exhibit 1 is the Rio Chama below Abiquiu. In June 2024, a storm blew out the Arroyo la Madera and dumped a mile-long pile of sediment deep enough to completely block the Chama. A technically complicated, and even more bureaucratically complicated effort followed to clear the channel to allow water through that segment of the river. By the start of 2025, river managers (that appellation needs such careful qualification) thought they had the capacity to move a thousand cfs, but this year was so dry we still haven’t been able to test it.
Now’s our chance! 800 cfs and counting!
Exhibit 2, the other geomorphologic bookend on this stretch of the Rio Grande, is what is called, in the poetic language of the engineers, “River Mile 60,” at the head of the Elephant Butte Reservoir delta.
Reclamation over the holiday weekend dropped the 302-page draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Lower San Acacia Reach Improvement Project, a hundred-and-umpty-million dollar project to realign the river at the bottom end of the Rio Grande Valley because the marriage of sediment and water management is not going real well down there.
I played with that sentence for a while, because the metaphor is tricky. The “marriage of sediment and water” is going just fine – the river doin’ river things. As at the confluence of the Rio Chama and the Arroyo la Madera, the problem isn’t the sediment and the river, the problem is that we’ve built a bunch of stuff that requires rivers to act one way to support human flourishing, which becomes stunningly expensive when rivers want to behave in a different way.
In the Lower San Acacia Reach, we have huge sediment inputs from the Rio Puerco and the Rio Salado (glorious ephemeral desert rivers, mostly dry but impressive in full flower), plus lots more side arroyos that happily contribute more clays and sands and gravels. Rivers doin’ river things.
For our purposes as humans who have built a metro area of a million people upstream of the Lower San Acacia Reach, and another metro area of many more millions to the south, keeping the water moving between A and B poses a forever challenge.
Middle Rio Grande
It’s important to understand that the Rio Grande is not a natural system. It’s an engineered system. It’s managed on a daily basis by a consortium of agencies at all different levels of government plus municipal water users and irrigation districts. So partly, (drying is) a product of decisions.
It is also clearly a product of climate change because really, we didn’t get any snow (last winter).
The snow we do get disappears on the way down because it’s hot and the soils are dry. We just can’t really get water down into this desert anymore.
On top of that, we have infrastructure problems like El Vado. It doesn’t store water anymore. Now, we’ve made a temporary fix so we could put water into Abiquiu Reservoir — if we had it.
But the El Vado problem kind of eliminates a longer-term problem: For the foreseeable future, we’re not going to be able to store water because of the Rio Grande Compact.
That does mean when we do have water in the mountains, we do let it run down through the system. But climate change is telling us that’s coming earlier. There’s less snow, and more of it gets lost along the way. Every single place where there’s water use, the water use is more. And so, by the time it gets down here into the desert landscape, there isn’t anything left.
– Dagmar Llewelyn
From Laura Paskus’ much-anticipated new project New Mexico Rivers Rising.
Gateway to a zoom 18 tile.
The dog came out of nowhere. The best ones always do.
I was bicycling the McCoy Dam service road in Albuquerque’s far South Valley, off the Gun Club Lateral irrigation ditch, past an ambiguous Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control authority gate, down the hill from the old Vanderploeg Dairies property.
Earthen dam to my left, horse corral to my right. We call the flood control authority ”AMAFCA.” Knowing the name is part of the game. AMAFCA’s gates are blue. The gates are ambiguous in their intention, physically permeable in practice.
Dogs are part of the game.
The philosopher Bernard Suits defined games thus: “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. For Suits, this is a good thing.
Consider golf:
The utter ridiculousness of making it harder to drop a ball in a hole — as if there were a reason to do that in the first place! — by requiring you to use a stick to do so… we are creating a system full of complexity for ourselves. A toy system where the rigidity and weight of the stick, the chaotic interference of the swirling wind, the mental impact of the oohs and aahs of the spectators, the way the dew fell across the grass and reflected sun in our eyes, even how to deal with that cramp in our leg from walking all this way — where all these things are present in the toy.
