Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

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Neumie
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Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by Neumie »

Went to check out how bad things were on the Medina River, and honestly I wasn't sure what to expect, but it was somehow worse than I anticipated. Socializednerd was on the Medina about 3 weeks ago and it had water, so I at least had that as a baseline.

Anyways, I started way up and checked out nearly every crossing upstream of Bandera. I took my rods and caught a couple fish, but ultimately quite fishing as it was unnecessarily adding stress to the fish.

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Farther up stream there were some deep pools holding water and I waded/hiked a lot of the crossings.

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After the third crossing I made my way to a fourth and realized my camera had fallen out of my pocket and was floating somewhere, so I had to go back and find it. Here's my pic after finding it.

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As I worked my way back to Bandera the river crossings dried up. The crossing where my sister had gone a few weeks back had chest deep water was now bone dry.

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A friendly reminder to always fish the roots beneath cypress trees; lots of fish holding structure.....you know, when there's water.

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This is 6th St/Schmidtke Rd in Bandera just upstream of the City Park. The cypress trees are in the process of going dormant (hopefully just dormant) and dropping leaves.

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As a friendly reminder.

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I ended up hiking just under 6 miles total. Some of it was hard wading and I even had to swim in some of the deeper pools, but it was worth documenting and seeing the impact of the drought. It was interesting to feel the difference in temperature of pools depending on if it had springs from the subterranean flows.
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Ron Mc
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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by Ron Mc »

thanks for posting smiles - breaks my heart to see it.

We need Harbor Island, and we need a potable water grid to the hill country that works like the electric grid.

San Antonio and Austin need to buy land at Indianola for Pass Cavallo discharge.
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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by karstopo »

Wow, that’s terrible. Heard Jacob’s well went dry. Looks like the whole region is really suffering.
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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by motoyak »

Yep, pretty sad all over the hill country and beyond. Upstream Travis is just a channel now, Guadalupe down to just a few ribbons on water bwt impoundments. On the bright side, it actually just rained about 5 minutes LOL Hopefully, more to come, when? Only He knows :wink:
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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by Ron Mc »

This has Never happened before in history. The Medina, the Blanco, the Colorado have never before looked like this.
Before the drought that began in 2004, the Guadalupe stopped once on record, just above Rebecca's Creek, where the Trinity aquifer takes flow off the river - Once in 1955, the drought of record.
It stopped there in 7 out of the 10 years following 2004.
We can't continue to take water out of the ground and expect our rivers and bays to survive.
What little river discharge is there is choked with nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers (phosphorus is Never needed in Texas).

We are only in the Second year of this drought.
The drought is Normal.
The population and groundwater use is Abnormal.
The water authorities will Always write water permits for new neighborhoods.

This also isn't news. Corpus water usage has run the Nueces dry since 2003, and is contracted to continue until 2040.
70% of the Nueces evaporates in Choke Canyon and Lake Corpus Christi reservoirs.
Everyone saw this coming, except our infrastructure, which has needed desalination for public water supply for the past 20 years.

If you're a CCA member, tell them to STFU over Harbor Island, and to dissolve their association with Sierra Club.
They're shooting us all in the foot by court injunction to slow (they won't stop) Harbor Island desalination plant.
The State of Texas needs to take over water authorities and build desal plants that discharge through Pass Cavallo.

Here's what will be next - mouth of the Western Colorado River in the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortez).
The shrimp, crabs and oysters will disappear first.
This was once the largest mangrove estuary on Earth, before southern California water usage ran the river dry.
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Rain won't solve this. In the wet years of the past decade, hill country river discharge has been sorely inadequate and nitrogen loading excessive.
The biggest problem with rain, it causes people to forget this problem.
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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by Dandydon »

Great information, men, and special thanks to Ron for throwing me into a state of terminal depression. I'm usually a happy-go-lucky guy.

Our rivers are all drying up and we're getting closer to death every day.

Goodness gracious. Time to hit the Makers Mark and try to find somebody to take me fishing.

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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by Kayak Kid »

Neumie, you could have gone all day...,and into next year without sharing those photos. If not for the many wonderful memories of kayak fishing the Medina, I would join Dandydon's state of depression.
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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by impulse »

If they were being honest with us, they'd post up at the gas pump how much water was used to grow the corn and other "green, renewable" stuff that we pump into our tanks every time we fill up. That's ethanol and bio diesel. It may be renewable, if only we had enough water....

They'd also tell us how many acre feet of water is effectively exported when a ship full of cotton goes overseas, as the vast majority of Texas (and American) cotton is no longer processed in the USA. Texas grows it with our water, and someone else gets most of the economic benefit, processing it into fabric and clothing.

