/innadesert/

Lets go down this in order.

>feasibility
Extremely difficult.

>Reeves County
Reeves County *is* in the Rio Grande basin, but only in the same sense that parts of Colorado are. The actual river is over a hundred miles away from the southmost tip of the county. The only water in Reeves County, aside from Balmorhea spring and its associated lake, is the Pecos River. The Pecos River is semi-okay up in New Mexico, but further south it becomes very, very alkaline and it actually shrinks in size as it passes through the desert.

>Groundwater
Only the western edge of the county has much, with Balmorhea, and that's pretty much all claimed. And you'd need an outlandish rainwater collection system to get enough because it only rains a few inches a year, on average. Long-term predictions for the region see it getting drier.

The county is mostly flat with a lot of creosote. There's little outcroppings of topography in spots, but not enough to really make groundwater possible. Agriculture out there is a bad idea. Pretty much all the land use these days comes from the oil/gas industry.

>>888824
You might be able to get enough water if you combine whatever scant groundwater you can find with whatever scant water you can condense from the air. You should play around with that before going all in and buying a plot, though.

Why would you choose this location? Especially if you're as unfamiliar with it as you are?

Go there and check it out.

>>888824
Here's a tip, pretty much all of the western United States was open to homesteading for many years. If there aren't people living there or at least ranching there today, it's because the conditions were too harsh and it sucked.

I'm a field archaeologist and we find abandoned homesteads all the time. Last month we found one where the guy just abandoned all his equipment and walked away. Dipshit tried to farm on a sandstone ridge in the mountains of western Colorado on the west-facing slope where all the snow collects. But we find stuff like that in Texas too.

>>889356
That's a cool gig what kind of schooling is required? I'm pretty big on history and that sounds absolutely fascinating

>>888824
Live in the northern Rio Grande basin.

Water table is deep and it becomesore saline the further south you go in the rift. There are some studies being done in my area with using flood water to store for later. Basically, the basin and range areas are so dry and the topography is so steep that it's heavily prone to flooding, but if you can find a way to slow the water down with natural dams you can recharge an aquifer, or migrate flow to a containing pool.