The ungrievable and blockbuster art

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Graffiti words, possibly ‘SUCH’ and ‘PESO’ painted in large block letters across the top of a vacant high-rise building.

Props.

Props to the artists who tagged the vacant Two Park Central Tower at Central and San Mateo in Albuquerque. I like to think Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would approve.

I noticed the art today while out on my morning dérive, walking and riding my bike through one of the weirder and more interesting neighborhoods in my part of Albuquerque. It’s one of two vacant office towers surrounding a stunningly busy and stunningly vacant Albuquerque intersection – a car wash on one corner, a closed WalMart just down the street, a closed Walgreens on the corner opposite.

Folks who live in nearby told me the graffiti – a style called “blockbuster,” big block letters, usually two colors, often in dramatic locations – has been there for a couple of months – I only now had the occasion to look up, I guess.

The artists must have gotten into the building and hung off the roof to paint it. It is hard to make out the words – maybe “SUCH” and “PESO”? Blockbuster is usually easier to make out – that’s one of its characteristics. But the weird ins and outs of the building make it tricky, and I can imagine hanging off the top in the middle of the night made the work more challenging.

Kulturindustrie

I’ve had some enforced down time this week, some of which I’ve spent on Adorno, a mid-century German philosopher, kinda Marxist, whose critique of the Enlightenment, drawn out in response to Auschwitz, is helpful in thinking about the intersection of Central and San Mateo. Adorno’s “negative dialectic” is a response to Hegel’s positive dialectic – a thesis, its antithesis, and then a tidy new synthesis in response. Adorno said no, it’s never that tidy, and society’s contradictions can’t be resolved. The inexorable workings of capitalism, Adorno argued, means things just stay a mess, injustices are inevitable, and the work of the moral critique is to just stare at it and be unhappy. All the stuff you might try to do to make things a little bit better in the here and now only make it easier for the deep injustices to persist.

„Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.“ (Roughly: You can’t live a good life in a bad life. I do not like this. I do not like it one bit.)

The depth of the contradiction reared up as I talked to the neighbors over on Madeira Drive east of the empty, vacant Two Park Tower, living rough in the shadow of an abandoned building. A developer bought the 1970s-era building and its 1960s sibling across the parking lot in 2023, with plans for more than 250 apartments and a proposal for government help. The folks I talked to this morning when I was asking around about the graffiti were, as I said, living rough, back today after the police and city trash crews did one of their encampment sweeps on Madeira yesterday.

Judith Butler, in a 2012 talk/essay when they were awarded Frankfurt’s Adorno Prize, talked about those they described as “ungrievable”:

[W]hose lives are already considered not lives, or only partially living, or already dead and gone, prior to any explicit destruction or abandonment?

Of course, this question becomes most acute for someone, anyone, who already understands him- or herself to be a dispensable sort of being, one who registers at an affective and corporeal level that his or her life is not worth safeguarding, protecting and valuing. This is someone who understands that she or he will not be grieved for if his or her life were lost, and so one for whom the conditional claim ‘I would not be grieved for’ is actively lived in the present moment. If it turns out that I have no certainty that I will have food or shelter, or that no social network or institution would catch me if I fall, then I come to belong to the ungrievable.

A big part of Adorno’s critique involves what he and Horkheimer called “the culture industry” – the again inexorable workings of the creation of cultural products:

Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared direct intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of pure reason. But today that secret has been deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve up the data of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society, which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalise it; and this inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies so that they give an artificial impression of being in command.

I’m not saying here that I buy what Adorno was selling. There is a remarkable show right now at the Albuquerque Museum – Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945. It is in significant part a collection work by artists responding to the rise of the National Socialists, the Nazis, in Germany in the 1930s. The confrontation of those artists with what was happened is by measures terrifying, heartbreaking, and liberating. It ranks among the handful of most intellectually stimulating art exhibits I have seen in a lifetime of many, many art exhibits. (If you are in Albuquerque, go see it, it’s here through Jan. 4.) Their art was an often fierce critique. But sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it was an accommodation.