“Tiling,” as the bicycling game is known, is what sociologists would call “ludic geography” – a game of place. It seems obvious in retrospect. The ubiquity of GPS devices by the middle of the last decade, first mounted to a bicycle’s handlebars, now miniaturized in watches, made it feel inevitable.
Ben Lowe, of Veloviewer, seems to have landed first on the idea of a map of tiles colored in after visited on one’s bicycle. (I rely here on the terrific history article on Ride Every Tile.) Simply coloring in the map was fun, and one of Lowe’s users quickly snapped to the possibilities: what was the largest NxN square of tiles all colored in? It was the first step toward Suit’s “unnecessary obstacles” – turning it into a game.
But the NxN square, for many, quickly became an unsolvable puzzle. My maximum Albuquerque square quickly hit 10×10, with the land of the Indigenous Sandia Pueblo to the north, where one does not trespass, and the military industrial complex (Kirtland Air Force Base) to the south, where the guards are heavily armed and the barbed wire doubled in protection of elements of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Message board discussions ensued in response to the shortcomings of “largest square” as a game: Should unattainable tiles just be automagically ticked off as having been visited? This seemed unsatisfactory – the whole point of the game was to visit the places, not to merely color in the map. One could, for example, wait for the annual base open house to bag the military installation tiles, or persuade a friend with a pass to get you in. A new challenge was needed.
The resulting innovation, the “clump,” or “cluster,” as it finally came to be known, is an interconnected collection of visited tiles, each surrounded on all four sides – north, south, east, and west – by a tile that has also been visited. The cluster became a puzzle challenge, a geometric problem worked out on the landscape. Find a way around the edges of the military base.
Via Squadrats, an explanation of clusters (also known as “yards”)
A group of Polish tilers added a layer of complexity by mapping smaller tiles. Original tiling used Open Street Maps’ zoom level 14, roughly a mile on a side. The Polish Squadrats group added zoom level 17, 1/8th the size of traditional tiles, dubbing the little ones “Squadratinhos” (and incorporating lovely mapping graphics). Zoom level 17 clusters are a blast, lots of intricate little tiling problems – how do I get into the edges of that golf course? How do I get my cluster through that mountain pass? I have literally stuck my arm, with its GPS watch, through fences – more than once! – to get a tile.
The norm had long been “human powered” only – Jonathan France, the British tiler, famously paddled the Thames to fill in its London tiles. I had a friend take me out paddling the Rio Grande for some particularly tricky tiles in central Albuquerque.
The Squadrats team eventually loosened their rules, allowing e-bike rides – a nod to old people like me, for whom a pedal-assist e-bike is often the ride of choice for long Sunday outings.
The group (person?) behind Ride Every Tile added other zoom levels, all the way from zoom level 0 (one tile, the entire planet) to zoom level 17 (~250 meters on a side, depending on your latitude). Ride Every Tile also recently added hexagons, a fresh challenge.
Red is my largest zoom level 18 cluster, smaller orange clusters waiting for a puzzle solution to connect them, and blue are all the other tiles I have ridden.
As my age has gone up, my range, the distance I can ride, has gone down. So I recently coded up a tiling app that runs on my Mac that ingested the more than 7,000 activities I’ve recorded, 50,000 GPSed miles, mostly bike rides but also walks and hikes and runs and stand-up paddles, since I started GPSing things in 2008. The app allows me to tile at zoom level 18, which is ridiculously small – about the size of a typical crime scene – and therefore ridiculously challenging. I can’t just ride the road in front of the motel out by the interstate. To get the zoom level 18 tile clusters to connect, I need to circle around through the parking lot to the back: “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” I’d largely solved the zoom level 17 challenges within easy range of my house, but at zoom level 18, there remain a delightfully large number of crime scenes left to visit.
I have a whole new world of unnecessary obstacles within an hour’s ride of my house.
