Lousy start to the 2023-24 snowpack year on the Rio Grande

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Three months into the 2023-24 water year, we have our first early look at what sort of runoff to expect on the Rio Grande in the coming year, and it doesn’t look great. The January NRCS median forecast for March-July runoff is 42 percent of “normal” at Otowi, the critical forecast point where the Rio Grande enters New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande. It’s still early in the snow season, with a wide range of possible outcomes depending on the storm patterns over the next few months. But the best possible outcome (statistically a one chance in 20 of this much water) is still below the 30-year median.

In other words, we’re pretty clearly on track for a below-average runoff year.

The forecast uses the NRCS’s new Multi-Model Machine-learning Metasystem (M4) forecasting tool, part of an effort to develop improved statistical tools using machine learning approaches to the big snowpack datasets rather than the principal components analysis used in the past. The peer-reviewed paper laying out the testing done over the last half decade suggests significant improvement in the tricky task of forecasting runoff.

The biggest uncertainty is always the weather, but I’m excited to see the new, improved statistical models shifting from the research world to operations.

2023 in review: Exploring the commons, looking for a place to pee

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No Unauthorized Vehicles Beyond This Point

On my penultimate bike ride of 2023 Friday, I turned west on Bobby Foster Road in Albuquerque’s southwest valley, wandering past junk yards and Ace Metals: “THE BEST PRICES IN ALBUQUERQUE For: Steel, Iron, Junk Cars, Tin, Appliances, Aluminum, Copper, Brass, Batteries, Stainless Radiators, and Catalytic Converters”.

With my current loosey-goosey career, it’s easier for me to ride on weekdays, but it was the first time I’ve ridden the junkyard neighborhood on a weekday. Totally different. Groups standing around old wrecked cars talking parts, a crane picking and stirring the junk pile at Ace, a mail truck making the rounds. Human stuff, people living their lives.

My “geography by bike” is mostly a self-indulgent hobby, loosely linked to “exercise” and “goofing.” But the occupational hazard arising from a life as a writer is that I’m always writing, always seeing the things around me through the mental exercise of imagining how I might write about them.

I’m always writing.

Blue-green squares are places I rode this year that I’ve never ridden before (at least since I started GPSing my rides 15 years ago), as measured by a grid of squares about 1/6th of a mile on a side.

This came in handy over the last year as Bob Berrens and I were writing the manuscript for our forthcoming book Ribbons of Green, about the history of Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande. Everywhere we were writing about, I have ridden. I ride everywhere, by which I mean trying to find new places that I’ve not visited before. I have old standards, rides I love to return to again and again. But my favorite thing is to ride down a street, or ditchbank, that I’ve never ridden down before. (GPS and mapping software help in this regard. Did I mention that it’s a self-indulgent hobby?)

The thing about riding a bike is that you largely are riding through human-created spaces. It’s a window into what the French philosopher and sociologist Henry Lefebvre called the social production of space, and the joy for me in visiting places like the junkyards off Bobby Foster Road is thinking about the structure of the human lives that are forever producing these spaces.

My pursuit of new places to ride – it’s a bit hard core, see the map on the right – has encouraged an increasingly complicated grappling with what we might call “the commons,” or what, in a much more broad sense, the political scientist Bonnie Honig has called “public things.” My interest in the commons is longstanding. It’s at the heart of my book Water is For Fighting Over, which drew heavily on the ideas in Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons for its conceptual superstructure.

Ostrom and those bouncing around her were/are focused – properly! – on the commons in the context of “common pool resources” – stuff that we all need, that we all kinda share, but if I use too much there’s not gonna be enough for you, etc. Such as water, which is what got me invited to this party.

“Public things” is a broader category. In her book, Honig is careful not to define it, preferring to work the question through by way of example:

For example, a public thing may not be publicly owned but is public insofar as it is subject to public oversight or secured for public use.

So public streets are, for sure, a public thing. But how do we know which streets are “public?”

Lagunitas Lane and a place to pee

I stumbled onto Honig’s book via a link in an essay by Shannon Mattern about public drinking fountains. If you ride your bike a lot, as I do, you think about public drinking fountains and public toilets. There are few, which is why the glorious public infrastructure at the new Valle do Oro National Wildlife Refuge in Albuquerque’s Mountain View neighborhood stands out.

Valle de Oro public toilets, voted best in all of Albuquerque by a survey of me.

This is the broader sense of “public things” as the stuff that provides what Amartya Sen defines as “capability” – the underpinnings of our ability to live the lives we choose, meeting our preferred goals and desires.

Albuquerque’s new International District Library – the library Lissa and I have chosen as ours, a regular Saturday outing – is a great example here of a public thing. Not only is its architecture, like the Valle de Oro visitors center, gloriously enabling, but it has public computers and public bathrooms. This is a pretty flimsy floor for the Sen-style “capability” of our unhoused neighbors clustered in the neighborhood around the library, but anyone can use the computers to access the things on the (“quasi-public”?) Internet you need to engage in Sen-capability stuff, and there is a steady flow of people going to the special desk the librarians have set up in the library’s back corner to manage the bathroom key.