It documents how Hitler’s minions packaged art in Nazi, Germany. It is in a show that has been crisply – marvelously! – packaged for my consumption. The shadow of Adorno’s argument is there.

This is why I so love street art. Someone, or a few someones, snuck into an abandoned office tower in the dark of night, hung off the side of the building 10 floors up, and made us a painting, claiming this space as their own.

A rainbow, a river, and the first cranes of fall

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Autumnal equinox news briefs:

I was on the phone in the front room of our house yesterday evening, facing east, as the setting sun dropped beneath the clouds after a short burst of rain.

Rainbow. And the conversation, with the cousin of an old friend who died earlier this year, was rich.

The Rio Grande is flowing again through Albuquerque. Not a lot, but enough that a friend Sunday saw a bobcat in the woods down by the river with a wet face.

Sandhill Crane Finder has the first Middle Rio Grande Valley sightings.

Cranes are among the valley’s most charismatic megafauna, big birds with an unmistakable bugling that is one of my happiest sounds.

Their story is also cool because of the way their numbers surged back from the brink, as hunting and habitat loss caused populations to scrape the bottom of the evolutionary barrel in the 1930s. Partly it’s because we built stuff for them – wildlife refuges and such. But the cranes also pulled themselves back from the brink, adapting by hanging out on farms and eating corn.

 

The Rio Puerco was running today

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Muddy stream flowing through woods, with sky in the background

The Rio Puerco, just upstream from its confluence with the Rio Grande. Sept. 19, 2025, by John Fleck

Deepening and widening of stream channels in the Southwest is a phenomenon that has taken place within the memory of men now living. It began at different dates from 1860 on and has progressed at different rates on several streams, as summarized in a recent paper.²? The flood plains of numerous minor streams are yet undissected, but nearly every one of them is menaced by a deep channel, or arroyo, which visibly increases headward each year. These channels, or arroyos, not only grow headward through the smooth flood plains of the valleys but constantly widen by lateral cutting and the growth of minor tributaries. It seems inevitable that the present flood plains will eventually disappear and new flood plains will form at lower levels.

  • Bryan, Kirk. “Channel erosion of the Rio Salado, Socorro County, New Mexico.” US Geological Survey Bulletin 790 (1927): 17-19.

The Rio Puerco, a tributary of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, has deepened and widened its channel, or arroyo, since the settlement of the region. This process of accelerated erosion still continues. Historical evidence, largely the notes and maps of government land surveyors, is cited to show that the cutting began between 1885 and 1890. The deepening of the arroyos has decreased the agricultural and grazing value of the country, resulting in the abandonment of six small towns and numerous ranches. The coincidence between the introduction of large numbers of stock and the cutting of arroyos indicates that overgrazing precipitated this form of destructive erosion. The ultimate cause, not completely discussed in this paper, appears to lie in cyclic fluctuations in climate.

  • Bryan, Kirk. “Historic evidence on changes in the channel of Rio Puerco, a tributary of the Rio Grande in New Mexico.” The Journal of Geology 36, no. 3 (1928): 265-282.

Kirk Bryan, a child of Albuquerque, was still in his 20s when he was tromping around the Rio Puerco and Rio Salado, gathering data to inform the plans for the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District and trying to make sense of the messy reality of these two fascinating tributaries to the Rio Grande. He bore the label “geologist” before the branch of the science now labeled “geomorphology” had grown strong enough to stand on, and in the decades that followed this work he did much to establish the foundations for our understanding of arid landscape rivers.

A map of New Mexico highlighting the Rio Grande between Belen and Elephant Butte Reservoir, with the confluence of the Rio Puerco and Rio Salado also highlighted

the subject of another book?

In choosing this stretch of the Rio Grande to write about for the next project – from the confluence of the Rio Puerco downstream to to Elephant Butte Reservoir, what I’ve taken to calling our “field area”- we’ve granted ourselves permission to reach upstream on the Puerco and Salado, and also upstream into our evolving understanding of the geomorphology of these two remarkable streams.

