Inspired by these insanely cool California drought visualizations from Circle of Blue, here’s a drought history in New Mexico over the last 14 years:
The data come from the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly report on drought conditions around the United States. Here’s more info on the category designations.
Mule deer, Far View cafeteria, Mesa Verde, May 2014
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Simply put, no environmental law has had as much impact on western rivers–or created as much controversy–as section 7 of the ESA.
I’m on record as arguing that the Endangered Species Act is a terrible water management tool, while simultaneously being not terribly effective as an environmental tool. But you manage water and environmental values with the tools you have, not the ones you might wish to have. So the screw has a Phillips head and all you’ve got in your pocket is a regular screwdriver. Reed Benson, quoted above, is more clever than I am about how to use the tools already in your pocket.
In this case, he’s writing about the recent decision in NRDC v. Jewell (pdf), regarding Central Valley Project water delivery contract renewals, and the question of where the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s “discretion” might lie:
For most projects, the question will be whether Reclamation has enough discretion in operations–that is, in storing and releasing water for irrigation and/or other purposes–that it can make changes for the benefit of listed species affected by those operations.
Discretion remains murky, but Reed’s arguing that the USBR has more of it than we might think.
In Albuquerque, we frequently tear down our old Route 66 motels, but keep their signs:
Aztec Motel sign, Albuquerque, New Mexico, May 2014
Ruins of the Desert Sun Motel on old 66, Grants, NM
CL EAN ARGE R OO MS
The Desert Sun Motel is frozen at $19.95 a night (and up):
CLEAN ARGE R OO MS
$19/95& UP
FREE COF EE
CABLE TV HBO ESP
VACANCY
It looks like a project stalled in mid-renovation, though it’s hard to see how this could have ended well if the owners had continued to spend money. It’s on old Route 66 on the east end of Grants, New Mexico. I expect that it was a product of the best intentions of Route 66 tourism nostalgia. German tourists renting Harleys love this stuff. The doors were standing open, and the windows had all been removed. In a few of the rooms, I saw fresh drywall, as if the carpenter was due back any day. Just down the road at the freeway interchange was a fresh-looking Quality Inn and Suites, a Super 8 and a Travelodge. Tough to compete with the freeway-close brand names, I guess.
Still, the old place had ESP? For $19.95 a night? Such a deal.
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.
My search for water in the desert took Lissa and I this afternoon up US 160 from Teec Nos Pos in Arizona’s far northeastern corner, past the Four Corners Monument and into Colorado, where the highway crosses the San Juan River. Teec Nos Pos has a weather station that averages 8.09 inches (20.55 cm) of precipitation a year, but this landscape looks far drier. I feel like I’m zeroing in on what water in the desert looks like:
San Juan River north of Teec Nos Pos, Arizona. By John Fleck, May 2014
Delores Brown, center, holding one of her mother’s rugs in a picture taken a long time ago. From the bulletin board at the Toadlena Trading Post
tl;dr Lissa and I met a man today who saw Big Foot in the foothills of the Chuska Mountains on the Navajo Nation west of Newcomb, New Mexico. He could neither hear nor speak, but we have no reason to doubt his story. Lissa misplaced her purse, which was easily found, and we bought a Two Grey Hills rug. The ice cream man no longer delivers to Toadlena. These things are all connected.
TOADLENA – Of this much I am sure. Arthur J. Belone from Toadlena Mountain saw Big Foot on the piñon-juniper hillside behind the Toadlena Trading Post in the foothills of the Chuska Mountains on May 14, 2013. There were two inches of snow on the ground.
Because Arthur can neither hear nor speak, the details are murky, but we have no reason to doubt Arthur’s story. He gestured easily to his ears and mouth to make clear the communication challenge, but didn’t hesitate to initiate a conversation anyway. He pointed to his foot, raised it, and gestured with his hand to indicate the size of a much larger foot. Then he pointed to the hillside.