Some years ago, when Valle de Oro was still in the early phases of its transition from former dairy farm to wildlife refuge, my riding buddy and I had occasion to try to wander into the newly “public” (that word again!) property from the neighborhood on its northwestern edge. We turned down Lagunitas Lane and, when the pavement ended and turned to dirt, kept riding past the “County Maintenance Ends” sign.

Who owns Lagunitas Lane?

As we noodled south looking for a way to get into the wildlife refuge, a car approached slowly, the driver rolling down the window. “You know this is a private road,” they said, snippy. We smiled politely, thanked them for telling us, and kept going in search of a permeable gate to get onto the refuge.

In the five years since that encounter, I have always assumed the driver knew whereof they spoke. It has not stopped us from from riding down Lagunitas Lane, because the gate remains permeable, it’s a great place to get into Valle de Oro, and exploring the boundaries between “public” and “private”, the slippery notion of “trespassing”, is a big part of the exercise. But I was always wary of another encounter with Snippy Driver. “Trespassing” carries both social and legal costs.

But a look at the county property maps this morning suggests that this stretch of Lagunitas Lane is, in fact, public property, by which I mean owned by the federal government, so me! And you, too (some terms and conditions may apply).

I do not mean to equate my need for easy access to a wildlife refuge for purpose of bike riding escapades to the needs of our unhoused neighbors to apply for a job or pee. One is clearly more foundational to what Sen is talking about than the other, but it’s a continuum worth exploring.

The junkyards off of Bobby Foster Road

The Ace Metals road (I know, it’s been a while, we’re back to the bike ride I started this post with 1,100 words ago) is part of an area marked off in red on the maps I use for bike ride planning. They’re based on Open Street Map, a Wikipedia-like mapping site. (Open Street Map is a public thing.) Red means “industrial area”, and it also usually means “John can’t ride his bike there.” It’s also not on Google Street View, another “can’t go there” ride mapping clue. But I thought I remembered my riding buddy saying he’d done it, and I was in the neighborhood because I’d been riding in the neighboring flood control channel (Public! But maybe not for bike riding?), so I gave it a look.

It was a weekday, and the first thing I saw was a mail truck heading down the road. The U.S. Mail, a public thing if ever there was one! So off I went. A couple of guys standing talking by the side of the road outside one of the junkyards smiled and waved a “Hi”, which always feels so very public, a shared space thing.

At the far end, the road dead-ended with a gate into the last business. I eyed, as one does, the fences looking for a way through to the neighboring railroad tracks (railroad tracks regularly pose the “public or not” dilemma, these I decided “not”).

I rode back, got the obligatory Strava mobile phone picture of Ace, and rode on out of the neighborhood past the angry pit bull guard dog behind the fence of the last junkyard on the left (angry pit bulls a definite “not public” signifier).

Here’s the thing. A look at the county maps shows the whole road, from the pit bull to the gate a half mile down, is private property. I’m not savvy enough with the available maps to know about easements and maintenance agreements and the like, but it was a fun place to ride my bike.

A year on the bike

Much of my mental focus in 2023 was finishing the manuscript of Ribbons of Green, which was (and remains) an all-brain activity. So when I rode, which I do (373 hours on the bike, an average of a shade more than an hour a day, 3,173 delightfully slow old guy miles), I toured the landscape of our book.

My 2023 bike rides, h/t to the amazing Stan Ansems at Statshunters

 

I covered the whole Rio Grande Valley floor, from Bernalillo in the north to Los Lunas in the south, excepting the land of the indigenous Pueblo communities, which bear profound public/not public implications. I basically rode the entire “study area” for the book, which is about the interplay between the Rio Grande and the greater Albuquerque community.

I also spent a good deal of time exploring up out of the valley, parts of the city I’d not yet ridden. My goal is to ride everywhere, where “everywhere” involves a map grid of the greater metro area, squares that are about 1/6th a mile on side. Some of these neighborhoods are frankly not as interesting as the crazy spiderweb of river, levees, ditches, and flood control channels that define the hydraulic infrastructure I mostly write about.

But it’s all interesting! No place is uninteresting, junk yards least of all.

 

New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande 2023 Review

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High December flows on the Rio Grande in New Mexico’s middle valley, an artefact of river management rules. John Fleck.

This was a big flow year on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, but weird, in ways that highlight the challenges we face.

Flow in the River

Total flow into New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley (measured at Otowi) sits at 1.26 million acre feet with two more days’ flow to go, so round it off to 1.3maf.

Rio Grande flow at Otowi, with Brad Udall-style plots of 20th and 21st century means.

 

A drying Rio Grande. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Aug. 20, 2023. By John Fleck

So a big year! Yay!  Look at all that water in the picture above, a bank-full Rio Grande flowing past Rio Rancho, New Mexico, in December. And yet there I was in August watching dogs gamboling on the sand bed of a nearly dry Rio Grande. What’s up with that?

The answer involves the interaction between a climate change-driven megadrought, the use of the river by human communities, and the tangle of rules that govern management of the 21st century Rio Grande.

The short term tangle involves El Vado Dam, currently being renovated and therefore unusable for storage. That meant that by August the declining inflow of late summer with a lousy monsoon left the river nearly dry, regardless of the winter snowpack.