Joseph Burkholder, the chief engineer for the nascent Conservancy District, dispatched Kirk Bryan and George M. Post (whodat?) to sort out the challenges posed by the Puerco as it dumped its massive sediment load into the main stem of the Rio Grande downstream of Belen, New Mexico. From Burkholder’s report:

The Rio Puerco is the largest producer of silt, being the tributary having the largest drainage area and being subject to frequent silt-laden floods. In the report by Kirk Bryan and George M. Post on the “Erosion and Control of Silt on the Rio Puerco, New Mexico”, it is stated that nearly 400,000 acre feet of valley soil has been carried away by the erosion of streams and arroyos in the Rio Puerco valley during the last 40 to 50 years. It is also estimated that some 9,000 acre feet of silt is brought to the Rio Grande annually from the Rio Puerco, which is therefore held responsible for almost one half of the 20,000 acre feet of silt which is annually deposited in the Elephant Butte Reservoir.

The sediment is a central feature of the new project – river management as sediment management.

One of the things that interests me as I work my way through Bryan’s early work is the very human way he is doing his science, describing the relationship between people and their rivers: “decreased the agricultural and grazing value of the country”; “abandonment of six small towns and numerous ranches”; “most of the agricultural land in the valley has been destroyed.” A century of research since he published in the 1920s has only enriched our understanding of the interplay between climate and human impacts on the landscape. His basic thesis about the Puerco in the 1928 paper – yeah, grazing for sure, but also climate – has grown richer in its nuances and details, but the basic tension between those two causal threads seems to remain.

Trying to reach the confluence

A dirt road lined with blooming desert shrubs, an irrigation ditch, and mountains in the distance.

Road to the confluence, almost. John Fleck, Sept. 19, 2025

I’ve been trying to carve Fridays out of my calendar for “field work.” It’s an hour’s drive to the field area. With a couple hours riding around on my bike looking at stuff (field work!), I can be back in time for lunch and an afternoon to write.

We’ve had a nice blast of late summer rains over the last couple of weeks, and the Puerco has been running (it mostly doesn’t), so I threw a bike in the car this morning and drove down to take a look. Down a decent dirt road, atop what passes for a levee, I was greeted by a riot of blooming chamisa doing their “it rained, let’s get on it” routine. The cloud deck hung on through the morning hours, perfect riding weather, and the rains had packed down the road enough that it was easy going – only a few sandy patches.

The Puerco had been been up over 100 cfs for the last few days, but was down to 20-ish this morning when I finally had a chance to go see the muddy mess for myself. 100 cfs is the highest flow this year, but that’s a trickle compared to the recorded peak flow of 18,800 cfs in September 1941. I saw it in September 2013 at maybe 9,000 cfs (not sure exactly, it had blown out the gage).

I tried again to get to the confluence (I’d tried last month and was thwarted by sketchy no trespassing signs), this time from the north on land that seemed less likely to be legally encumbered. I’d talked to some elk hunters on one of my last field expeditions who suggested it was doable. After three miles the road fizzled into some skanky double-track, then shrank to path, which someone (hunters? I saw a few shotgun shells here and there.) had kindly cut through an otherwise impenetrable thicket of bosque, but the path petered out into the river bed of the Puerco itself about a hundred yards short of the actual confluence. It was such a gloppy muddy mess I decided against pushing on.

I’ll be back when it’s dry.

Analysis of Colorado River Basin Storage Suggests Need For Immediate Action

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By Jack Schmidt,1 Anne Castle,2 John Fleck,3 Eric Kuhn,4 Kathryn Sorensen,5 Katherine Tara,6

While Colorado River Basin attention is focused on negotiating post-2026 operating rules, a near term crisis is unfolding before our eyes. If no immediate action is taken to reduce water use, our already-thin buffer of storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead could drop to just 9 percent of the levels with which we started the 21st century.

Water consumption in the Basin continues to outpace the natural supply, further drawing down reservoir levels. While Basin State representatives pursue the elusive goal of a workable and mutually acceptable set of post-2026 operating rules, our review of the latest Bureau of Reclamation data shows that the gap between ongoing water use and the reality of how much water actually flows in the Colorado River poses a serious near term threat. Another year like the one we just had on the Colorado River would nearly exhaust our dwindling reserves.

