Rain Walks

This is a story from Paul Krafel that I think should be more widely known and celebrated.  Thank you, Paul.

Rain Walks

A simple play I’ve made hundreds of times exemplifies “every play is two plays.” High in the drainage, as runoff increases, the rising runoff begins overflowing its shallow channels, spreading out into easily overlooked overflow routes. Sometimes a rock lies in the overflow channel, obstructing how much of the runoff can flow that way. I lift the rock out of the channel so that more of the runoff can flow in this new direction (Play One). I then place that rock in the main channel so that it shunts more of the runoff towards the overflow channel (Play Two). 

This simple moving of the rock is two plays. The broader, slower overflow route receives more runoff because of the removal of the rock, and the deeper main channel receives less because of the new placement of that rock. Though much of the water still flows down the main channel, more is now flowing along the broader, slower overflow route.

Rising water has a distinctive appearance. Surface tension holds the water’s surface against plant stems and rock edges so that this ring of contact lags behind the rising level of the surrounding water. This creates a dimpled surface around each stem and rock sticking up out of the water. These dimpled surfaces sparkle with focused light. I can watch this dance of light advance with the increased flow down the overflow route.

Read more here...

Another interesting article by Paul here.  

Wetland, Stream, and Species Mitigation Banks

With the November 3, 2015 Presidential Memorandum "Mitigating Impacts on Natural Resources from Development and Encouraging Related Private Investment," mitigation banking has been getting more press.

Back in 2008 the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the 2008 Compensatory Mitigation Rule governing compensatory mitigation for activities authorized by Corps permits.  Each division of USACE has published Regional Compensatory Mitigation and Monitoring Guidelines.

Mitigation banks are restoration and conservation sites that preserve, enhance, or create important ecological functions that may be impacted elsewhere.  For example, since 2008 wetland banks can invest in the for-profit creation of new wetlands; developers can purchase credits in the bank to mitigate any impacted wetlands in the same watershed as the proposed development.

There are now over 2000 mitigation banks in the U.S.

USACE  runs the RIBITS website, which is their Regulatory in-lieu fee and bank information tracking system.

This map from RIBITS shows the distribution of mitigation banks in the continental U.S.  Some USAE districts already have dozens to hundreds of banks in operation, whereas some, such as the Albuquerque USACE district, have none.

This figure, courtesy of Kevin Janni, shows the distribution of mitigation banks and HUC watersheds in Texas for the Fort Worth and Galveston USACE districts.  Each bank may only be used to offset development within the same watershed.  Due to differing application processes and timelines for different USACE district, some districts have many more banks than others.

Mitigation banks are evaluated based on the quality of the wetlands created, using rapid assessments such as NMRAM.

The 2016 Mitigation Banking Conference will be held in Texas, May 10-13.

Rio Grande SIlvery Minnow

Interactive version: http://www.usbr.gov/tsc/rivers/awards/Nm2/rg/riog/schematic/SCHEMATICalbuquerquediv.html

The River. Like the Nile it rises in distant mountains, then flows down through farm, city, farm, and city, losing water to the desert. I've skipped over headwater steams in the highest alpine meadows in Colorado, and fished tributaries from the high peaks in the Wiemenuche, the San Juan, the Sangre de Christo mountains.

The Grande enters New Mexico as a whitewater river cut deep in a thousand-foot canyon, opens onto the agricultural floodplain of the (NM) Central Valley just north of Albuquerque and loses water continuously as it flows south toward Texas and Mexico.

It goes dry most years these days, fish left out under the oven sky. Agricultural diversions, cities. Dams and reservoirs. Water sinking into deep sand. Low-flow channels carry the remaining trickle south to satisfy more cities, interstate treaties. Fought over by water managers, farmers, and conservationists. (Link to article: How much water used by cottonwoods versus farmers versus cities. )


We went seining for fishes: white suckers, red shiners, catfish, chad and fathead minnows but most of all: Silvery Minnows, endemic to New Mexico and listed as Federally Endangered.

The Silvery Minnow is endangered for a range of reasons. Like many river fish it is negatively impacted by dams turning the river into lakes. The drying of the Rio Grande is probably more extensive now than it was before modern agricultural irrigation and pumping, but the Rio Grande probably always went dry and only remained wet in refugia...


Silvery Minnows: One thread in the tapestry of life. We were looking for silver needles in the full force of river water, the gush and rush, one and a half feet per second. We splashed into the surging river water, waded out to the river’s sand bars. We used bag and beach seines, color-coded buckets, rite-in-the-rain and water-resistant-(but susceptible) electronics, but the fish were nowhere to be found.

Mud flats held the first tiny dicotyledons of new weeds, sprouting. In a few isolated backwaters (I can’t say exactly where) we did find a few, or even many, Silvery Minnows, alive and wide-eyed. We photographed them, weighed and measured them, and checked whether they were tagged fish raised in a hatchery or a wild child, conceived in good ol’ mother nature.


For unknown reasons, the 2013 spawning was a good year for the Minnow and it seemed like it might bounce back then, but not much has been seen of that cohort since. Meanwhile, the lawyers aren't waiting .... (link to Wild Earth Guardians lawsuit)

Regolith and Quarternary Sedimentology: questions to infer paleogeomorphology and paleoclimate

This image was taken along Las Huertas creek, near the village of Placitas.  Note the lack of developed soil horizons: the top layers appear to be unconsolidated colluvial debris.   Perhaps the sandstone layers below the Juniper roots are paleo-sand dunes?  What then might the different colors indicate?

This image and the following were taken along La Jencia creek, deeply incised into Pleistecene and Holocene sediments in the San Lorenzo Spring quandrangle west of Socorro, NM.    The layers exposed along the creek channel show darker clay and/or organic-enriched layers that may have formed from swamps and/or backwaters along paleochannels.