This problem, which will go on for several more years, means that irrigators will depend on run-of-the-river operations for late summer irrigation for a while yet. Given that irrigation water also supports environmental flows on its way to the irrigation diversions, this is also bad for things like the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow and the river flowing through my city.

The longer term tangle involves competing community values among the various ways we use water, combined with a lack of tools to reduce that use.

Because, with climate change there is less water.

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But, like all your favorite Substackers, it is reader supported! Thanks as always to our readers. (And if you don’t know what Substackers are, again, bless you.)

The Tangle: Moving Water in Time

First let’s pin some data to our bulletin board:

Total storage on New Mexico’s Rio Grande and the Rio Chama, its main tributary.

There’s an old water management adage: Canals move water in space, reservoirs move water in time. We built them to store water in wet years, effectively moving it in time to dry years. So how much did we so move this year?

Inspired by Jack Schmidt’s monthly Colorado River posts, I spent my Saturday coffee wakeup this morning totaling up sorta year-end storage in the reservoirs I care about (from top to bottom Heron, El Vado, Abiquiu, Cochiti, Elephant Butte, and Caballo). It took longer than I expected because I was so distracted by all the amazing history embedded in this graph. 1986-87, yowza, what’s up with that?

Flow this year was ~440k acre feet above the 21st century average. Total end of year storage is up ~220k acre feet. There’s so much mixing of apples, oranges, durian, and pawpaw here that it’s not a straight up comparison, but it should give you a feel for the challenge: we only saved a part of the bonus water. We used a lot of it.

The Management Levers

Let’s imagine for a moment that we wanted to pull some water management levers to change that balance by reducing consumptive use (by “use” I mean evapotransporation, human and non-human) in the Middle Rio Grande Valley. We’ve basically got four different categories of use:

  • The cities, especially Albuquerque
  • The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, which manages irrigation water for some commercial farms and a lot of custom and culture/lifestyle stuff
  • Domestic wells
  • The river – evaporation and riparian consumption by our beloved bosque

Let’s take these in order of smallest to largest water use.

The Cities

We’ve already cranked down pretty hard on this lever. With a combination of water use reductions and a shift from groundwater pumping to imported Colorado River water, we’ve already cranked down extremely hard on this lever. This is the one area of the system that is already aggressively regulated.

If you want to crank down harder on this lever, the two points of entry in the legal/political/policy system are the Office of State Engineer/Interstate Stream Commission, which do the regulating, and the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority Board, which is made up of elected city councilors and county commissioners.

The District

Consumptive use by the Conservancy District’s irrigators is several times larger than the cities. The District took voluntary action this year to reduce use, delaying the start of irrigation season and cutting diversions once they started by 20 percent to try to get more water to Elephant Butte Reservoir.

With federal money, the District paid folks irrigating a relatively small portion of the valley’s acreage to fallow this year, and the acreage is going up in 2024. But the numbers remain small relative to the size of the problem.

If you want to crank down harder on this lever, it’s not clear to me what the state’s legal authority might be. There may be some, but it’s not been tested. But the District is governed by an elected board. That’s a lever, though it’s worth pointing out that the board got a lot of crap this year from irrigators about they steps they did take. Incentives in all of this are weird, it’s tricky to figure out how to work this lever.

Domestic Wells

We don’t regulate these at all. We have no idea how much water they use, but it sure looks to use like there’s a lot.  We don’t really even know how many there are, there seem to be a lot drilled illegally. (If you’re a UNM Water Resources Student, hit me up on this! We have some ideas for a really impactful masters degree research project.) We probably need to think about building a lever here, but we currently don’t have one. The state legislature might be a place to start? Maybe some un-exercised legal authority at the Office of State Engineer? (See NMAC 19.27.5.14, my day job, such as it is, is at a law school, though IANAL it sure looks like that could only apply to new wells, so horse out of barn etc.)

The Bosque

The biggest water user, likely larger than irrigation, is the riparian corridor itself. It’s largely unnatural, vegetation exploiting a niche created when we built levees and constrained the river’s flow, but whatever. It feels like “nature”, and we love it. And even if we didn’t it’s not clear what a lever to reduce that use might look like.

Values

Each one of these uses is valued by some segment of our community, and we seem to lack the tools to reconcile these competing values, which is why I’m pretty excited about the 2023 Water Security Planning Act.

A note on sources and methods

The reservoir data is from the USBR’s reservoir data archive. The latest 2023 data is from Dec. 18, so I matched up this year’s with Dec. 18 in previous years. My quick sensitivity check led me to conclude “Meh, good enough for a blog post.” For the early years, the USBR just reports a single year-end number for El Vado. My quick sensitivity check led me to conclude “Meh, good enough for a blog post.”

Flow data is from the USGS Otowi gage.

It is, in fact, spelled “gage“, just ask Bob, he’ll tell you.

I currently have 26 browser tabs open, including one with an amazing list of obscure fruit, did you know that Mark Twain called cherimoya “the most delicious fruit known to men.”? I had a bunch more I wanted to say, but that’s enough, it’s time to hit “publish”. Thanks for reading.