In a report being issued today, we look at total mass balance in the system – reservoir storage, inflow, and water use – to help clarify how much water the Basin actually has to work with if next year’s snowmelt runoff is similar to 2025, and the risks if we do not take near term action to reduce our use. The findings are stark.

Today, Lake Mead and Lake Powell hold 6.3 million acre feet of realistically accessible water – water stored above critical thresholds identified by Reclamation as necessary to protect the infrastructure and ensure reliable supplies. That is down from 39 million acre feet above those thresholds at the end of the 20th century. A below average monsoon, a dry warm fall, and depleted upstream reservoirs means that next year’s snowmelt inflow to Powell could be well below average even with a decent winter. If 2026 is as dry as 2025 and water use continues at the rate of the recent past, something current operating rules allow, our analysis shows the reserve of usable water could drop next year to just 3.6 million acre feet – less than the lowest previous storage content that occurred in March 2023. Such a situation occurring on Sept. 1, 2026 would necessitate drastic reductions in use during the subsequent reservoir depletion season, which typically results in another 1.4 million acre feet of drawdown before significant inflows begin. To be clear, we are not predicting what will happen next year. But a repeat of last year’s low inflows is a very real possibility. If we wait to see if 2026 is dry, the actions needed to save the system will be far more unpleasant than if we act prudently now.

A solution can’t wait for a long term agreement among the states. It may be difficult, if not impossible, for the Basin States to take such short term action. That reality puts the onus on the Department of the Interior to act.

 

1 Director, Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University, former Chief, Grand Canyon
Monitoring and Research Center.
2 Getches-Wilkinson Center, University of Colorado Law School, former US Commissioner, Upper
Colorado River Commission, former Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, US Dept. of the
Interior.
3 Writer in Residence, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico.
4 Retired General Manager, Colorado River Water Conservation District.
5 Kyl Center for Water Policy, Arizona State University, former Director, Phoenix Water Services.
6 Staff Attorney, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico

Broken Arrow

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Two-track dirt road through desert scrub with buildings and mountains in the distance.

Maybe this is the spot?

Alternative blog post title: No Bad Days on the Bike

In the picture above, you might be looking at the spot where the Air Force in 1957 accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on the mesa south of Albuquerque.

Nuclear history nerds have dropped their Google map pins at a couple of places along this two-track dirt ranch road. The Mark 17 bomb wasn’t armed (the plutonium capsule had been removed), but the conventional explosives all by themselves created a crater 25 feet wide and 12 feet deep when it hit.

A B-36 “Peacemaker” (really, that’s what they called it) was on final approach to Albuquerque when something happened – maybe one of the crew accidentally grabbed the release lever to steady himself against turbulence. (Great write up here about the whole affair.) The bomb, minus its plutonium, slammed through the bomb bay doors. It is obligatory in written accounts to note that it killed a cow.

The Air Force lied and filled in the hole, and the details weren’t released until the 1980s, when an Albuquerque Journal reporter named David Morrissey used the Freedom of Information Act to pry the accident reports loose. His FOIA work was legend. I inherited his desk and beat and filed a lot of nuclear weapons FOIAs, but never got anything this good.

On our bike “ride” today (note the tire rut in the sand, there was walk-a-bike and at least one goathead-inspired flat) we found a circular area with different vegetation that seemed like the right size to be the spot. It matched a map I can’t remember the source of. Another map puts it a couple hundred feet to the north. It’s about 2-1/2 miles of increasingly ratty dirt roads from the big Netflix studios where they make all those shows, somewhere around here.

The sealant in my front tire lost the battle with the goatheads, which were wicked. The sand was, at times, also wicked. But the people we thought were probably serial killers were just out with their dogs (far too well behaved to be serial killers’ dogs). We found lots of other weird stuff, often with bullet holes. The coolest weird stuff on our desert rides has bullet holes.

