The socioeconomics of jogging
The reflection of socioeconomics in Strava’s running heat map for my town is striking. It’s sort of Tiebout sorting?
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
The search for enduring solutions on the Colorado River
Kathryn Sorensen & Sarah Porter, Kyl Center for Water Policy, Morrison Institute for Public Policy, Arizona State University; John Fleck, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico School of Law Colorado River Basin governance is increasingly struggling with a deep question in water management: When we reduce our use of water, who gets the …
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Finding Albuquerque’s Northeast Passage
I left for my Sunday morning bike ride today as early as an alarm, coffee, and breakfast would allow – to beat the heat. To structure the route, I set myself a puzzle: to ride from Albuquerque’s Old Town, paralleling the Rio Grande to the north, all the way up the valley to the north …
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Albuquerque’s Aquifer
I’ve been a) Playing with Datawrapper as a tool for displaying data here on Inkstain, and b) Thinking about Albuquerque’s aquifer as bad summer river flows force us back onto groundwater (City #2, in the North Valley, is one of a quartet of groundwater monitoring wells drilled in the late ’50s as Albuquerque’s population …
Tacos and a bike helmet
The “plate of food with a bike helmet” is my favorite genre of Strava photo.
Tipping Point: Colorado River Reckoning
Out toward the top left corner of this picture – maybe a little bit left, out of the frame – is the point where the Southern Nevada Water Authority gets its water out of Lake Mead. There’s nothing to see – the intake is at the bottom of the reservoir. Completed in 2015, …
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Hoover Dam and the social nature of infrastructure
A water nerd friend and I made a pilgrimage yesterday evening to Hoover Dam, spanning the Colorado River on the Arizona-Nevada border. We’d had dinner at one of the restaurants on the docks at Hemenway Harbor, and driven up to the old abandoned boat ramp at Boulder Harbor, two Lake Mead landmarks for me, places …
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The 2024 Runoff Season Comes to an End – How Did We Do?
By Jack Schmidt, Utah State University Center for Colorado River Studies How did we do in the continuing effort to recover reservoir storage? How much reservoir storage accumulated from this year’s snowpack, and how does that accumulation compare to other years? In Summary: Total basin-wide reservoir storage is an appropriate metric to describe the status …
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Colorado River 2023 Water Use: An Optimistic Narrative
Preparing for A Thing I’m doing next week, I updated the Crazy Fleck Spreadsheet this morning of data from Reclamation’s annual Lower Basin decree accounting reports. Amid all the angst and rhetoric, it is easy to miss the salient fact made clear by this graph: Lower Basin water users have reduced their take on the …
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Water flowing again in the Rio Chama
Our friends at the Abiquiu News (yay local journalism!) have an update on the sediment plug on the Rio Chama that’s been playing havoc with Rio Grande flows: The Rio Chama is officially on its way back into its original channel as of Tuesday evening. Workers from the US Department of the Interior Bureau of …