“Game on!” as a friend texted yesterday afternoon.

At 2 p.m. Monday (Aug 31, 2026) the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, along with the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District and Audubon Southwest, began releasing a pulse of water from Abiquiu Reservoir on the Rio Chama in Northern New Mexico as an experiment – what might a several day pulse of water do to help the aridification-starved riverside forests along New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande?

Here’s Bernalillo County Commissioner Barbara Baca, chair of the ABCWUA board:

This one-time release will allow us to gather important data about how water flows through the river following a period of extended dryness, the relationship between the river and groundwater, and the effect of such a water release on plants and trees. It’s also our hope that this will aid vegetation and wildlife affected by the ongoing drought.

As I and others have written previously, we’re seeing extraordinary stress on the riverside trees, the ribbons of green that flank the Rio Grande through New Mexico’s largest city.

The tradeoffs that we talk about every fall semester in the water resources class I teach, tradeoffs among competing and conflicting values, are becoming real. The motivating question I’ve used in my writing on water since my old newspaper days was to ask, as pointedly as I could, “When supplies run sort, who actually doesn’t get water?”

Two answers have become increasingly obvious in recent years along the Middle Rio Grande. What we’ve come to call the “accordion” of irrigated agriculture is squeezing, as pastures and fields without the super-senior water rights that apply to some of the irrigated lands of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande (or a supplemental well) go dry.

“The environment” is the other.

The question has never been “What do we say we value?”, but rather “What do we value enough to give up water in some other place?” This is about tradeoffs. More water in one place – an irrigated field or the river channel itself – necessarily means less water in some other place. My “what do we value enough to give up water” formulation shifts this from a question of what we say we value to what we actually value enough to give up water to preserve?

Behind the scenes for the last couple of weeks there has been an extraordinary effort underway to scrounge up some water currently in storage upstream for other purposes, and to rapidly put in place the tools to monitor the results. Nobody’s quite sure how much water will get how far into the bone dry Albuquerque reach of the river, how far downstream the pulse will make it, what the results might be for the riverside forest.

For my whole professional life, long before I shifted from newspapers to writing books, I had a joke when something remarkable happened: “That’ll be great material for my book!” This is that.

Sun’s almost up, I’m off to chase the water.

The Albuquerque bosque north of Central. Drone photo by Paul Tashjian, Audubon Southwest.

Albuquerque’s bosque has been suffering a rapid dieback, as shallow aquifers drop away from the roots of the community’s beloved cottonwood gallery forest.

This is uncharted territory for our modern bosque, which grew into its present state after Bureau of Reclamation channeling in the 1950s created the modern river corridor, and flood control and water management practices created a stable source of water that allowed the forest to grow into its present state. From the late 1970s until the last couple of years, the river through Albuquerque essentially never dried, creating conditions under which the bosque could flourish. And it has become a much beloved part of our lives.

In 2026, the bottom has fallen out. We are at 58 days of dry river at the Central Avenue Bridge, where Audubon’s Paul Tashjian took this drone photo. What is usually green is rapidly browning, and it’s not clear how much longer the trees can hold out – what the point of no return might be for, by my quick-and-dirty estimate, ~1,000 acres of normally green bosque forest that is now rapidly browning.

Black: dying bosque. Map by John Fleck, using ESA Sentinel data, Google Earth Engine.

The black pixels in the above image are my best first pass at dying bosque – pixels that are normally green at this time of year that are rapidly browning. (Full map for all of the Bernalillo County Bosque, essentially the last 10 days, here.)

I had reason to hope this would not happen – that the trees with their roots in the shallow aquifer would hang on. There was good evidence for this hope – strips of bosque that have held their green in river reaches farther south as the river routinely dries, and the bosque’s relative stability during last year’s river drying. But the scale of the dieback this year, and its rapidity, shows how wrong I was.

This reflects a deep challenge in our community’s water management systems. We have well developed systems to remove water from the river and the aquifer, to take it out of the river channel and the shallow aquifer – MRGCD irrigation water diversions and the dense network of domestic wells alongside the river irrigating yards that remain green in the midst of this year’s epic drought.

But, as beloved as the bosque is, it grew up as a happy side effect of water management systems developed for other purposes. We have no effective system for leaving water in the river, or for protecting the shallow aquifer on which the bosque depends.