Wandering the neighborhood on this morning’s bike ride, I ran across this sign: I’m reading Robert Ellickson’s 1991 book Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes. It’s a fascinating bit of legal scholarship about how residents of Shasta County, in California, manage the problems posed by cattle wandering off the ranch and onto other folks’ …
In Glenwood Springs this weekend, a friend kindly acceded to my demand: “We must go on a Sunday morning bike ride up Glenwood Canyon.” It’s 16 miles of paved trail that run along the Colorado River. Like, right along the Colorado River, as you can see in the picture above. So close, in fact, that …
One of the great joys of bicycling socially is route sharing. Albuquerque is a great bicycling city. We’ve got a nice network of trails that are completely separated from streets, including one along the Rio Grande that runs the whole length of the metro area. We’re seeing more and more facilities on the streets as …
Continue reading ‘“I just found this route a couple weeks ago….”’ »
The Rio Grande through Albuquerque has been rising this week, thanks to a combination of a great snowpack and a quirk in the river’s operating rules. The snowpack part is obvious – it’s big and melting fast – the rule quirk less so. Under Article VII of the Rio Grande Compact, we cannot store water …
If I go out and ride for an hour, my brain function after is definitely better. I like to think up creative water solutions when I’m riding. That’s John Currier, chief engineer of the Colorado River District in Glenwood Springs, in a fun story on the crazy bicycling habits of Currier and his colleagues Eric …
Continue reading ‘The solution to the West’s water problems’ »
This guy paddled past today as I was standing with friends on the bank of the Rio Grande, watching the high flows of this week’s environmental pulse flow through central New Mexico. If you look closely, you can see a bicycle in the front of his canoe. As he rode by, he explained that when …
A couple of summers ago, I saw the Google Street View car coming down the Interstate 40 onramp at Carlisle Boulevard, parallel to my bike trail, as I was coming home from a ride. I looked a few times, hoping they’d captured my endorphin smile, then forgot about it. This evening I remembered to check:
It would be wrong to say I harbored a dark secret lo these many years. Because it was only yesterday afternoon that I realized, “Wait, I’m just like Lance Armstrong! I was a doping cyclist!” At least, it appears I might have been. OK, not entirely just like Armstrong. Like Armstrong, I’m maybe a bit …
From the morning paper I would like to personally thank the taxpayers of Albuquerque for saving my life.
Inspired by the beautiful maps Geoff McGhee made for the Lane Center-KQED California Delta project, I spent some time this weekend playing with GIS software. I haven’t done any hackerly projects in ages, and a friend who’s a GIS professional had suggested QGIS, a free software project. (ArcGIS is pricey, and I’m a Mac guy …