We’ve tried a couple of times before to find the bomb place. I’m gonna call it good this time ‘round.

As I said, no bad days on the bike.

 

Rio Abajo and the Unit 7 Drain

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Olive green desert vegetation spreading out beyond an irrigation ditch in the foreground, with a single tree, a distant railroad train, and clouds spread across a blue sky.

Unit 7 Drain near the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Rio Puerco.

NEAR THE CONFLUENCE OF THE RIO PUERCO AND THE RIO GRANDE – The broad delta where the Rio Puerco meets the Rio Grande in central New Mexico has never been a great place to live, though people try. To the east, across the river, the Ancestral Puebloan Piro built the village Spanish colonizers named “Sevilleta” (“little Seville”) on a Pleistocene gravel bench up out of the flood plain. Because when the Rio Puerco is in flood, it really is in flood.

In their 1984 book Rio Abajo: A Prehistory of a Rio Grande Province, Michael Marshall, Henry Walt, and colleagues chose a naming convention that I like, even though it is confusing as hell. The traditional naming convention for the Rio Grande in Spanish New Mexico is to divide the river and its human communities (as always, the physical geography creates the structure the human communities follow, but it’s the human communities driving the naming) thus:

  • Rio Arriba for the landscape north of the great escarpment known as La Bajada.
  • Rio Abajo for the landscape south of La Bajada

But both physical and human geography suggest a second division. It is worth quoting their reasoning in full (Marshall and Walt 1984, p. 1):

The term “Rio Abajo,” as it is used in this volume, is of Pre-Revolt vintage and applies specifically to the Pueblo and Hispanic province of the Piro, believed to have extended from the Paraje de Fra Cristóbal on the south to Abeytas or Sabinal on the north (Figure 1.1). In 1776, nearly a century after the demise of Piro-Hispanic civilization in the Socorro region and just before the resettlement, Fray Francisco Antanasio Domínguez divided the Kingdom of New Mexico into two sections: Rio Arriba and Rio Abajo (Adams and Chávez 1956:7). At that time, Rio Abajo was described as the area from Cochiti Pueblo on the north to below Isleta Pueblo (i.e., Sabinal) on the south. Since the emphasis of this study is on the Piro and the Pre-Revolt era, we have employed the archaic usage of the term “Rio Abajo” from the time when Colonial Hispanic settlements extended as far south as Senecú. From a research perspective it is logical to describe the region north of the Piro district and south of La Bajada as “Rio Medio,” although this term is not found in the historic archives.

Sepia-toned topographical map showing the Rio Puerco joining the Rio Grande, pushing the Rio Grande toward the east.

Historical Topographic Map Collection

Spatting with its much larger sibling, the Puerco at the confluence, with its ephemeral flows but massive sediment load when it does run, has shoved the Rio Grande to the east in a broad bend that snaps nicely into view in the 1952 USGS topo map to the right. Blasting out into the valley floor, the Puerco’s delta has created a broad, gentle high spot, and in flood water backs up the valley to the north. I have seen this.

It is sediment that drives the story my collaborator Bob Berrens and I are trying to understand for the new book project we’re beginning to explore. Managing the sediment in this stretch of the river – from the Puerco and the Rio Salado eight miles downstream, plus umpty named and unnamed arroyos that blast in under the weight of summer rains – is the central challenge for water management in this stretch of the Rio Grande in the 21st century.

We drew our boundaries around the stretch of river from the Puerco down past San Marcial for different reasons than Marshall and Walt. Ours was based on river management, theirs was cultural. In the Marshall-Walt topography, Rio Abajo is the home of a people we’ve come to call the Piro, a name applied by the Spanish to the Ancestral Puebloans who lived along this stretch of the river before Spanish colonizers arrived in the 1500s (Bletzer 2013). But old human settlement patterns and modern river management challenges are built atop the same foundation.