A friend who cheerfully indulges my passion for tiling (if not exactly sharing it, though they appreciate the oddities when we ride together) recently texted me a picture of this passage from the artist Sally Mann’s new memoir Art Work. It is a disquisition on trespassing:
To be an artist means you must declare a loyalty to your art form and your vision that runs deeper than almost any other, even sometimes deeper than blood kinship, and certainly deeper than those trifling laws protecting land ownership.
I was on my Sunday morning bike ride when I got the text, near the top of Albuquerque’s Nine Mile Hill. It’s a fast highway with wide shoulders and the sort of marginal light industrial activity that thrives, or at least survives, where property values are low. It is not our most scenic of rides in conventional aesthetic, but it’s delightfully weird, and there were tiles to be had near the top. I stopped and texted my friend back a picture of the entrance to one of the tiles: “Beware of Dog” tacked to the telephone pole on the left, “Posted: No Trespassing” on a fence post to the right.
I’ve been eyeing that dirt road for a while. Once again, I didn’t have the nerve to get the tile.
The dogs are part of the game. In video games, we would call them “pursuer enemies,” like the ghosts in PacMan that chase you around the maze while you gobble up the – what are the things called that you gobble up in PacMan?
That is how I made the acquaintance of the dog along McCoy Dam, the one that came out of nowhere. I was never a strong bike racer, and I’m long removed from whatever sprinting ability I did have in my younger days. I wasn’t on the e-bike either (so no “dog mode”, the most powerful pedal assist). But my legs, spurred on by the barking, did their work, and my bike handling skills were up to the challenge posed by the sandy road, and the dog did what they always do, which is chase me just far enough to get beyond their self-understood perimeter of obligation.
The dog made clear that I was not to return via the road I came in on, posing a fresh puzzle – how to get out? Cutting back across the top of the dam under the watchful eye of the dog, an occasional desultory bark to remind me, I found an alternate route, got four new zoom level 17 tiles, and increased my cluster by 3.
The view from the dam, the valley cottonwoods stretched out before me, was lovely.
The benefits of tiling include this.
Scholars who study consumer protection and environmental governance have described transparency as a coevolutionary race, where multiple actors compete to accomplish their goals by advancing science, preventing it, and evading ever-novel barriers to transparency. In this model, successful governance arises from an equilibrium in these knowledge-generating efforts.
J.N. Matias, & M. Price, How public involvement can improve the science of AI, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (48) e2421111122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2421111122 (2025).
Los Padillas
Wednesday family lunch included tacos at El Paisa on Bridge just west of the river, and then a drive to the Los Padillas Cemetery in the far south valley.
I love cemeteries because they speak to some deep values, and I’ve taken to using them as a teaching tool for our UNM Water Resources Program class as we think about the value of water in alternative uses.
Why are some cemeteries green, and some not?
My favorite example of the entanglements are Mt. Calvary Cemetery, on Edith NE against the freeway in Albuquerque’s northeast. In 2016 the Catholic Cemetery Association filed a formal plea with the state asking for time to put its paper water rights to “beneficial use,” arguing that, while it wasn’t using the full amount now, people kept dying, and over time they would need more water to keep the additional graves green. (The first well at Mt. Calvary seems to have been dug in 1913.) New Mexico water law is famously silent on what actually counts as “beneficial use,” but the state seemed to agree that irrigating lawns out of reverence for the deceased was OK. The state gave Mt. Calvary a thumbs up. Mt. Calvary pumped 81 acre feet in 2024 in service of this value.
To the north, across the freeway, Sunset Memorial Park is lush (cemeteries, along with golf courses and some of the more affluent neighborhoods with domestic wells, pop out on satellite maps of urban greenness). But Santa Barbara Cemetery, immediately to the south, is brown. It’s my favorite of the three – old graves, rich with Albuquerque history.
