August 2025 – jfleck at inkstain
Archive of entries posted on August 2025| jfleck at inkstain
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
Jack Schmidt Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University 14 July 2025 Water stored in the reservoirs of the Colorado River represents the account balance from which we draw water for u…| 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
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling ...Continue reading ‘138,000 cfs’ »| jfleck at inkstain
And what if it is love one is trying to understand, that strange unmanageable phenomenon or form of life, source at once of illumination and confusion, agony and beauty? Love, in its many varieties, and their tangled relations to the good human life, to aspiration, to general social concern? What parts of oneself, what method, ...Continue reading ‘Quoting Martha Nussbaum’ »| jfleck at inkstain
Formed in a series of volcanic eruptions between 1 and 2 million years ago, the Jemez Mountains dominate the cultural and environmental history of central New Mexico. For more than four decades, forest ecologist Craig Allen has studied them, engaging in what has come to be known as “place-based ecology,” with deep roots in what ...Continue reading ‘Craig Allen joins us on the Utton Center’s Water Matters! podcast’ »| jfleck at inkstain
If you have ever been to modern San Marcial, New Mexico – or what is left of it – the notion of an 86-pound catfish requires some explanation. The spot where D.C. George hooked his record catfish is today ragged scrubland. But for a brief, shining, extremely odd period of time in the 1940s and ...Continue reading ‘The 86-pound catfish of Lake San Marcial’ »| jfleck at inkstain
University of Arizona economist Bonnie Colby on why the enduring opposition to water transfers out of agriculture goes beyond price: This is not surprising given third party economic effects when i…| jfleck at inkstain
With the latest Bureau of Reclamation model runs highlighting the serious risks posed by the declining reservoir levels that Utah State’s Jack Schmidt has been warning about, there are signs …| jfleck at inkstain
A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico| jfleck at inkstain
By Eric Kuhn, John Fleck, and Jack Schmidt On January 16th, the Bureau of Reclamation released the January 2025 24-Month Study. Based on the January 1st runoff forecast into Lake Powell, the projec…| jfleck at inkstain