I’m nervous about pushing too hard on the idea that geomorphology drives the structure of human communities on the landscape. Lots of other stuff is involved, but geomorphology lies at the base of the rest of it, our decisions about where to live, to hunt and gather, to build our farms and cities. Why did the Piro build on the east side of the river here? How did they use the river, live with the river? Today, the question about where we build our highways, our railroads, and our levees and ditches, are motivated by the same things. So I put the bike in the car yesterday morning and drove down to La Joya, the state game park on the river’s west side just downstream from the confluence, to try to understand the shape of the landscape.

This has become a central piece of my practice as a writer in the last few years. I’ve always pursued what I have called “journalism by wandering around,” going to a place and just kinda being there, looking around with curiosity, thinking about how and why stuff spatially fits together. The networked nature of water lends itself to this style of thinking, because water moves in paths, and the humans moving with it follow and, increasingly, shape those paths. In the last five years, as my work has become more intimately place based, I’ve done it on my bicycle. I move at the right pace to feel the landscape.

I parked at one of the “La Joya Wildlife Management Area” pullouts near the river and headed north, up the east side service road (the side closest to the river) for the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s Unit 7 Drain, a bizarre water management channel that does what it says on the tin. I need to do a full post on the Unit 7 Drain, it’s super weird. It snakes through the Lomas Pardas Narrows downstream of the Puerco, siphons under the Rio Salado and into the Angostura de San Acacia, winding parallel to railroad tracks on the west and the Rio Grand’s main channel on the east, slicing through a wildlife refuge and hunting park, turning drain water into a fresh source of irrigation supply for Socorro County farmers. It’s one of my favorite spots on the river and is for sure one of the weirdest MRGCD ditches, right up there with the place in the South Valley where the Barr Canal cuts through a junkyard. There is, or was, a much beloved Albuquerque post-punk band named after the Unit 7 Drain. You can’t make up shit that good.

Picking which side of a ditch to ride on is always tricky, because I want the side that’s most rideable, meaning least sandy. But I also want to be on the side closest to my ultimate destination, because often there aren’t any crossings, and wading through a ditch with my bike is impractical. The road yesterday was good, the sand mostly packed down by recent summer rains, which also made it green. The white-crowned sparrows seemed happy with the results, if not annoyed at my presence, doing that thing they do where the clustered in groups around the ditchbank vegetation and dashed out ahead of the bike, as if they were escorting me.

Gate and "no trespassing" signs blocked a sandy dirt road, with lush green vegetation to the right and an irrigation ditch to the left

Rio Grande Hunt Club?

I was deterred from reaching my goal – the actual confluence of the Rio Puerco and the Rio Grande – by a gate and a no trespassing sign on the service road. I was pretty sure this was the classic western move of putting up “no trespassing” signs to privatize a public space, but I was having a leisurely morning and didn’t fancy a confrontation with the sort of entitled people with guns who frequent “hunt clubs” and exploit murky areas of law to claim ownership of rivers, so I turned back.

A look at county and MRGCD property maps when I got home supported my hypothesis – the actual private property involved is a third of a mile away, and the service road itself sure looks to me like MRGCD property the whole way – in other words, public property – both sides. But MRGCD access rules are complicated, and a careful post-ride study of the satellite imagery now that I have a better feel for the place suggests several routes to the confluence that should avoid any entanglements with the gray areas of rivers and property law (see Adobe Whitewater decision – the hunt club people do seem to actually own a big piece of the Rio Puerco itself). So I’ll be back.

 

References:

  • Adobe Whitewater v. NM State Game Commission, 519 P. 3d 46, 2022 NMSC 20 – NM: Supreme Court, 2022
  • Bletzer, Michael. “The First Province of that Kingdom: Notes on the Colonial History of the Piro Area.” New Mexico Historical Review 88, no. 4 (2013): 4.
  • Marshall, Michael P., and Henry J. Walt. Rio Abajo: prehistory and history of a Rio Grande province. Museum of New Mexico Press, 1984.

New Mexico’s Dry Middle Rio Grande: More Data Visualizations

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Graph showing days of river drying on New Mexico's middle Rio Grande, showing 2025 the driest since the 1970s.