We were sitting on a low wall outside the Toadlena Trading Post, 12 miles off US 491 near Newcomb on the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico. The trading post is one of those old stone buildings that in this part of the country sit at the intersection between traditional culture and the cash economy. Inside, in a warren of rug rooms, are gorgeous Two Grey Hills weavings.
Delores Brown, who was minding the store, said the ice cream man no longer delivers here, at the end of this long road. When we stopped by late in the afternoon to recover Lissa’s misplaced purse, we had just missed Delores’s mother and sister, who had been by a few minutes earlier to bring the ice cream. Her mother, Violet Brown, is a weaver of some renown, as was her grandmother, the late Yazzie Blackhorse. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Arthur J. Belone’s are the shoes of a runner
Arthur had the lean build of a runner – Delores mentioned marathons – but he sadly pointed to his knee. He carried a Bic ballpoint, tucked into a glasses case clipped to the collar of his t-shirt from the 15th Annual Toadlena Challenge (8k and 2 mile). He used the pen when gestures fell short. “I can’t run any more,” he wrote in the margin of a copy of the Navajo Times Lissa had been carrying.
It was via that technique – his ballpoint or my mechanical pencil, and Lissa’s Navajo Times or my yellow Rite in the Rain notebook – that he clarified the Big Foot story – the date, the depth of snow. He also shared some family history that I won’t go into, and described either deer or elk coming down from the mountains, hopping the fence and eating crab apples from the orchard across the road. Delores described Arthur as being remarkably chatty for a man who can neither hear nor speak. I could not disagree.
It was only several hours later, when we had stopped at the Saturday flea market up the road in Shiprock, that Lissa realized she must have left her purse in one of the rug rooms where we had been sitting on the floor laying out rugs and dreaming. It wasn’t all that much bother, because we were just wandering, so we wandered back down US 491 to the turnoff north of Newcomb and headed back out the road to Toadlena. There had been sheep on the road earlier. We hoped to see them again.
Delores was happy to see us. She said she’d been uncomfortable poking through Lissa’s purse to figure out who it belonged to, found a phone number and left a message. It wouldn’t have helped. The cell phone was in the purse. And then Delores started telling stories – about the few grandmothers who still go up in the mountains in the summer with the sheep, about the time her mother tried to teach her to weave, about snakes and growing squash, about the ice cream problem and that it was too bad, we’d just missed meeting her mother.
Lissa asked if they had any of her mother’s weavings. Delores said yes. And so it was that we became the owners of a beautiful Violet Brown weaving.
Violet Brown weaving
The “Mummy Lake” or “Far View Reservoir” site at Mesa Verde, which is probably not about water. May, 2014
Lissa and I stopped this morning at Mesa Verde’s “Mummy Lake”, more recently renamed “Far View Reservoir,” on account of apparently there was never any mummy. Now we learn, thanks to science, that there was probably never a reservoir or lake, either:
The structure at Mesa Verde National Park known historically as Mummy Lake and more recently as Far View Reservoir is not part of a water collection, impoundment, or redistribution system. We offer an alternative explanation for the function of Mummy Lake. We suggest that it is an unroofed ceremonial structure, and that it serves as an essential component of a Chacoan ritual landscape.
That’s from “Mummy Lake: an unroofed ceremonial structure within a large-scale ritual landscape”, by Benson et al., Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 44, April 2014, Pages 164–179.
Joseph Castro did a nice writeup on the research, which is how I found out about it. Castro explains that Benson and colleagues concluded that there likely would never have been enough water to fill it, and the features originally thought of as canals to collect and distribute water would likely have plugged up with sediment or leaked over cliffs if they were actually used to collect or distribute water.
L. Heineman at Petroglyph Point, Mesa Verde, May 2014
There’s an easy grace in spending a warm spring Friday afternoon with my partner of more than 30 years, looking at things we’ve looked at a million times before.