From the work blog:

Corky Herkenhoff, who’s been farming at San Acacia for half a century, told me he can tell where the runoff is coming from by the smell. San Acacia sits just below the Rio Puerco and Rio Salado, two generally dry tributaries that have been pumping water into the Rio Grande over the last week. Herkenhoff said he can tell the difference. “You can tell when the Rio Puerco comes in, and you can tell when the Rio Salado comes in,” he said.

In the midst of a very unusual storm (see my newspaper explanation of its unusualness here), I’ve spent much of the last 24 hours watching a big slug of water make its way down the Rio Grande Valley in which Albuquerque sits. A source yesterday afternoon pointed me to the readings on the USGS San Felipe gauge, which had popped up over 9,000 cubic feet per second. For this spot on this river, upstream from Albuquerque, that is a lot of water. We quickly committed journalism, the water managers rallied their modelers and calculated estimated peak flows and arrival times, the municipal authorities went into hyperdrive. And then we waited.

This was not a “wall of water” type of flow, but as modeled, it was likely to be up near the largest flow we’ve had in Albuquerque in the post-dam era. So we staked out the bridges, as did a hoard horde of residents, to watch our briefly big river roll past. (My colleague Rob Browman illustrated this part nicely.)

After work, Lissa and I went out in the pitch dark so she could see it, and then I spent today following the pig in the python downstream. It’s a slow-moving, easy-to-track thing: midnight at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue bridge, noon today at Los Lunas south of here, rising as I write this at Bosque, the gauge in the far southern end of Valencia County.

The thing that was hard to capture was the quiet nature of the event. We think of “floods” as tempestuous, but as I wrote this morning, one of the reasons the flow was less than expected is the way the river spread gently into the woods alongside its main channel. Upstream, the river has been incising into its old flood plain, so the spreading is only possible in places where human intervention, in the form of habitat restoration, has created low areas, swales and side channels for endangered critters. To the south, the river made it out of its banks on its own.

I am not a photojournalist, but I’m trying to learn how to take pictures that tell stories. Here’s one attempt, a cottonwood in a normally dry bosque forest with a soft blanket of water at its feet:

Quiet water in the cottonwood bosque, John Fleck, 9/14/2013

From yesterday’s newspaper:

The (San Juan) basin, in northwestern New Mexico, has every competing water interest you’d want in the mix if you were creating a recipe for conflict: Native American water rights (the Navajo and Jicarilla Apache nations), endangered species (the Colorado pikeminnow and razorback sucker), farming large and small, city water use and a couple of big coal-fired power plants. Also, not one but two interstate water compacts lurk in the background.

As Navajo Reservoir on the San Juan River dropped, the risk of conflict was enormous.

“We were looking into an abyss,” Leeper said.

But rather than fire up the lawyers and prepare to fight over the dwindling supplies, the basin’s water users began talking. When 2003 started looking every bit as dismal, they had a negotiated agreement in place to share the shortages.

Albuquerque’s Rio Grande is currently not much of a river.

River No More: the Rio Grande as seen from Albuquerque’s west bluff neighborhood, Sept. 8, 2013, by John Fleck

Lissa and I made the rounds this afternoon of a few Rio Grande viewpoints. This is from Albuquerque’s West Bluff neighborhood, on the west side of the river north of downtown. The bridge in the distance is Montaño.

With an abysmal snowpack, the river was dropping fast in June, but a wet July rescued flows temporarily. As August dried out, though, the river started dropping again. The gauge at Central Ave., the most important measure for regulatory purposes, is down this weekend, but the Paseo del Norte gauge, at 137 cfs, is the lowest it’s been all year. The Central gauge has typically been 50 to 100 cfs below the Paseo gauge all year (data here), so I’d only be guessing based on past performance that the Central flow well south of 100 cfs. Eyeballing it from around Central, it sure looked lower than in early July, when it briefly reached the mid-70s.

Maybe it’ll rain this week.