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 …
Stopped in the new Routes Rentals on Mountain west of Old Town on my bike ride today. Don’t know much about them, but I’m happy to see an Albuquerque bicycle rental shop give it a go. Their cruisers are gorgeous.
Now that I get to be an occasional columnist in the newspaper, it’s remarkable how much of the work that seems appropriate in that new (for me) form builds off of something that started here, as a simple riff. To the extent that I’m getting my legs beneath myself as a columnist, it’s pretty clear …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The Great Banana Peel Sticker War’ »
A river is not just in one place. It extends in time up and down its watershed. Last night, Daniel Porter at the Albuquerque National Weather Service office sent out an alert of possible flooding on Peralta Canyon, which enters the Rio Grande about 40 miles north of Albuquerque. Its watershed was burned in the …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert: blackwater edition’ »