Los Padillas is in the middle of that range – more trees than are usual for dry Albuquerque cemeteries, with an irrigation ditch down one side (I think for the alfalfa field to the south, but still, a cemetery with an acequia!), the Gun Club Lateral winding down its western edge, a scattering of trees (the shade was lovely Wednesday), and obviously beloved gravestones. We found some Turrieta family gravestones (a family that makes a brief but important appearance in our forthcoming book Ribbons of Green) and lots of Padillas.
n.b. Al pastor at El Paisa is my favorite Albuquerque taco. Cash only.
Lower Basin water use since 1964. 2025 data provisional, based on USBR projections Oct. 29, 2015.
California’s projected use of Colorado River water this year, 3.76 million acre feet as of Reclamation’s Oct. 29 modeling runs, would be, as near as I can tell, the state’s lowest use since 1949.
Also notable:
Total take by the US Lower Basin states is projected to be 5.917 million acre feet, the lowest total US main stem use since 1983.
A few things to note.
First, the tenuous fabric of the Basin States negotiations is predicated right now, in part, on the Lower Basin cutting 1.5 million acre feet of annual use. They’ve already done that.
Second, the current cuts are enabled by significant federal payments to compensate the water agencies for their cuts. As my colleagues and I wrote back in September, counting on that money in the future would be unwise.
Third, the economies of Arizona, southern Nevada, and southern California are chugging along just fine right now. As I have written in the past, having less water does not mean scary doom. We can do this.
The projection of total 2025 use by Lower Basin water users is based on model runs done by the Bureau of Reclamation every few days. It’s a rich source of data, with detailed accounting of the various conservation programs being run by the Lower Basin agencies. PDF here.
The comparison with prior years is based in part on the Lower Basin accounting reports, prepared each year since 1964. For prior years, I have a dataset I got years ago from the technical staff at the Metropolitan Water District of California, who had pieced together California numbers back to 1941. (Thanks, Met!)
We have no comparable data for the Upper Basin that might allow us to track water use at this level of detail, and with this kind of immediacy. This is a problem.
For the first time in more than a century, salmon have reached the headwaters of the Klamath River Basin, a milestone made possible by the removal of four major dams along the California–Oregon border. The event marks a defining moment for both environmental restoration and the communities of southern Oregon that depend on the river’s health for ecological and cultural vitality.
In carrying out its treaty obligations with the Indian tribes, the Government is something more than a mere contracting party. Under a humane and self imposed policy which has found expression in many acts of Congress and numerous decisions of this Court, it has charged itself with moral obligations of the highest responsibility and trust. Its conduct, as disclosed in the acts of those who represent it in dealings with the Indians, should therefore be judged by the most exacting fiduciary standards.
Seminole Nation v. United States, 316 US 286, 86 L. Ed. 1480, 62 S. Ct. 1049 – Supreme Court, 1942
The bipartisan consensus on the pursuit of access to clean, safe drinking water on behalf of U.S. Native American Communities seems to be break down, according to a new report from the Initiative on Universal Access
to Clean Water for Tribal Communities:
As EPA’s Administrator has made clear, every American is entitled to clean air, land, and water. The necessity of, and entitlement to, clean water is nowhere more apparent than on Tribal lands. Not only is the need there the greatest, the federal government has specific responsibilities to Tribes to provide a permanent and livable homeland in exchange for the land concessions Tribes made in the last centuries. We cannot continue to ignore or gloss over this responsibility. Yet the FY 2026 proposals move in the opposite direction—Interior would eliminate BIA’s Tribal Community Resilience program; Reclamation would zero out the WaterSMART toolbox and cut the Native American Affairs Program; EPA would reduce SRF capitalizations to historic lows; and IHS would reduce the SFC program budget to $13.5 million—a reduction of 85% in the one funding stream that directly connects homes to water and sewer. The President’s proposed FY 2026 budget reflects his policy choices.
Key to the group’s argument, however, is a reminder that the Administration proposes budgetary allocations, but the actual appropriations require action by Congress.
You know what to do.
The utility of a model is seldom in its ability to deliver a precise value but rather in whether it provides an improved understanding of a system that would not have existed in its absence.
– Kevin Wheeler, Modeling to Support Water Management Negotiations