The White Trains

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Abandoned tracks from the nuclear weapons-bearing “White Trains,” which weren’t always white. On edge of Tijeras Arroyo, south of Kirtland Air Force Base, outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. John Fleck, December 2023

Out on my bike exploring this morning, I climbed a hill to find these old abandoned railroad tracks built for what they called the “White Trains,” which carried nuclear weapons to and from Kirtland Air Force Base outside Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It wasn’t a surprise. I knew roughly where they were, having stumbled on a section of abandoned tracks on a bike exploring expedition with a couple of friends a few years back and sorted through the “Why are these train tracks here?” question. This part of the arroyo is popular with the dirt biking/ATV crowd, and when you get near the road the trash dumpers, but there’s not much other human activity out here any more. The embankment to the right is a huge pad graded for a business park that never (has not yet?) happened. As I said, not much human activity out here any more.

It’s not great bike riding – sandy, a lot of walk-a-bike – but I was exploring and in no hurry. The ATV folks have created some nice paths that helped my navigation, and it being a weekday, there weren’t any actual ATVs in sight, just one big-ass street pickup, one of those slightly lifted 4-door jobs, poking its way through the sandhills going as slowly as I was.

The White Trains

The White Trains had been retired by the time I moved to Albuquerque to start writing about nuclear weapons in 1990, replaced by anonymous truck transports that looked like regular big rigs if you didn’t notice the armored SUVs escorting them. From the 1950s until the late 1980s, the Department of Energy had used the White Trains to ferry nukes from the Pantex Plant outside Amarillo, where they were assembled, to Kirtland – and I think maybe elsewhere in the country too.

Kirtland is home to what I think (it’s classified!) is the largest military nuclear weapons depot in the United States, the Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex. Kirtland’s vast barbed wire enclosure also includes Sandia National Laboratories, where we design a significant portion of the nukes’ innards.

My first nuke story, Oct. 23, 1990

This was a huge part of my life. For nearly a quarter century, nukes were my beat. A search on “John Fleck” and “nuclear” in the Albuquerque Journal archives gets 1,563 hits. I have a deep history with the topic. That’s why ever since we found the “White Train” tracks on one of our crazy bike exploring outings, I’ve had a pin in my mental map out there.

The White Trains became a focus of protest by the 1980s, and the nukers cleverly tried painting them different colors, but the protests continued and people continued calling them “White Trains”. Given the end points of the trip – Pantex and Kirtland – it was pretty obvious that they weren’t carrying household goods.

I’ve been exploring these landscapes around the edges of the city lately, working on a piece about them – places not designated “park” or “wilderness”, just culturally orphaned open spaces repurposed for off-roading and dumping trash. They’re rich desert ecosystems, but the human detritus makes them a little spooky. The abandoned White Train tracks upped the spooky meter to 11.

Sunport South Business Park

Courtesy Albuquerque Journal

The land where the abandoned tracks run is part of the “Sunport South Business Park”, “strategically located where road, rail and air meet,” as the Albuquerque Journal explained in a 2017 story announcing the project. The “rail,” actually shown in the Journal graphic, is the old “White Train,” line which, judging from the picture above, needs a bit of refurbishment. Road access from a street to the east is better, and it’s right next to the airport, so sorta strategic?

Looking back at my old bike rides (I’m one of those crazy people who GPS ’em all.), I realize that the bike ride during which we found the “White Train” tracks was the day after the newspaper story announcing “Sunport South.” You have to ride your bike somewhere. “Let’s go see where they’re gonna put that new business park!” It was a pretty memorable ride, involving a drag strip and a trespassing incident that I’ll have to tell you about over beers some time.

Six years later, Sunport South remains a feature on my “much-hyped business parks that don’t actually have any business” bicycle exploring tour. The “Aviation Center for Excellence,” built on a stretch of abandoned runway on the far side of the airport, is also on the tour, given that the only thing built on the site nine years after the project was announced are a bunch of streets that make it easy to get near the airport to watch the planes take off and land.

These things take time, and I’m patient. I’m in Albuquerque for the long haul. Maybe the “White Trains” history could be a marketing tool.

 

 

Closing in on a post-2026 Colorado River management deal (some terms and conditions may apply)

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DALL-E thinks we need a very large table for this, suggesting a broad need for “collective agency” to go along with our “collective action”.

The news out of last week’s Colorado River Water Users Association is that, behind the scenes, a deal is taking shape with the potential to bring Colorado River Basin water use into balance with water supply.

The deal would eliminate the “structural deficit”, and creates a framework for a compromise over the Upper Basin’s Lee Ferry delivery/non-depletion obligation.

This is huge. But so are the caveats – in terms of both the challenges remaining for a deal, and the definition of the problem we are trying to solve.

The U.S. Lower Basin states – California, Arizona, and Nevada – have converged on a set of numbers to permanently reduce their use on a year-in, year-out basis by a minimum of 1.25 million acre feet per year, eliminating the “structural deficit” – the year-in, year-out gap between inflows and outflows that has drained Lake Mead over the last two decades.

