Two years ago, when the level of Lake Mead was hovering near elevation 1,040, my artist wife Lissa Heineman and I drove out over UNM’s fall break to see it for ourselves. Out beyond the old Boulder Harbor, we walked a half mile across mud flats to get to the water. I could look out …
By Jack Schmidt The decrease in reservoir storage following the 2024 inflow season has been thankfully modest, but not as favorable as it was at this time last year. Perseverance reducing consumptive uses and losses is needed for reliability and security in the water supply and to regain reservoir storage. Between mid-April and early July …
Continue reading ‘The 2024-2025 Season of Water Consumption: Can We Retain Our Gains?’ »
Taming the Lower Basin Structural Deficit The federally funded water use reductions approved last month by the Imperial Irrigation District and the federal government have made their way into the Bureau of Reclamation’s annual forecast model (updated Sept. 6 as I’m writing this), and the numbers are remarkable. Imperial’s projected 2.2 million acre foot take …
Sitting on our front porch the other day, Lissa and I were trying to remember when we planted the garlic. We’ve been in this house for more than three decades, and the garlic in the front yard was an early experiment. So at least a quarter century, we figure. It’s been feral for years, along …
Lorelei Cloud and John Berggren had a really important piece on Colorado River governance in the Colorado Sun last month that has not received sufficient attention. The challenge, they argue, is the lack of the institutional framework we need to address evolving societal values around the river’s management in a changing world. Cloud is Vice-Chairman …
Continue reading ‘Emerging Values and Institutional Reform 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 …
Continue reading ‘The search for enduring solutions on the Colorado River’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Finding Albuquerque’s Northeast Passage’ »
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 …
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, …
Continue reading ‘Tipping Point: Colorado River Reckoning’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Hoover Dam and the social nature of infrastructure’ »