jfleck at inkstain

“big messy community conversations”

jfleck — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:50:11 +0000

Arenal Canal, Atrisco in Albuquerque’s near South Valley. June 2026. By John Fleck

I made a brief stop at a dry Rio Grande main channel this morning, around the Central Avenue Bridge, before I pointed the Space Ghost southwest into the South Valley. The Arenal Canal, which hugs the sand hills on the valley’s western edge, was flowing, but just 25 cubic feet per second. 100 cfs is typical in the Arenal at this time of year, according to the MRGCD-USBR dataset.

I had intended to ride down Foothill, a “comfort food” ride that mostly hugs the Arenal, which mostly hugs the sandhills, but it turned into a “What happens if I turn here?” kind of day instead.

I am obsessed with green these days, the vegetation kind of green, as the river and the ditches go dry in a year that, by one measure (current flow into New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley at Otowi) is the driest since we started measuring the river’s flow in 1895.*

One of the best questions I got at Tuesday’s book launch talk at Bookworks (did I mention Bob Berrens and I have a new book out this week) was from a guy who asked what climate change would mean to the future of our community. My answer was annoyingly simple: Our community will be less green.

The distribution of Albuquerque’s green. (color represents evapotranspiration on heavily vegetated pixels). Map by me.

That’s what we do with water. Our indoor water is largely recycled, put back into the Rio Grande to support a riparian ecosystem and downstream users. The consumptive share of our water use is applied to landscapes to make our city green.

The map is one of my experiments in using satellite data to get a better handle on how we’re actually using water. I’m increasingly frustrated by a discourse focused on water agencies. As I put it in a thing I’m writing with some colleagues, agencies don’t use water, people do. Many Albuquerque neighborhoods on the valley floor get water from multiple sources – municipal pipes, domestic wells, and ditches. Lots of homes have access to all three.

This particular map uses data from the OpenET project, focusing on heavily vegetated pixels and calculating how much water they use. The details of the numbers are less important than the overall story it suggests: some parts of our community are a lot greener than others.

The near South Valley, the neighborhood I rode this morning, is an interesting example. Home values and median household income (US Census data yada yada) are lower than the county average. And compared to the much more affluent neighborhoods to the north (Los Ranchos de Albuquerque and the rest of Albuquerque’s North Valley), this part of the South Valley is a lot less green. But there was a lot of shade for me to ride beneath as I drained the two water bottles I carried. Lots of tree-lined ditches to ride to beat the heat.

The map tells this story. This part of the South Valley is one of the greener parts of the metro area.

big messy community conversations

Sarena Ulibarri, one of my UNM Press peeps, captured this in the quote she shared on Mastodon after the Bookworks event (sorry, I can’t figure out how to link directly to a Mastodon post, I’m not good at Internet):

Happy Book Birthday to RIBBONS OF GREEN by @jfleck, which should be essential reading for anyone interested in the complex relationships between cities and nature, the ways that collective action can help us adapt to climate change, and the “big messy community conversations” we need to have to create policies that actually work.

The quote – “big messy community conversations” – is the key bit here. There’s a bunch of regulatory apparatus and political and legal tools that needs to come into play – well metering orders, (“Please,” he pleaded to his friends at the Office of State Engineer, “domestic wells, OK?”), potential constraints on municipal pumping, AWRM (“Active Water Resource Management,” we actually say it “A-worm”), that sort of thing. Whatever we do will be driven in large part by our Rio Grande Compact obligation to our downstream neighbors, either by proactive measures before we end up in court, or by reactive measures after we get sued for stiffing our neighbors in southern New Mexico and Texas for the water we owe them. Either way, the result will be that we use less water, and stuff is less green. The question is where?

What I’m interested in, what I was thinking about and trying to talk about as I sat before that delightful audience Tuesday night at Bookworks, is the big messy community conversation we need to have about what we desire for our community’s future, how we get beyond the legal formalisms of the whole thing and find a way to talk about our desired future conditions for our community, and how we go about sharing the water.