California and Arizona seem to have found a path to a compromise (the details of which have not been made public) after the early-2023 cage match that seemed to place us on the path to interstate litigation, with six states arguing for sharing the pain and California insisting on a priority administration that would have largely placed the burden of the impact of climate change on Arizona.

If separate negotiations with Mexico lead to additional reductions south of the border (which is how this has played out in the last two rounds of basin scheming), total durable, permanent Lower Basin reductions on the order of 1.5 million acre feet a year appear to be within reach.

If more cuts than that are needed to balance the system, the Lower Basin states at CRWUA made it pointedly, publicly clear that they are asking the Upper Basin states to share in the additional pain.

Implicit in that final point is the opportunity for a version of what we used to call the “Grand Bargain” – a Lower Basin concession that the river’s flow may not be sufficient to deliver 82.5 million acre feet per year. That would require even deeper cuts in the Lower Basin. To avoid interstate litigation over a Colorado River Compact delivery shortfall, the Lower Basin is offering a “Modest Bargain” of a sort – an Upper Basin contribution of water matching in some way (it’s not clear in what proportion to the additional Lower Basin cuts) in return for the Lower Basin not wading into a legal fight over the meaning of Article III(d) of the Colorado River Compact.

To the extent that this moves from the meeting rooms and hallway conversations of CRWUA to public view, the seven states need to come together on something that can be put down in writing, publicly, by (I think) March in order for the Bureau of Reclamation wizards to begin the modeling work. So this is on a very fast track.

This is a very big deal, and very good news. But….

Some terms and conditions may apply

There are a bunch of caveats.

The final AZ-CA-NV split of the 1.25-ish million acre feet is not fixed, but it is close, converging on a set of numbers that make sense, respecting some of California’s senior priority status, but not insisting on it as thoroughly as the state’s proposal of last February.

Suffice to say that the remarkable Lower Basin use numbers this year – currently at 5.8 million acre feet for the three U.S. states, the lowest total U.S. draw on Lake Mead since the modern record-keeping regime began in 1964 – shows that cuts like this are totally doable without wrecking the economies of the three states.

If we don’t have three-state numbers yet, we’re a lot farther from figuring out how each of the three states will divvy up the cuts among their users. This will be hard. Well for two of the states, anyway, Nevada just has one major user to do the divvying.

But will voluntary cuts of the scale needed be possible without the big inflow of federal cash that has helped so much this year? The precedent set by all the money sloshing around the Lower Basin right now poses a challenge.

And what of the Upper Basin’s relentless “it’s a Lower Basin over-use problem!” rhetoric over the last year. Now that the Lower Basin folks have basically said “Yup, and here’s what we’re gonna do about that”, have the Upper Basin folks painted themselves into a corner that makes the broader compromise needed on the next steps that much harder?

Who’s at the table right now?

All of this is predicated on a narrow definition of the problem we are trying to solve, which is basically a mass balance problem – figuring out how to match our use of water with the supply available, rather than over-using and draining the reservoirs. This is important! But it’s not the only thing.

This is a process dominated by the economically and politically powerful current water users. If we have a collective action problem here, we also have a “collective agency” problem. It is a system under which “agency” – the power to influence outcomes – is tightly controlled and narrowly distributed.

What about interests other than the big water agencies and their representatives in state government? This is clearly a state-to-state conversation right now, heading toward a desire for a seven-state proposal come March. In the last two rounds of this – the 2007 Interim Guidelines and the Drought Contingency Plan – the states’ proposals have carried the day.

What about the Colorado River Basin’s 30 Tribal Sovereigns? It’s not clear to me how their needs and interests are being incorporated into this process. In this regard, one is reminded of Neil Gorsuch’s dissent in this year’s Navajo decision, where he analogized to the tribe standing in line after line again and again at the DMV, only to be told that this isn’t the right line. Then which is?

What about non-water-consuming environmental values, which have similarly had a hard time figuring out which process might be the right one? The states could, in theory, act on behalf of those non-water agency interests in the deal they’re so furiously negotiating. Will they? Will the federal government step in and insist if the states don’t?

There was hope as we headed into the negotiation of the post-2026 river management regime that broader interests and values would be represented. It will be interesting to see what else beyond a seven-state proposal gets consideration in the discussions to come.

A note on sources and methods: I spent last week resting, looking at art, watching falling snow, reading a book (actually several), and not going to CRWUA. My deep thanks to my many friends who attended and filled me in what they heard and saw. All errors are mine. (Also, is that a Cocker Spaniel in the picture, a couple of seats to the chair’s left?)

Jardins du Nouveau Siècle

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train tracks crossing a barren valley

Going across the Rio Grande River Valley on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad between Vaughn and Belen, New Mexico. Jack Delano, 1943, Office of War Information

One of the first books Bob Berrens suggested I read when we began working together was Voltaire’s Candide. This has come in handy.

Candide is a bit of a romp, a picaresque in which our hero has all kinds of horrifying misadventures before settling down to tend his garden.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

Our forthcoming book Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of a Modern American City, is part of the University of New Mexico’s Press’s “New Century Gardens” series, a conceptual framework that sent us down the Voltaire translation rabbit hole.

The evolution of Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande involved a dramatic hydrologic alteration of the Rio Grande through the valley in which we live, the creation of an integrated system of flood control, drainage, and irrigation that, in an instant, changed the river and the communities relationship with it.

