Has Albuquerque’s Rio Grande already peaked?

Early March is usually when I emerge from my wintry water nerd slumber and begin tracking the rise in my beloved hometown river, Albuquerque’s Rio Grande.

Yesterday morning the core family unit packed sandwiches and went down to the Rio Bravo Bridge, on Albuquerque’s south side. It’s a favorite spot because of the graffiti – the engineers built a lot of canvas for the artists to work with.

Bridge, with art.

The county crews had recently painted over the graffiti on the bridge abutments, which always means a fun new canvas and a bunch of new art.

The river’s low – at around the 10th percentile on the dry side at the Central Avenue gage, the nearest measurement point upstream of here. I dashed off Tuesday’s post in a hurry because news, but what’s about to happen deserves more attention.

One of the deep/fierce discussion underway I’m having with some smart colleagues is the question of how much our community values a flowing river. One of the reasons we’re arguing, umm, I mean discussing, is that evidence about public attitudes is thin.

We’re about to have a Rio Grande through Albuquerque substantially drier than we’ve seen since the early 1980s. Before that time, summer drying was common because of community water management choices: larger supplies were diverted into irrigation ditches, leaving the Rio Grande to go dry. The river essentially dried through Albuquerque in eight out of ten years during the 1970s. That began shifting in the 1980s because of wetter climate, but more importantly because of water management choices that reflected a shift in community values.

Beginning in the 1990s, the federal Endangered Species Act became the water policy driver, keeping water in the river’s main channel to keep the Rio Grande silvery minnow alive. “This little fish, that human efforts keep alive,” my Utton Center colleague Rin Tara has written, “is a powerhouse for dictating river flows in the Middle Rio Grande.”

Silver Linings

The quote above is from a terrific new paper of Rin’s exploring the history, and legal and policy framework around the silvery minnow and the Endangered Species Act. (Discloure: Rin and I share an office at Utton, which has enabled an ongoing stream of conversation that has immeasurably enriched my thinking about these issues. We should prolly get some microphones and make a podcast.)

For those who care about the Rio Grande (you wouldn’t have read this far if that didn’t include you), the whole paper is worth a read. It is the first time anyone has pulled together in a single narrative the history of the role of the silvery minnow in the last three decades of water management on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande. Rin’s legal scholarship also sheds new light on the way the Endangered Species act functions in practice in a situation like ours – an effort to keep a species alive in a river far removed from the ecosystem in which the species evolved. This disconnect is at the heart of the challenge posted by the ESA in the third decade of the 21st century. As I said, terrific new paper.

Given the current context – a river at risk of drying in 2025 – the challenge to community values around the Rio Grande is something I’ll be watching closely. Here’s Rin (“2028 BiOp” is a new minnow management plan now in development – read the whole paper, Rin explains):

The space between the minimum actions necessary for the minnow and the maximum actions encouraged by the ESA is an area in which there is room to manage the ecosystem with broader values in mind; this space brackets the possibility for a zone of consensus. The Middle Rio Grande will never be a home for the minnow as it was before the construction of dams, but it is a home for myriad human and nonhuman communities as it is now. The 2028 BiOp is an opportunity to reframe minnow protections as one component of a larger Middle Rio Grande management plan.

The question of what those broader values might look like is where the action is, one of those “we get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have” moments.

Big Dog

Rio Grande, March 12, 2025

I rode back out to the river for this morning’s bike ride.(I am trying to ride and picnic more and work less, with mixed results.) The ride took me through downtown and across what used to be swampland to the Rio Grande. What we think of today as “the river,” the narrow channel snaking through the valley between levees, is a tiny fraction of what the Rio Grande used to be before we decided to build a city here. Even as I acknowledge the loss of the expansive wetlands that used to spread across the valley floor, I also love my city. Both of those things can be true, as is often the case with the most interesting moral tensions.

I stopped at one of my favorite river views to snap a picture for a friend I’d been texting with who loves the Rio Grande, but has moved to a city on a different (also beloved!) river.

It’s just above Central Avenue/Route 66. There’s a bike trail bridge over the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s Central Avenue Wasteway, and when there’s water you feel like you’re out in the river. The wasteway delivers water from the irrigation system back to the main river channel, and when I was riding by this morning it was flowing at ~40 cubic feet per second. It’s a popular fishing spot, for both humans and cormorants, though I saw neither this morning taking advantage of the flows.

The journalist in me can’t resist small talk in a place like that. A woman was walking by with a big, beefy, happy dog. I asked if it was OK to pet, and did, though she had to restrain the friendly animal from jumping up on me with his wet, muddy paws. They’d walked down from their neighborhood just up the valley, so the pooch could play in the river. One of the weird things about low flow is that it actually makes the river more accessible for picnics and dog play. As it drops, you’ll see people out on the sandbars.

Until, of course, there’s no water left for frolicking. I assume there were silvery minnows out there in the channel. They cannot know what is coming, nor, frankly, can we.