* n.b. By another measure – total flow to date past Otowi – it’s the third driest year in history, behind 1904 and 1977.

Colorado River Basin – new report from my colleagues on the implications of running on empty

jfleck — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:34:32 +0000

I’ve been on a “Colorado River sabbatical” of late, but I took a peek last week at Reclamation’s latest 24-month study. Holy moly things have gotten bad since the last time I looked!

Those not on sabbatical already know all of this, but to keep Lake Powell above a surface elevation of 3,500 feet, Reclamation is:

increasing releases out of Flaming Gorge on the Wyoming-Utah border
dropping releases out of Lake Powell to 6 million acre feet this year

Even with those two “hail Mary” moves, Lake Mead is projected in the “most probable” scenario to drop to elevation 1,020 by summer 2027. Under the “minimum probable” forecast, Mead drops all the way to elevation 1,008 in 2027.

We are on the brink, as a group of my colleagues explains in a new analysis out this morning (Monday June 1, 2026), of a system crash:

If the Colorado River Basin (Basin) experiences another dry year, similar to Water Year 2025, it is likely that reasonably accessible storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead would be mostly depleted, even if consumptive uses and losses are at or near historic lows. Run-of-the-river operations would shortly ensue. This would be an outcome with devastating consequences.

That’s from the latest report from the team of Castle-Schmidt-Kuhn-Sorensen-Tara, the Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River. I’ve been on “sabbatical”, so I didn’t work on this one with my friends. (The joke is that I’m busy catching up on old movies, which is at least partly true, did you know Billy Wilder made, like, 50 movies?)

Even a wet year, my friends conclude, would only provide a short reprieve from the need to significantly reduce consumptive use.

Building on a similar analysis done last September (I was a co-author on that one), the authors attempt to overcome one of the shortcomings of the traditional Colorado River accounting systems, which is to treat any water above “dead pool” as usable storage. This is not the case, with clear do-not-cross lines in the reservoirs that are maintained for technical reasons well above the bottom, defined by my colleagues as…

“realistically accessible storage” (hereafter, “RAS”) in the major reservoirs. RAS is the water available above protected elevations determined by Reclamation. These levels are 3500 feet in Lake Powell, and 975 feet in Lake Mead. “Active storage” is a term widely used in water resource engineering and refers to all the stored water that is above “dead pool” that could theoretically be released. This is the metric of storage reported by Reclamation in the 24-Month Study. Forecasts of active storage may not be fully illuminating, however, because Reclamation currently intends to protect higher levels in the reservoirs.

One of the reasons for my “sabbatical” is, frankly, an agonized frustration with the abject failure of Colorado River governance at the basin scale, and a desire to turn my attention to the local level, which is where the problem solving responsibility seems to rest right now. Each community needs to be having a serious conversation right now about the specifics of its Colorado River water supply, and how it intends to go about using less. Blaming other people for using too much isn’t particularly useful at this point, we seem to have chosen to hand that set of questions (the rule-based part of “who is entitled to how much”) over to the courts, and who knows what that process holds. We know the answer for everyone is “use less water”, and each community needs to be getting on with that conversation.

The full report is here.

Bob and I got our pictures in the paper!

jfleck — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:13:22 +0000

I made the hometown paper. Bob, too.

Going through our chaotic collection of old maps at the H-F house, I found a treasure: 2003 BLM map of Albuquerque and vicinity that I’d used to mark a bunch of bike rides with highlighter. Pre-GPS era. I’ve been at this for a long time.

My favorite social media response to the announcement of our new book’s release came from old Internet pal Kim Hannula:

This sounds like the jfleckiest book possible. (Or it would if there are recommended bike rides at the end of each chapter.)

My response:

The bike rides are there, but kinda hiding out, you have to know where to look.

Ribbons of Green: the Rio Grande and the Making of Modern Albuquerque is about a river and a city, the endless interplay between the two. (To learn more, join us Tuesday at Bookworks!) It’s not a bike riding book. Except it sorta is?