The common, and famous, translation of Voltaire’s line is that “We must cultivate our garden.” In our modern usage, “garden” carries a connotation of a bit of land around the house where we grow some flowers and vegetables and maybe a fruit tree. But in recent years translators have reached back to the French of Voltaire’s time to suggest a broader version, a tended landscape – “We need to work our fields,” or “We must work our land.”

Here is translator Burton Raffel:

Note that in Voltaire’s day the French word “jardin” meant “fields” or a place where one cultivated either medicinal plants or assorted vegetation from around the world. Indeed, until the nineteenth century the English word “garden” had the same meaning; the adjectives “flower” or “private” were still required to indicate the newer and now prevalent meaning. At the end of Candide the word Voltaire uses, jardin, has been regularly mistranslated (for our time) as “garden.”

The word “garden” played a lively role in the development of Albuquerque’s integrated system of flood control, drainage, and irrigation, a rhetoric at times bordering on the Edenic.

It was a fun bit of scaffolding from which to hang a book.

The Mystery of the Chinese Junk

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With the book manuscript handed off to University of New Mexico Press, and fall semester (and grading) done, I’m taking some time off.

CRWUA, or not

I’m skipping CRWUA this year. Y’all seem to be doing fine right now on Colorado River stuff, and to the extent you’re not, I don’t feel like I’ve got much to contribute. As Jack pointed out last week, the reservoirs are up. Plus they haven’t found any new Lake Mead bodies lately. Water use is down, good job y’all.

The Mystery of the Chinese Junk

Cover of the Hardy Boys book The Mystery of the Chinese junk, with the brothers at the wheel of a motorboat.

The Mystery of the Chinese Junk

I’m putting up an away message on my work email, and I’ve squirreled away a few books to pass the time.

First on my list is The Mystery of the Chinese Junk, circa 1960, by “Franklin W. Dixon”. Frank and Joe buy an old Chinese junk. Danger and excitement ensue!

I had a hard time figuring out originals and updates and stuff, but I think the one I got from the library is the original.

Other reading for the break:

  • The Power Broker, by Robert Caro. Robert Moses tries to built stuff in New York City. Danger and excitement ensue!
  • The Secret Panel, by Franklin W. Dixon. Originally published in 1946, I think I’ve got the 1969 revised version, though it’s also got a 1974 copyright date. See above re danger and excitement.
  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. Jacobs confronts Moses’ rebuilding of New York City. Danger and excitement ensue!
  • The Tower Treasure, by Franklin W. Dixon. I’m confused about the dates on this one, the cover suggests a recent re-release, but text looks old-timey, but who cares, it’s a Hardy Boys mystery! Danger and excitement are sure to ensue!

‘So Far, So Good’ for the Colorado River Watershed in 2023

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An Inkstain guest post from Jack Schmidt, crossposted with encouragement from the Utah State University Center for Colorado River Studies

By Jack Schmidt | December 7, 2023

In Summary

By the end of November 2023, storage in the reservoirs of the Colorado River watershed had been reduced 1.73 million acre feet from the high of mid-July. We’ve used 21% of the gains from the exceptional 2023 runoff, a drawdown slower in the annual cycle than in it has been in all but one year of the previous decade. New policies to reduce basin-wide consumptive use may be working. To date, about one-third of losses were from Lake Powell and Lake Mead, one third from CRSP reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell, and one-third from other Upper Basin reservoirs. Losses in the combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead specifically have been much less than in previous years.

Reservoirs are the ultimate buffer between water use and a water crisis, especially during extreme dry spells, such as occurred in 2002-04 and 2020-22. Although the runoff in 2002-04 was worse than the later event, the later one caused relatively more alarm, as reservoir storage was already low. Then the exceptional water year in 2023 provided the second largest runoff of the 21st century and restored some lost storage in the reservoirs. We still have a long way to go to return the reservoir system to full conditions (see blog post, Water Year 2023 in Context: a cautionary tale). There is an imperative to retain as much of the 2023 runoff as possible to create a buffer, especially if another dry spell occurs.

Some Context

The last time the basin’s reservoirs were completely full (in fact, a bit overfull) on July 15, 1983, they held 63.6 million acre feet (af) of water, as reported in Reclamation’s basin-wide reservoir database. Today, the maximum capacity of the reservoir system is a bit extended, due to completion of few new reservoirs (e.g., McPhee and Nighthorse). Reclamation’s database, although quite complete, and reporting the status of 42 reservoirs, does not include every reservoir in the basin (for example, Wolford Mountain, Stagecoach, and Elkhead reservoirs). The data as it stands is still useful for assessing the present condition of basin reservoir storage.

