When last we met, I showed you the San Juan River looking like the only water for miles (and not much water at that) as it flows across the Ute Mountain Ute Nation near Four Corners. Today, after miles of driving around the high country of the Four Corners region (vacation road trip) I have a happy update: if you look hard enough, you can find enough water on the San Juan for houseboats!

Houseboats on Navajo Reservoir, May 2014, by John Fleck

This is the reservoir behind Navajo Dam in northwestern New Mexico, a unit of the Colorado River Storage Project, completed in 1962, “BUILT FOR AND BY THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES,” as the plaque atop the dam explains. Some of those people subsequently plopped houseboats into the reservoir, and they will be happy to learn that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projects the reservoir will be up 20 feet (pdf) at the end of the current water year as compared to 2013.