I gotta be honest, I’m nervous! Writing a book is an act of tremendous hubris – thinking one has something sufficiently worthwhile to say that people should spend their money and time with one’s ideas.

To calm my nerves, I met up this morning with my trusty bike riding and book research field work buddy at Albuquerque’s Old Town Plaza. Book or not, our Sunday bike rides anchor my week. We rode west to Gabaldon Drive, one of the first places where we began the “bike riding as book research field work” schtick – maybe 2019? I had an old aerial photo from the 1929 floods, and we were trying place the river’s un-leveed 1929 path on the modern landscape. Today, Gabaldon is half a mile from the river channel. Back in 1929, it was at the river’s edge.

Thus began a practice that has served me well. First, moving back and forth between old maps and modern urban structures, and doing it on bikes, has been central to my understanding of the landscape I’m trying to write about. I can feel the subtle ups and downs of a valley floor shaped by the river long before we built stuff on top of the sediments the Rio Grande laid down. I can feel the old twisty streets of village life, and the overlay of grids as sequential waves of urbanity swept over the landscape.

Second, it’s a blast. At age 67, riding bikes still triggers little kid “let’s go on an adventure!” feels.

We rode up through Duranes and picked up the Duranes Lateral, one of the old community acequias dating to olden times that still thread the valley floor. The Duranes is today a suburban ditch, and it’s slow going, often slowing down to walking pace so as not to alarm the locals out for their Sunday walk. The ditch network is the best way to ride bikes through Albuquerque, but it’s a shared space, and we try to respect the locals.

Stopped for lunch under one of the big old cottonwoods up on the north side of Dietz Farm, a branch fell down and didn’t hit us. (We’ve got some fun cottonwood business in the book, set just down the ditch from our lunch stop. The Duranes is in the book!) A mom and her young son walked past, headed for one of the flowing ditches with their fishing poles. Thick places.

As we turned to head back south, it was starting to heat up, so we switched onto roads – faster for the trip home to beat the heat. Until we saw the open gate. It was on the Griegos Lateral, but a stretch we’d not ridden because the gate was always closed. A talk with one of the ditch walkers confirmed that we could get out on the downstream end – they explained that we wanted the bigger of the two holes in the fence. Local knowledge. Place. That’s the practice.

2026-05-19: Federal managers increase release for the silvery minnow

jfleck — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:53:24 +0000

Dropping when it should be rising: Flow at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge, May 2026

Federal water managers yesterday (May 18, 2026) began pushing a pulse of water through New Mexico’s rapidly drying Middle Rio Grande to try to encourage the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow to spawn.

From a note sent ’round to the Bureau’s water management list yesterday by Carolyn Donnelly, water operations supervisor for the bureau’s Albuquerque Operations Office:

Due to the record low snowpack and well above normal temperatures in March, the Rio Grande did not have a typical spring flow increase. That type of spring flow increase is what triggers the Rio Grande silvery minnow to spawn, and without it, the silvery minnow spawn has been minimal this year. Because 2026 is the third poor hydrologic year in a row, silvery minnow numbers are concerningly low.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service therefore asked the Bureau of Reclamation to use its leased San Juan – Chama water to create a brief higher flow through Albuquerque, hoping to trigger a more robust silvery minnow spawn. Crews will be out in the river this week collecting silvery minnow eggs to provide to hatcheries for later augmentation and broodstock.

Flows at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge have been hovering around 10 cubic feet per second. The river’s managers bumped the release out of Cochiti Dam at the head of the valley by 250 cfs yesterday. (The increase actually started upstream at Abiquiu Reservoir Sunday.) The water being released was imported from the Colorado River Basin via the San Juan-Chama diversions in the mountains of southern Colorado, then leased by the USBR from San Juan-Chama contractors not using their full allotment.

The inordinate mental cost of writing the preceding paragraph at 5:37 a.m. reminded me of the complexity. “The Bureau increased”? “The Army Corps of Engineers increase”? USFWS? SJC? And what happens as the water passes through the system? It’s passing a bunch of Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (a local agency) diversions, which will have to be managed to keep water in the main channel for the fish. Stunningly polycentric, this system.