During the 21st century, 60-80% of all reservoir storage (not including storage on Lower Basin tributaries) has been in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the United States. Further downstream on the mainstem river, 4-8% of the basin’s storage occurs in Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu. These reservoirs are typically maintained near full pool. Lake Havasu is operated to provide a stable pumping forebay for California’s Colorado River Aqueduct and for the Central Arizona Project, and Lake Mohave is operated to maximize hydroelectric power generation and to reregulate releases from Lake Mead. These four reservoirs – from Lake Powell to Lake Havasu — store water to meet the needs of the Lower Basin and Mexico. Because there are no significant withdrawals from Lake Powell or in the Grand Canyon, Lake Powell and Lake Mead can be considered one integrated reservoir unit, even though the reservoirs are in the Upper Basin and Lower Basin, respectively. The reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell provide storage for Upper Basin agriculture and trans-basin diversions and account for 16-32% of the total storage in the watershed.

The amount of water in a reservoir is a result of the difference between the amount of water that flows in, and the amount released downstream, as well as the amount that evaporates or seeps into the regional ground water. For ease of writing, “loss” here means the amount of reservoir storage decline—loss results from changes in reservoir inflows, reservoir releases, and evaporation.

How are we doing this year?

Conditions this year are “so far, so good.” Between July 13, 2023, when total storage reached its maximum — 29.7 million af — and November 30, 2023, storage declined by 1.73 million af (Fig. 1). The total gain in storage that occurred from the 2023 snowmelt runoff was 8.38 million af. We have now lost 21% of that original gain. Losses between mid-July and November 30 were only 68,000 af greater than the total losses between mid-July and October 31 (see blog post, Protecting Reservoir Storage Gains from Water Year 2023: how are we doing?), and 79% of the total reservoir storage gained in the 2023 runoff season remains.

Since mid-July, the loss in storage has occurred in three places:

Total storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell between mid-July and November 30 has declined by 540,000 af;
Total storage in other Upper Basin reservoirs of the Colorado River Storage Project (Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, Crystal, Fontenelle, Flaming Gorge, Navajo) during the same period declined by 500,000 af; and,
Total storage in other Upper Basin reservoirs, such as Granby, Dillon, McPhee, Strawberry, Starvation, and Nighthorse, declined by 620,000 af.

figure 1

Figure 1. Graph showing reservoir storage in 2023 in three parts of the watershed, as well as the total storage. Note that most of the loss in basin-wide storage was due to decreases in storage upstream from Lake Powell.

The rate of loss this year is much lower than in any other of the previous ten years (except for 2014 when there were large monsoon season inflows), suggesting that current policies of reducing consumptive use may be working. I calculated the loss in each of the last ten years, beginning on the day of maximum basin storage (Fig. 2). Each curve in this graph represents the loss in storage from the peak of each year. For example, on November 20, 2020, reservoir storage was 4.42 million af less than the peak storage that had occurred on June 18, 2020. In contrast, storage on November 30, 2023, was only 1.73 maf less than the peak storage that occurred on July 17, 2023.

figure 2

Figure 2. Graph showing loss in basin-wide storage from the maximum storage of each year. Note that the losses in 2023 have been less than in any other year except 2014.

 

Management policy concerning where storage is retained and where storage is reduced appears to be in transition. In contrast to previous years, storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead is being reduced very slowly (Fig. 3). Today, storage in these two reservoirs is only 544,000 af less than the mid-July peak, whereas storage in these reservoirs in 2020 was 2.85 million af less than the maximum storage of that year.

 

figure 3

Figure 3. Graph showing loss in the combined contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead from the maximum storage in each year. Note that the losses in 2023 have been less than in any other year, indicating that the combined water storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead remains relatively high.

 

Next week, Colorado River water users and managers will gather for the 2023 Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Las Vegas. The river’s stakeholders are in the midst of negotiating new agreements on how to share the pain of water shortage during the ongoing Millennium Drought, and there is significant interest centered on this event.

Although we ought to feel good about our collective effort to retain desperately needed storage, we must remain vigilant to continue the hard work to reduce consumptive use. Today’s total watershed reservoir storage of 28.0 million af is the same as it was in early May 2021 in the middle of the 2020-2022 dry period (Fig. 4). Let’s hope for a good 2023/2024 winter and spring snowmelt.

figure 4

Figure 4. Graph showing reservoir storage in the 21st century in three parts of the watershed, as well as the total storage. Note that conditions on 30 November 2023, at the far right hand side of the graph, are similar to conditions in early May 2021 and less than during most of the 21st century.

Acknowledgment: Helpful suggestions to a previous draft were provided by Eric Kuhn.

Inkstain mailbag: Why “Ribbons” plural?

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Image of text message reading: "Why 'Ribbons' vs. 'Ribbon'? I can't wait to read all about it."

reader mailbag, except it’s a “text bag”?

Alert reader T texted a question:

Why “Ribbons” vs “Ribbon”? I can’t wait to read all about it.

Thanks, T!

The title of our forthcoming book* Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of a Modern American City comes from a passage in the strange and wonderful book The Desert by John van Dyke.

The desert terraces on either side (sometimes there is a row of sand-dunes) come down to meet these “bottom” lands, and the line where the one leaves off and the other begins is drawn as with the sharp edge of a knife. Seen from the distant mountain tops the river moves between two long ribbons of green, and the borders and the gray and gold mesas of the desert.

So two ribbons, one on each side of the river.