Agriculture uses the majority of water in Texas, and about 70% of the water worldwide. They'd like us to believe that they're growing food to feed Texans. But the reality is that a huge portion of water is being used to grow crops that we're either exporting or burning in our cars and trucks instead of crude based fuel. But that doesn't fit the narrative.

I'm not anti-agriculture. I like to eat. But it's clear that the way it's happening isn't sustainable. In Texas, or in the Southwest desert. And don't get me started on the absolute trainwreck that's headed our way when we deplete the Ogallala (and Edwards) and other aquifers. We can't desalinate enough water to make up for the way we've been abusing them for decades.
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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by mwatson71 »

Yowza. I’m going to go eat an edible now. And I’m sure that probably used a shit ton of water to make, from the growing of the plant to processing it into a gummy, packaging and shipping, and god forbid the CO2 emissions from the private jet I had to fly back from Seattle on so I didn’t have to go thru TSA security.
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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by Ron Mc »

Again, if we want to get the right attention, we need to not generalize, wild-ass shotgun, etc, rather focus on the exact geography suffering the blight of groundwater over-use, and where it would benefit everyone and everything downriver by replacing over-use with desal water piped from the coast.

Seriously guys, this is not a how stupid can we make it subject - it's too important, and too late in coming.
Most whined over the freeze for a year, and that was a naturally recurring event.
This is man-made - only the recurring drought is natural, and simply serves as an indicator of the man-made problem.

Unfortunately, this also happens to be where 40% of Texas growth occurred since the last census.
If you haven't made the drive west on US-90, you can't image the blight of San Antonio sprawl in that direction -
- this growth further encroaches on the Nueces drainage.
As I said above, Corpus immediate need for desal public water began 20 years ago.
Austin - hell, you couldn't drag me there now - I lived through the Ex-S-California invasion, which was bad enough

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This problem is not so severe in Dallas and Houston, because those rivers drain the Great Plains; Rio Grande drains the East Slope.
Hill country rivers drain Mountain Home.
I've been on this soapbox for 20 years, and have to wonder if this thing is on.
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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by Kayak Kid »

RonMc,
I hunted the area NW of SanAntone in my distant youth. I attended UT and was pretty familiar with the area. My third child is now moving to the Austin area to be near my two other children who live there.

As such, the bride and I began thinking of moving to Sun City near, what I remember as the cute little town of Georgetown. We have a number of good friends who live in SunCity, and they've told us how pleasant it is to live there.

We took a trip to look things over, and the revelation was shocking. The traffic in the city of Austin is disgusting...,as is the sight of the many homeless wandering the streets of the downtown area. Georgetown is no longer anything as I remember it. A sprawling network of bedroom communities filled with homes that have increased in price over 40% in the last two to three years. Traffic stacked up everywhere, and growing worse by the day.

We will be staying in our Houston home of the past thirty years. This is where most of our family and friends still reside. The crime rate is deplorable, but ammunition is still cheap. The city is not the city of thirty years ago, but all things seem to be changing throughout the country. It takes my children only three hours to drive here. Life is good where ever you make it so.
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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by Ron Mc »

Thanks KK,
I've joked since the 80s that we were guarding the wrong border.
A small California equity buys a lot of Texas.
But the fact remains, they have the right to move their equity.

Saving the hill country rivers and Aransas NWR to Upper Laguna Madre means filling the bucket a drop at a time.
The problem is, the first drop was already approved by TCEQ, after review and recommendation from the watershed and specific bay system Academic Advisory Boards.
That was 6 years ago. Nobody cared then, because it rained. Though brown tides in ULM were already the summer norm.

We need to wake people up to recognize this is not a random rare occurrence, but the natural order of things just now coming to light because of our excess. The only way to get more water is to make it. It has to be done where infrastructure already exists. Trying to build infrastructure to Matagorda or San Jose islands is both economically unfeasible and environmentally catastrophic
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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by Dandydon »

This was one of the most thoughtful, well-written and informative TKF threads this Summer.

But Kayak Kid and I are still grumpy old men who can hardly believe what the world is coming to. Is over half the country bat-shit crazy?

I worry most about the children I'll sire once I find Ms. Right...

Back to the Makers Mark.

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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by Ron Mc »

Don, I have lived through the slow death of my hill country rivers.

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If this isn't solved, the next generation is going to live through the death of our bays.
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Re: Medina River 08-06-2022 - It Ain't Pretty, Y'all

Post by Dandydon »

Ron, it's about time we actually got together to share a cold beer and general information on every topic under the sun. Between the two of us every question can be answered.

Isn't it wonderful having two knowledgeable polymaths on this TKF board? ImageImage

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