Or maybe I just need to finish my second cup of coffee. The 2026 water year is testing a lot of our mental and emotional faculties, and the chemicals we use to manage them. It’s a good thing weed is now legal in New Mexico.

Why our ribbons are still green, but with a dry river at their heart

jfleck — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:17:58 +0000

City Well #3, monitoring groundwater in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque.

I’ve been riding the last few weeks down around the Rio Grande and Central Avenue in Albuquerque. I’m trying to make sense of Albuquerque’s relationship with a drying Rio Grande.

One of the rides followed some twisting single-track trail between the river and Tingley Beach, a city park built in the 1930s. Tingley Beach replaced the old swimming holes lost when Albuquerque first built the levees and drains that today line the river through the city.

I walked the trails’ twistiest parts, to better enjoy the cool of the woods and not alarm the dog walkers and bird walkers. Collective action at the scale of community requires owning the differences among the relationships we all have with these public spaces. Our values sometimes compete and conflict, and an old man zooming on a gravel bike didn’t really mix with the others’ peaceful pace.

The bosque is green, with the sounds of birds I could not name. (One of the walkers, a birder, humored me when I asked by naming the bird making each call, but her demeanor suggested she would prefer I let her bird in peace).

When I cut through thickets on the little footpaths out to the river, mostly made by the unhoused seeking shelter, I saw a Rio Grande nearly dry. Flow through Albuquerque right now is the driest at this point in the year since 1972.

institutions and community values

We, as a community, have done a remarkable job of preserving the riparian corridor between the levees as a public, quasi-natural, widely accessible urban park. It has a paved multi-use trail the length of the city, 15 miles of grade-separated loveliness, with access points to the woods and the river along most of that length. A little zigging and zagging adds another 10 miles to that. It’s glorious. Levee riding is the best.

Motivated by my co-author Bob Berrens’ thinking about the nature and role of institutions, with our lodestars Elinor Ostrom and Daniel Bromley as methodological guides, we tried in Ribbons of Green to piece together the evolution of the institutions by which we have managed Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande, in the process enabling the very existence of the thing today we know as “Albuquerque.” Lots of chicken-and-egg going on in this book.

The result is a historical narrative that gives me the breathing room to make sense of the contradiction at the heart of last week’s bike ride – a beloved, well tended bosque, and a river in its heart going dry. How can such a contradiction exist?

the Oxbow and the creation of Rio Grande state park

Our chapter on the evolution of Albuquerque’s rising environmental consciousness is anchored on the 1970s political fight over an old stranded river meander known today as “the Oxbow,” located on the west side of the river at the base of the bluffs just upstream from St. Pius High School.

Pinned between levees built in the 1930s to eliminate the river’s “menace,” the Rio Grande was largely forgotten by the community save those occasions when the river rose up and breached the levees.

By the 1970s, a rising environmental consciousness, a shift in community values, began to change the relationship. There were calls for park-like river access, and efforts to treat the emerging riverside bosque as a thing of value to the people who lived around it and of value for its own sake. The storytelling political crisis, the moment we use in our narrative, is a battle over the Oxbow, as water managers tried to drain an “inefficient” use of scarce water and community members called for a more expansive value that included the birds and the fish and the frogs and the cattails dependent on that water as an efficiency of a different sort.

By 1983, the politics had crystallized around state legislation designating the land between the levees as Rio Grande state park. The process through which the institution emerged is crucial to understand. Shifting community values were codified in legislative actions involving state and local governments.

Local values, reified through local institutions.

The resulting structure of governance we created has become a framework for the management of the bosque. We have delightfully engaged public conversations about trails and tree thinning and fire prevention, with roles under the legal institutional structure for the city and the county and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District and more. It’s not that the framework compels answers. We argue, and disagree! It’s that it provides a structure for our arguments over competing and conflicting values and desired future conditions. It is ours.

the Endangered Species Act and the Rio Grande silvery minnow

Compare that framework with the framework for flows in the river itself. There, the institutional framework is the Endangered Species Act, a federal law passed in 1973.