25 cfs at Central means the Rio Grande dries before it reaches the Albuquerque wastewater treatment plant.

Alert Inkstain reader Rolf asked in the comments of last weekend’s post for a version of the above graph – number of days of low flow at the Central Avenue Bridge – with a threshold above zero. I usually set the threshold at 25, because our experience in the last two drying episodes – 2022 and 2025 – that’s the point at which the river went dry before it could reach the wastewater treatment plant.

Bar chart of annual Rio Grande flow at Otowi Bridge, NM, from early 1900s to 2025, measured in acre-feet through August 21 each year. Each vertical bar shows a year’s flow; 2025 is near the low end. Years with less flow than 2025 are highlighted in red, showing rare but repeated low-flow events, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Thick black horizontal bars mark decadal averages, which decline from the high flows of the early 20th century to lower averages in recent decades, illustrating a long-term downward trend.

Previous years this dry or drier, with added decadal horizontal bars.

Here’s an updated version of total flow past Otowi to date, with previous years this dry or drier in red, and I added horizontal bars to show decadal averages. As alert reader Devin pointed out, the years after 1972 include imported San Juan-Chama flows. Rio Grande Compact accounting would subtract that out (“Otowi Index Flow”), but I’m interested in the hydrologic reality in the valley, not in using this as an accounting or climate measure. This helps us think about how much water we actually have entering the valley.

Bar chart of annual Rio Grande flow at Albuquerque, NM, from the 1960s to 2025, measured in acre-feet through August 21 each year. Each bar shows a year’s flow; 2025 is highlighted near the low end. Years with less flow than 2025 are in red, showing such low-flow events have been uncommon but not unprecedented. Thick black horizontal bars mark decadal averages, which rise into the 1980s and then decline steadily through recent decades, illustrating a long-term reduction in average flow.

Total flow to date at Albuquerque gage.

Here’s the same approach as for Otowi above, but for Albuquerque. As measured by total flow to date, this is also the lowest since 1977.

And since it keeps showing up, here’s 1977. Worth noting (but hard to parse in too much detail because of some missing data) is that El Vado Reservoir began 1977 at near-normal levels, and even though it was a terrible snowpack year they were able to supplement flows by some 100,000 acre feet by draining El Vado between late April and early August of ’77 to supplement the Rio Grande’s flow:

Line and shaded-area chart of daily Rio Grande flows at Albuquerque, NM, 1965–2025. Shaded blue and green bands show historical ranges and medians. The 1977 line (black) shows lower-than-normal flows through winter and spring, but with sharp spikes during the summer monsoon. The 2025 line (blue) stays consistently low with no strong runoff or monsoon surge. The record median (green dashed) shows a strong May–June peak, absent in both 1977 and 2025.

1977: drier spring, wetter summer.

Driest on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande since when? 1972? 1964?

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Upturned couch in a dry, sandy riverbed, flanked by green trees on both side

Dry Rio Grande. Albuquerque, July 2025

I spent some time this morning crunching numbers, trying to make numerical sense of how bad this year is on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande. We keep saying it’s only the second time the Rio Grande has dried through Albuquerque since the 1980s, but that felt insufficient.

Some data visualization experiments:

Graph of days of drying on the Rio Grande at Albuquerque's central avenue bridge, showing the most drying days since 1972.

Total days, by year, with a USGS average daily gage measurement of zero at Central Avenue in Albuquerque (forgive the “or less,” the code allows me to look at low flows below arbitrary thresholds)

By this measure – total days measured at “zero” by the USGS gage at Central Avenue in Albuquerque – it’s the driest since 1972, when the river was dry at that spot on 74 days. (Note that if it’s dry at Central, it’s already been dry far longer at points downstream.)

Or this: How much total water is entering New Mexico’s Middle Valley, as measured at Otowi, the gage immediately upstream? This uses some old code I wrote some time ago to sum up total flows to date at a gage, to allow year-to-year comparison during the year. I colored this year, and all previous years that were worse, in red. By this measure, 2025 is the driest year since 1964.

