Alternative blog post title: No Bad Days on the Bike In the picture above, you might be looking at the spot where the Air Force in 1957 accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on the mesa south of Albuquerque. Nuclear history nerds have dropped their Google map pins at a couple of places along this two-track dirt ...Continue reading ‘Broken Arrow’ »| jfleck at inkstain
NEAR THE CONFLUENCE OF THE RIO PUERCO AND THE RIO GRANDE – The broad delta where the Rio Puerco meets the Rio Grande in central New Mexico has never been a great place to live, though people …| jfleck at inkstain
Alert Inkstain reader Rolf asked in the comments of last weekend’s post for a version of the above graph – number of days of low flow at the Central Avenue Bridge – with a threshold above zero. I usually set the threshold at 25, because our experience in the last two drying episodes – 2022 ...Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s Dry Middle Rio Grande: More Data Visualizations’ »| jfleck at inkstain
I spent some time this morning crunching numbers, trying to make numerical sense of how bad this year is on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande. We keep saying it’s only the second time the Rio Grande has dried through Albuquerque since the 1980s, but that felt insufficient. Some data visualization experiments: By this measure – ...Continue reading ‘Driest on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande since when? 1972? 1964?’ »| jfleck at inkstain
By John Fleck, Anne Castle, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen, and Katherine Tara As we await Friday’s (Aug. 15, 2025) release of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River 24-Month Study, we need to remember a painful lesson of the last five years of crisis management: whatever you see in Reclamation’s report of the “Most ...Continue reading ‘Awaiting the Colorado River 24-Month Study’ »| jfleck at inkstain
WHIDBEY ISLAND – It’s a five minute walk to the beach from the place we’re staying on Whidbey Island. It’s a pebbly beach, not like the soft sands of Oxnard where I first met (and in one case, fell in love with) the folks around me this week. Time has lifted and moved us, depositing ...Continue reading ‘Glacial Erratics’ »| jfleck at inkstain