In August 1994, the federal government declared the Rio Grande silvery minnow “endangered,” triggering a process that continues today to guide management decisions about keeping water in the river to keep this specific species of fish alive. This is the institutional framework that governs flows in the Rio Grande through Albuquerque – not a product of local values and deliberation, but instead those values offloaded onto a federal law for their pursuit and protection. From our book:

The legal and policy framework around the Endangered Species Act meant that community values were not the issue. It didn’t matter whether the people of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley cared about the minnow. Unlike saving the Oxbow or creating Rio Grande State Park, preserving the minnow did not require building public support and political coalitions. Once the Endangered Species Act listing elevated the minnow into the public consciousness, scholars looking for it found evidence that the public valued the minnow and a flowing river to keep it alive. Still, it was not public support that drove the resulting management process; instead, the legal ins and outs of the Endangered Species Act and the web of federal funding and authorities became the arena of action.

The footnote behind that “scholars looking for it found evidence” is a link to an amazing body of work by Robert P. Berrens, my Ribbons of Green co-author. His research showed clear evidence that community values did, in fact, support efforts to save the minnow and maintain a flowing river. The problem was that the arena of action was the bizarrely bureaucratic and litigious Endangered Species Act process rather than the sort of robust community discussion that led the creation of Rio Grande State Park.

That difference echoes today, with a lovely maintained bosque for my bike ride, and a main river channel going dry because the Endangered Species Act by itself has proven insufficient to keep water in the river’s main channel.

the time shift of ushering a book into the world

The time shift imposed by the gap between writing a book and the book’s emergence into the world is weird. Bob Berrens and I crept into the decision to write what became Ribbons of Green nearly six years ago, sitting on Bob’s porch, and my porch, and walking our neighborhood during those awful pandemic months of 2020. (Walking and yakking is central to our practice.) We did the bulk of the writing in 2023, with significant rewriting/polishing in 2024 and ’25, though the underlying research and conversation is an ongoing process.

With the book about to emerge into the world (June 2 at Bookworks in Albuquerque, y’all, come join us!), I’ve been thinking with a sharp new focus on Albuquerque and its relationship with the Rio Grande. The river is raising very different questions in 2026 than it did in 2023, when we did the bulk of the writing. It was a wet year. We wrote about overbanking and “flood ops”. But the central questions are unchanged: what is the institutional mix we’ve inherited, why does it have the shape it has, and is it sufficient to meet the challenges of the future?

Watching as the river again goes dry through the New Mexico’s largest city while the communities that flank it continue to pull water out of the river to maintain the green spaces that many of us so clearly value puts a sharp focus on those questions.

That’s the tradeoff that I’m focused on these days. We have less water, there will be less green – less water diverted into irrigation ditches, pumped from the poorly counted and completely unquantified domestic wells on the valley floor, hoovered up from Albuquerque’s deep aquifer and piped to my house to keep the little larkspur meadow beside my driveway green (tiny, it’s tiny!). Do we have the right institutional mix to make good choices not simply about which agency uses less water, but what we value, what we would like to keep, and what we must give up?

The Farmers Almanac Says We’re Gonna Have a Wet Summer

jfleck — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:40:36 +0000

With enough infrastructure, all droughts are shallow?

Seen on the bike

Monsoon forecast

The Barelas (aka “Little Ditch”) was running when I rode up to its heading this morning. Hardly ever see that. It’s a favorite. Guy walking his dog told me the Farmers Almanac says we’re gonna have a wet summer. Epistemologically solid.

Trespassing

A lady weeding in her front yard explained that I should just ignore the ginormous “PRIVATE PROPERTY” sign at the end of the street to cut through to get to the Duranes Lateral. Just be sure to close the gate, she said. Local norms FTW.

Mariachi

Technically not on the ride, but on the drive home, past the cemetery on Edith with the windows rolled down on a lovely spring morning, heard a mariachi band playing at a funeral. Local norms FTW.