Cover of Peter Wild's book about John van Dyke, with picture of mustached man and cactus

Peter Wild, who lovingly debunked van Dyke’s excesses

Published by Scribner’s in 1901, The Desert is a weird and wonderful book, a milestone in the 20th century cultural evolution of our attitudes toward deserts. Far from being frightening wastes, van Dyke suggested for the first time to a broad audience that deserts were kinda cool.

Its influence hasn’t seemed dented by the work of late 20th century scholars (see Peter Wild, image right) who figured out that van Dyke, umm, embellished his stories about his wanderings – that he mostly rode trains and stayed in railroad hotels rather than riding around on a horse living the desert up close.

I’ve always loved the “ribbons” passage because it touches on my childhood experiences of driving across the desert on epic summer car camping trips – the feeling as you drop down off a mesa toward a community tucked into a valley next to a river, from the brown and hot and and dry into the green and moist and cool.

That’s greater Albuquerque, y’all.

* The Book

As I’ve mentioned approximately 8 jillion times here, Ribbons of Green is being published by the University of New Mexico Press. My co-author Bob Berrens and I spin a yarn about how the modern metropolitan area spreading up and down the river valley from Albuquerque came to be in an institutional dance between people and river.

Coming spring 2025, we hope.

Reader Supported

Thanks as always to Inkstain’s supporters. If you’d like to join them, you can support my work here.

Ribbons of Green: A water book? A city book?

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People board a city bus in downtown Albuquerque. Walter McDonald, 1969, courtesy Albuquerque Museum, object number PA1996.006.036

I have devoted an inordinate amount of time over these last few months thinking about two things: finishing the book, and dreaming about the dreamy freedom of my life after we handed over the manuscript to the University of New Mexico Press.

The book work, finishing the manuscript of Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of a Modern American City, which Bob Berrens and I have been working on for the last three years, has been a joy, but an intense one. We’ve been burning pretty hot. It’s the most ambitious project I’ve ever attempted, out at the edge of my skills.

My dream for The Time After was to dive into Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, a doorstop of a non-fiction tome. I still have to finish my semester’s teaching, and then Lissa and I booked a cottage for a few days in a remote, undisclosed location. My thinking was that Caro’s book – the subtitle is Robert Moses and the Fall of New York – would sweep me away to a new place and a different set of ideas.

Oh, John, you sweet, sweet child.

A water book? A city book?

Water basins at the water treatment plant near downtown Albuquerque. Brooks Studio, 1930. Courtesy Albuquerque Museum, object number PA1978.152.373

A friend who’s been living with my yammering about Ribbons of Green for those three years asked me over the weekend when I realized it was a city book. “I dunno, three weeks ago?” I replied.

It was reasonable to think I was writing a water book. That’s what I do. My friend, who’s been listening to me talk about it week after week, month after month, year after year, as we rode our bikes across the greater Albuquerque metropolitan area’s vast river valley, had known long before I had. Bob and I have written a city book.

This is, in retrospect, unsurprising, a return to my roots.

My first paid writing gig, in the spring of 1981, involved (among other things) sitting in Walla Walla, Washington, city council meetings trying to understand the functioning of a municipal government. I read proposed ordinances and talked to the mayor and listened as traffic engineers explained the decision process for installing stop signs and traffic lights.

I was trying to figure out how a city worked.

A couple of stops down the career track, I was sitting in the Pasadena, California, city hall, still trying to figure out how a city worked. Pasadena had a water agency. What’s up with that? In understanding a community, I came to realize, I could start with its water.

Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses

Chatting at a pub a couple of years ago with two water/planning students, I inadvertently won brownie points with a casual reference to “eyes on the street.” It’s a catch phrase from Jane Jacobs, who wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I wasn’t trying to show off! Jacobs is in the water I’ve been swimming in my whole career, the idea that cities need to be treated as complex, emergent things. Moses, Jacobs’ bête noire, carried with him the Progressive Era optimism for rational planning by smart men. Moses built expressways. He didn’t give a shit about eyes on the street.

Ribbons of Green didn’t start out as an attempt to grapple with the contradictions and conflicts between Progressive Era enthusiasm for central planning and the messy realities of the evolution of a city, but that’s where we ended up.

Albuquerque emerged from the same early 20th century Progressive Era thinking that spawned Moses. To build a city, the Progressives needed to solve the problems posed by building that city on a river valley floor.

“Flood control, drainage, and irrigation” is a leitmotif in the book – the driving motivations behind the project needed to build a city here. But the smart men of Albuquerque’s Progressive Era management never accumulated the power Moses did, instead crashing headlong into the messy realities of emergent city-making Jacobs described. Those messy realities are the subject of Ribbons of Green.

Crucially for our book, it was always water management in service of city-making. My old realization that to understand a community, I could start with its water, seems to fit. So definitely a city book?

Definitely a water book

Yeah, but the city – a linked urban/surbuban/peri-urban/rural collection of communities stretching 160 miles along the Rio Grande Valley – is built now. It is, à la Jacobs, forever emerging, never done. But as climate change saps the Rio Grande’s flows, throwing into ever sharper relief the community values both shared and conflicting, what shall we do?

The water management institutions we built to create a city, the ones we describe in the book, remain the ones we have available to answer that question.

So definitely a water book.