Graph of total flow through Aug. 15 at the USGS Otowi gage on the Rio Grande, with 2025 and all years previously lower colored red. This shows 2025 as the driest year since 1964.

Total flow to date past Otowi.

 

Awaiting the Colorado River 24-Month Study

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By John Fleck, Anne Castle, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen, and Katherine Tara

As we await Friday’s (Aug. 15, 2025) release of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River 24-Month Study, we need to remember a painful lesson of the last five years of crisis management: whatever you see in Reclamation’s report of the “Most Probable” reservoir levels for the next two years, we must prepare for things to be much worse.

A year ago, Reclamation’s “Most Probable” forecast told us to expect Lake Powell to hold 10.36 million acre feet of water at the end of July 2025, with a surface elevation 3,593 feet above sea level. Actual storage in Powell at the end of July was 7.46 maf, 2.9 million acre feet less, and the reservoir is 38 feet lower, than the “Most Probable” forecast.

Four years ago, one of us (Eric Kuhn) wrote this, which is helpful in understanding what is happening:

The problem: the assumptions underlying the study do not fully capture the climate-change driven aridification of the Colorado River Basin.

In 2022, a Utah State Center for Colorado River Studies team led by Jian Wang (including one of us, Schmidt) took this on in more technical detail – Evaluating the Accuracy of Reclamation’s 24-Month Study of Lake Powell Projections. The finding provided technical support for an intuition water managers already had: the 24-Month Study has an optimistic bias.

It is a practical demonstration of the problem U.S. Geological Survey scientist Paul Milly and colleagues famously warned us about nearly two decades ago – in water management, climate change means the past is increasingly unhelpful in projecting the future.

The 24-Month Study: A Brief Primer

Produced monthly, Reclamation’s 24-Month Study includes three scenarios: Most Probable, Minimum Probable, and Maximum Probable. The Study includes 18 pages of data and forecasts for twelve Colorado River system reservoirs, from Fontenelle and Flaming Gorge in the north to Mohave and Havasu in the south, projecting things like elevation, storage, inflows, releases, evaporation, and hydropower production each month for the next two years.

Here is Wang et al’s explanation of how it works:

Projections for reservoir elevations during the next few months are based on predictions of reservoir inflow using a widely accepted watershed hydrologic model run by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. The input data for that model are observed snowpack in the watershed, soil moisture, and anticipated precipitation and temperature. Projections for reservoir elevations beyond the immediately proximate winter, a year or more in the future (‘second year projections’), are based on statistical probabilities calculated using analyses of past inflows during a 30-year reference period.

The resulting model runs represent a wide range of uncertainties, which are captured in three resulting scenarios:

  • Most Probable: the middle of the range
  • Maximum Probable: the 90th percentile scenario, meaning that 10% of the model runs predict even wetter hydrology and 90% predict drier.
  • Minimum Probable: the 10th percentile scenario, meaning that 10% of the model runs predict even drier hydrology and 90% predict wetter.

The problem, implicit in the argument Milly et al. made nearly two decades ago, is that a 30-year reference period is no longer a reliable indicator of what we should expect in the future. It represents a river we no longer have. This is not to suggest any bias or partiality on the part of Reclamation, but merely that the algorithms and modeling used to produce the 24-Month Study have proven in recent years to be skewed more toward the the past than the true-to-life. Our response needs to reflect that reality.

Because of the changing conditions in the Colorado River Basin, the Minimum Probable scenario has become the most valuable in providing a reliable indicator of the future. Actual flows and reservoir levels have been tracking the minimum probable forecast since March of this year. As we enter the fall of 2025, with the weak summer monsoon for most of the Upper Basin coupled with weak La Niña conditions persisting through the fall and early winter, and NOAA’s seasonal outlook pointing to a warmer and drier than average fall, it’s a good bet that this trend will continue at least through mid-winter. The Basin should be prepared for minimum probable conditions, with a clear possibility that  actual conditions could be worse than the 10th percentile scenario. The basin community needs to be ready to respond with the necessary water use reductions now to protect the Colorado River system on which we all depend.

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