Quoting Matt Webb

jfleck — Fri, 08 May 2026 10:46:49 +0000

Incidentally GTA6 is coming out in November and apparently it cost $1 billion to make.

Gonna play the heck out of it not just for the music but because of its status as a cultural artefact: the final big game built before LLMs.

No-one will ever invest that much in a game again, no software will ever encode this quantity of hands-on human labour again. The last of the great pyramids.

– Matt Webb

June 2, Bookworks

jfleck — Wed, 06 May 2026 20:10:36 +0000

I’d be delighted if you could join us June 2 at Bookworks

In which I hold our book in my hands. Photo by L. Heineman

I was sitting on the front porch early this afternoon with my eyes on the street when the postman come up the front walk holding a book-shaped package. I walked up to him, reached out, and held it in my hands.

The kind folks at Bookworks and the Leopold Writing Program, with some help from UNM Press, have arranged a book launch event June 2.

I could not have dreamed of a better place than Bookworks to launch Ribbons of Green into the world, for two reasons. First, Bookworks remains a canonical bookstore. Second and more important for our book, it sits at the heart of one of the most important neighborhoods in Albuquerque for the narrative of our book. It was here, just around the corner on the Griegos lateral, that we imagine a young Max Gutierrez standing on the ditchbank watching flood waters finally claim the old village of Los Ranchos.

Just down the road is Max’s old farm, now home to Valley High School. His parents and brothers and in-laws had property scattered all through Los Griegos and Los Candelarias, and the evolution of these neighborhoods, from acequia villages to modern peri-urban suburbs of a growing.

Just up the road is Melquiades Montaño’s old farm, once a swamp, now a treasured community open space (Los Poblanos Open Space) farmed in alfalfa. Tracing a line from there down through Max’s neighborhood, just 550 feet east of Bookworks, is the Griegos Drain, built in the early 1930s to drain the valley’s swamps, changing the flood plain on which we built our city forever. We’re pretty sure Max’s father-in-law’s house is one of the properties condemned by the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District because it was in the path of the drain.

One of the challenges in book like Bob and I have tried to write with Ribbons of Green is the movement back and forth from the general – the broad conceptual superstructure of the project – to the specific – the lives of people like Max and the places they called home. The boundaries between what Bob wrote and what I wrote in this book are opaque even to me, but I feel like the chapter about Max and, by inclusion, this neighborhood, may be the best thing I’ve ever written. (I’ll let Bob speak for himself.)

The Utility of Operationally Neutral and Flexible Conservation Pools in the Colorado River Basin

jfleck — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:31:55 +0000

Nota bene: A guest post from friends of Inkstain John Berggren and Kevin Wheeler

John Berggren (Regional Policy Manager, Western Resource Advocates)

Kevin Wheeler (Principle, Water Balance Consulting)

5/5/2026

As everyone is well aware, the snowpack and associated runoff this year are truly awful. It will be one of the worst, if not worst, on record. The Bureau of Reclamation is using unprecedented policy levers to keep Lake Powell from reaching levels so low that the safety of the dam may come into question. And it is unclear if those policy levers will be enough, especially if the rest of the spring and summer are warm and dry. This got us thinking—are there other tools in the toolbox we are not considering?

While current guidelines may not contain much else, you only have to look as far as Reclamation’s Post-2026 Draft Environmental Impact Statement to see there are options being proposed. We explore how one of those—flexible and operationally neutral conservation pools—can actually provide system protection without the political, legal, and hydrological risk that comes with currently available options. The current Intentionally Created Surplus program in the Lower Basin is an excellent framework to explore how conserved water can be creatively moved between reservoirs, wherever it is needed most.

No need for new infrastructure, complicated agreements, or shifting of risk—just smart reservoir accounting and operations. We hope this level of flexibility and creativity is being considered in new Post-2026 Guidelines and in the Basin State’s negotiations.