Screenshot of the Quandrangle geological map, with a red dot on La Jencia creek showing the location of the photos.

This exposure reveals an unconformity in the left-center that may be due to in-filling of a paleo channel?  Does this images show an actual unconformity, with deposition, then erosion, then deposition? Or was there continuous deposition? Why is there banding of light and dark material in such regular layers?  How were these layers laid down?  Does the fact that they were deposited indicate an aggrading landscape, perhaps controlled by climate-influenced sediment supply??

This photos shows a close-up of a tiny (5-foot long) layer of darker clay, clearly deposited in a concavity.  Note the coarser sediment deposited below it and the finer sediment above.  How old are these layers?  How do geologists infer the direction of paleoflow?  Why aren't there fossils?

Surface geology maps of the area offer confusing clues to interpreting these buried layers.  The geological map for the quandrangle to the North of San Lorenzo Springs (the Silver Creek quandrangle) shows paleochannel flows on the surface, as well as relictual dunes from some point in the Quarternary.  Why are the paleochannel flows going every which way?  Was this whole valley a closed basin, and if so, would that explain the aggradation, independent of sediment supply?  Why is this stream downcutting so rapidly today?  What are the implications for the future?

Bankfull Flood on the Haw River, North Carolina

There is abundant evidence of a bankfull flood event on the Haw River, upstream of Bynum, North Carolina.

Let's see what the USGS Gauge at Bynum says.

 A gauge height over 11 feet counts as a flood...and it is more than 7 feet above current flow.  Note that this is a very wide river, so the actual volume was much more than 7 times...according to the USGS calculation, the flow was near 20,000 CFS, over 30 times the current flow of 600 CFS.

How does the compare to previous floods?

This January flood appears to be a bankfull event that was surpassed in 2008 (the first year of record for Bynum), 2009, and 2010, (but not in 2011 or 2012).  Many of these large floods happen in the early spring, perhaps when the heavy rains fall on an already-saturated watershed.

This is what happened the week of January 13th.  On top of the previous week's rain, there was significant rain on Monday the 14th and Wednesday the 16th.  The storm continued into Thursday, bringing more than an inch of thunderstorm rain (and snow) on top of the saturated landscape.  The Haw river flow peaked soon thereafter, in the early morning hours of January 18th.

A Mississippi River Wetland National Park?

http://www.osu.edu/news/newsitem3123

A New Conception of My Home-Watershed: the Gila River Basin

It took me three years of living and traveling extensively around Tucson to understand the local watershed. I grasped early on the basin and range topography of parallel North-South mountain ranges, but these ridges served to confuse rather than clarify the overall drainage, since I did not know how the meandering rivers and dry washes of the bottomlands connected. Some went north, others flowed south. Where was the continental divide? Where did they meet the sea?

It was only by fortuitous circumstance that the last year found me exploring the full scope of an area I finally recognized as my home watershed. I new conception of the Gila River Basin emerged from these vast peregrinations, a new understanding of the lay of the land and a meshing of medium and large scale aspects:

The Sonoran desert in Arizona exists in the Gila Basin, surrounded on three sides (north, east, and south) by concentric rings of grassland valleys and mesas, woodland hills and forested mountains. The Gila, which rises on the continental divide to the east (in NM), is joined by tributaries from the north and south, representing, respectively, the Mogollon Rim divide and another divide which roughly approximates the U.S./Mexico border.

This general schema is interrupted, of course, by the basic and range, which further divides ecotones and watersheds, creating a kind of comb effect wherein numerous drainages flow parallel before their confluence with the Gila. The Gila itself is also indistinct, since it virtually disappears in an amorphous wash in the middle of its basin. And, since it flows through sparsely inhabited parts of the countryside, it is even easier to ignore its central role in ordering the landform. Most people living in the large metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Tucson do not realize their place along the cusp of the Sonoran lowlands, or the importance of the placements of their cities at the ecotone divide between grassland and desert, where rivers [used to ] bring water from the mountains before evaporating in the desert. [Theoretically,] the Gila eventually flows into the Colorado, before that crosses the U.S. Mexico border, reaches its estuary, and flows into the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). The Colorado rises from the western rocky mountains and the high colorado plateau to the north of the gila basin. To the south, in Mexico, streams flow directly off the Sierra Madre into the Sea of Cortez, without joining together in a large basin such as the Gila. To the east, on the other side of the continental divide, are the Chihuahan desert and the Rio Grand. These areas combined form the Southwest, and a large part of three out of four of the N. American deserts.

Verde River Explorations

The Verde River and its tributaries in central AZ present a fascinating example of a naturally regenerating ecosystem. Grazing was removed almost 20 years ago and today the trees in the riparian forest are all ~20 years old.
Clear Creek, AZ, a tributary of the Verde.

Some trees are loosing their leaves, while other plants are flowering.
A dry tributary of the Verde.
Wild and Scenic portion of Verde River: mountains constrict its flow here.
An island in the Verde: like being at the beach, but more green.

Tent rocks formation along USFR 500
Page Springs: two large blue herons just flew off



Sycamore Canyon Springs and Wilderness Area, a tributary of the Verde.



Tuzigoot National Historic Site, overlooking Verde River.

What we need here is a Forensic Flotsamologist

50 and 100 miles from home

This is an old AAA map of Arizona, with modifications. Since my van can be towed 100 miles for free, it seemed prudent to determine the extent of my get-home-free zone. This is where I feel comfortable; anything beyond that starts to stretch my luck and my umbilical. This zone, my home, includes most of Arizona's sky island mountain ranges.