Water Year 2026 Challenges

The Bureau of Reclamation’s April 24-month study indicates that under the ‘most probable’ scenario, Lake Powell will fall below 3,500 ft by August of this year if no further action is taken. Reclamation has indicated, however, they intend to plan for the ‘minimum probable’ scenario which has the reservoir crossing this critical threshold in July. In response, Reclamation will be releasing additional water from the Upper Initial Units (UIU) under the 2019 Drought Response Operations Agreement (DROA) in the range of 660 kaf to 1 maf. Reclamation has indicated these releases would come from Flaming Gorge and will help keep Lake Powell from dropping to critical levels.

Concurrently, Reclamation has announced they intend to reduce Lake Powell releases from 7.48 maf to 6 maf during Water Year 2026 under Section 6E of the 2024 Record of Decision from the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement to the 2007 Interim Guidelines (SEIS). Reducing Powell releases has implications for elevations in Lake Mead as well as significant Compact implications. In the absence of any operational adaptations, the 10-year cumulative flow at Lee Ferry will fall to 82.7 maf by the end of the current water year. If releases are reduced to 6 maf and 1.48 maf of water is withheld in Lake Powell between April and September 2026, as is currently planned, the 10-year cumulative flow will be approximately 81.2 maf (Figure 1). This would risk triggering legal action by the Lower Basin.

Figure 1. Lee Ferry Cumulative 10-year Flow. The blue line shows the estimated decline of the cumulative 10-year Lee Ferry flow before any adjustments and the orange line shows an accelerated decline following a 1.48 maf reduction to Lake Powell releases made under 6E SEIS authorities.

Despite this immediate legal risk, Reclamation’s modeling demonstrates that both mechanisms will be required to protect Lake Powell this year, but just barely. Under ‘minimum probable’ hydrology, these actions would still result in Lake Powell dropping to 3,500 ft —dangerously close the hydropower intakes.

The Upper Basin has reluctantly accepted the proposed DROA releases which will significantly impact Flaming Gorge, but harbors significant concerns over whether water releases from the UIUs will be used to benefit the Lower Basin and how storage of the UIU reservoirs will be recovered. Similarly, the Lower Basin has issues with the reduction of Lake Powell releases to 6 maf, citing concerns over violations of the Compact and suggesting that more water should be released from the UIUs. Neither Basin is happy with Reclamation’s response to the dire hydrology this water year.

How could Water Year 2026 have been different?

The challenges discussed above present an opportunity to examine exactly how a primary tool developed for several of the alternatives in the Post-2026 Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) — operationally neutral and flexible conservation pools — could provide another means to handle extremely dry years. While current guidelines do not allow for this flexibility, Water Year 2026 does provide a concrete example for how moving conservation pool water could mitigate low runoff years and protect critical infrastructure without many of the challenges discussed above. In this hypothetical, we demonstrate how if conserved water currently stored in Lake Mead were to be treated as an operationally neutral conservation pool with flexibility in where it is located, Reclamation could more easily protect Lake Powell.

As of EOY 2024 (the most recent Reclamation Colorado River Accounting and Water User Report), there was 3.32 maf of conserved water, called Intentionally Created Surplus (ICS), being stored in Lake Mead. If this current conserved volume would be considered operationally neutral, as in some of the proposals in the DEIS alternatives, then Reclamation could move a portion of this conserved water up to Lake Powell. ICS water can be “moved” to Lake Powell by reducing releases from Glen Canyon Dam. Importantly, though, these reductions in Powell releases would not occur under the 2024 SEIS 6E authority and therefore would have no impact on Compact compliance.

In the current case, the proposed 1.48 maf reduction of releases from Lake Powell could be considered a transfer of ICS water from Lake Mead to Lake Powell. The reduction of releases would be added to the physical volume crossing the Lee Ferry Compact point, as though 7.48 maf were released from Powell, even though only 6 maf were physically released, so there would be no risk of a compact violation. That water would help to prevent Lake Powell from reaching critical elevation levels but would remain under the ownership of the Lower Basin contributors. Similarly, instead of needing to release 1 maf from Flaming Gorge, Reclamation could release only 500 kaf from the UIUs as part of DROA, and move an additional 500 kaf of ICS water up to Lake Powell by making a physical release of 5.5 maf for Water Year 2026 from Lake Powell (again, as though 7.48 maf were released). This would keep more water in Flaming Gorge which serves as a potential buffer if Water Year 2027 is similarly dry.

Figure 2. Options for Protecting the Elevation of Lake Powell. Under the minimum probable hydrologic condition from the April 24-month study, the orange line shows combinations of contributions from Upper Initial Units (UIUs) and Water Year 2026 releases from Lake Powell to maintain 3,500 ft elevation. The blue line shows the resulting minimum elevation of Lake Mead during Water Year 2026 on the right axis.

As shown in Figure 2, several options exist to maintain Lake Powell at 3,500 ft during the projected lowest month of March 2027. The options towards the left side of the graph indicate lower releases from UIUs and reduced releases from Lake Powell (i.e. increases in release reductions relative to the initially assumed release of 7.48 maf). The options on the right side of the graph rely on larger contributions from UIUs and greater releases from Lake Powell (i.e., smaller release reductions).

What if additional water is needed later in Water Year 2026?

Concerningly, the minimum probable hydrology is not the worst-case scenario and therefore additional flexibility may be required. The April to July runoff of Water Year 2026 is tracking very closely to Water Year 2002, which then resulted in the historically lowest inflow to Lake Powell. With the starting elevation today over 120 ft lower than it was in 2002, such a sharp decline would have far worse implications for Lake Powell. Using both levers to the extent currently planned may not be enough to keep Lake Powell at a safe elevation. Building upon the April 24-month study, if April to September inflow is equivalent to 2002, the “hole” in Lake Powell that Reclamation would need to fill might require an additional 530 kaf from currently projected volumes to maintain Lake Powell at 3,500 ft. To fill this hole, Reclamation may need to release additional water from the UIUs, but that presents significant physical risks because we cannot be certain what 2027 will be like and that would certainly face significant Upper Basin opposition. On the other hand, additional reductions from Lake Powell below 6.0 maf faces mounting legal risks, including exceeding Reclamation’s authorities under the SEIS and further exacerbating Compact concerns along with Lower Basin opposition. Having the flexibility to, again, pull from an operationally neutral conservation pool to respond to changing conditions and fill the inherently uncertain hole, provides a solution that avoids many of the legal, hydrologic, and political uncertainties.

What happens to Lake Mead?

The other benefit to having a flexible conservation pool is not just in the short term to move water up to protect Powell, but in the medium term as it provides the mechanism to move that water back down in future years. The water might have been needed in Water Year 2026 to protect Powell, but in Water Year 2027 it could be moved back down to Mead, depending on system conditions and priorities. Reducing Powell releases under Reclamation’s 6E authority provides no similar mechanism to recover that water in Mead in future years.

What if Water Year 2027 is dry?

In the absence of institutional barriers, prudent extended drought management operations in a generalized multi-reservoir context suggest keeping as much water as possible higher in the system, bringing water down only when it is needed. This approach keeps more options open for unknown future conditions. Furthermore, it minimizes evaporative losses due to cooler temperatures at higher elevations. In the context of the current Colorado River crisis, this would equate to minimizing additional releases from the UIUs while maximizing the use of adaptions to releases from Lake Powell, but only to the extent possible without impairing the operations of Lake Mead. If this mechanism were possible, more water could be retained in the UIUs while less water is released from Lake Powell. This approach increases the overall system protection if Water Year 2027 were to be dry.

“Birding Toward Hope”

jfleck — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:01:08 +0000

Tucker Davidson of Audubon wrote a lovely piece about slowing down and listening to, and looking for, the birds:

Birding requires us to be present in the moment. It also allows us to shift our focus from our own worries and ruminations to another subject, breaking anxious thought patterns. Birds hold our attention without overwhelming it. For the socially awkward like myself, birding can provide deep enrichment without the anxiety-inducing obligation of socializing.

Rin and I had a blast last month talking about all this with Tucker on our Water Matters podcast.