Sidebar by Ed Quillen
Water – June 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE CONTROVERSY over the use of the upper Gunnison River would have ended a long time ago, if the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had been able to go ahead with a 1948 proposal. There would be nothing to argue about, because every potential drop would be diverted to the Eastern Slope in the “Gunnison-Arkansas Project,” an ancestor of the current Fryingpan-Arkansas Project which serves the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District.
“Gun-Ark,” as we’ll call it here, was inspired by the Colorado-Big Thompson (CBT) project in northern Colorado, so that’s a good place to start the story.
Some of Colorado’s most productive agricultural lands are in South Platte drainage east of the Front Range. But the farmers’ water supplies were unreliable, and so they began looking west to the wetter Western Slope. In 1937, during the New Deal and Dust Bowl years, they organized the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District.
They also lobbied Congress to allow the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to build a facility that would capture water near the headwaters of the Colorado River at Grand Lake, then send it under the Continental Divide through a 13.1-mile tunnel that emerged near Estes Park on the Big Thompson River. From there, it would drop into a maze of reservoirs, power plants, pipelines, and canals that stretched for 60 miles north from Boulder Creek to Horsetooth Reservoir above Fort Collins. Electricity sales, as well as revenues from water users, would presumably repay the Bureau for the cost.
CBT construction began shortly before World War II, suffered some delays on account of the war, and began delivering water in 1947. It was expanded in the 1980s with the Windy Gap Project, and CBT delivers about 330,000 acre-feet in an average year.
CBT made agriculture much more productive in its territory, which extended to the Nebraska line, and northern Front Range cities grew with their share of CBT water. Colorado also got a major source of electricity from the hydropower. By almost any political or economic measure, it was a success story for the Bureau. Even so strong and persistent a Bureau critic as Marc Reisner described it positively in Cadillac Desert:
“One of the Bureau’s most successful projects, Colorado-Big Thompson, was already delivering Colorado River water across the Continental Divide through a tunnel to the East Slope; the power produced by the steep drop down the Front Range was enough to justify the expense of the tunnel, and the additional water diverted from the upper Colorado to tributaries of the Platte River was welcomed by everyone from canoeists to whooping cranes to irrigators in Colorado and Nebraska.”
That was the model for Gun-Ark, which was described in a “project planning report” issued in 1948 by the Denver office of the Bureau of Reclamation.
It was an immense project, and although all of the developed water was bound for the Arkansas, not all of it came from the Gunnison basin. Gun-Ark comprised what eventually became Fry-Ark, which has a collection system above Basalt on the Western Slope, a tunnel (eventually the Boustead Tunnel) under the Sawatch Range west of Leadville, and includes Pueblo Reservoir to store water for downstream farmers. In essence, that’s the Fry-Ark we have now, and it delivers about 70,000 acre-feet each year.
But Gun-Ark would have delivered a lot more than that. On the north side of the Elk Mountains on the Western Slope, in the general area of Aspen, it would have collected water from the Crystal River and run it through a tunnel south to the Gunnison basin. Similar tunnels would have taken water from Maroon and Castle creeks above Aspen.
The North Fork of the Gunnison, above Paonia, would have been tapped, too, with tunnels that led to the Slate River near Crested Butte.
MOST OF THE WATER would have been gathered into an expanded Taylor Park Reservoir, and a new reservoir would have been built at Almont. A tunnel under Cottonwood Pass would deliver water to the Eastern Slope — but not directly to the Arkansas River.
Instead, Gun-Ark water — starting with the Fryingpan system west of Leadville — would have flowed in a canal along the east flank of the Sawatch Range, and every few miles, there would have been a hydro-electric plant: Twin Lakes, Granite, Wapaco (8 miles north of Buena Vista), Princeton (5 miles west of Buena Vista), Salida (7 miles northwest of town).
[Gunnison-Arkansas Project Map]
All told, Gun-Ark would have generated at least 110,000 kilowatts, and delivered as much as 540,000 acre-feet a year to the Arkansas River near Salida — almost eight times as much water as Fry-Ark now supplies (another diversion, the Twin Lakes Tunnel under Independence Pass, supplies about 30,000 acre-feet annually to the Arkansas). In other words, it would have more than doubled the annual flow of the Arkansas at Salida and points east.
Those post-World War II years were heady days for the Bureau. At the time, it seemed possible to build just about any project in the West, and Gun-Ark was modeled on the successful CBT project that delivered water to Eastern Slope farms while generating electricity to pay the bills. So why did this grandiose plan get scaled down to a fraction of its original scope?
For one thing, the 1948 Bureau Report, one of the last known references to the Gun-Ark Project, was quite preliminary, based on estimates rather than hard data and formal engineering. The Bureau was fond of doing this — issuing a preliminary study in the hopes of getting political support so there would be public demand for the project — but there may not have been much public demand for Gun-Ark in the late 1940s.
AFTER ALL, Colorado’s capital is Denver, and Gun-Ark wouldn’t have made a single drop available to Denver, which is on the South Platte. It would have served Pueblo on the Arkansas, and even then, Pueblo was losing political clout.
Further, a project the size of Gun-Ark would have put new irrigated farmland into production. On a national basis, representatives from farm states are reluctant to vote to use federal money to subsidize Western farmers who will then compete with their farmers. A smaller project would merely provide “supplemental irrigation” — water to help crops on land that is already under irrigation, and thus it makes an easier sell to existing farmers in Iowa and Illinois, who get federal subsidies, too.
And then there’s Wayne Aspinall, long-time U.S. Representative from Colorado’s Western Slope who rose to chair the House committee that oversaw appropriations for the Bureau of Reclamation. Aspinall’s Western Slope constituents didn’t want to see any water diverted to the Eastern Slope, but he also had to work with the rest of Colorado’s congressional delegation — that is, he had to make deals, something like “if you back off on Gun-Ark, I’ll give you the Fry-Ark part of the project.”
At this remove, it’s hard to know just what deals were made. But by the 1950s, there was no more talk of an immense Gun-Ark project. Instead, southern Colorado leaders were promoting the smaller Fry-Ark project, perhaps because they suspected that was all they could get. Congress was reluctant, with bills passing the Senate but failing in the House.
To raise money for lobbying, supporters walked burros up and down the towns along the Arkansas, and sold gold-painted frying pans: $5 for a small one, $100 for the big size. In 1962, the legislation finally passed, and President John F. Kennedy flew to Pueblo to sign the bill on Aug. 16.
Construction began in 1964, and continued until 1990.
Even though Fry-Ark is essentially complete, and Gunnison water forms no part of its supply, the water of the upper Gunnison basin still attracts covetous eyes.
After all, as George Sibley once observed, the Bureau of Reclamation sees its duty as fixing the mistakes that God made in plumbing the West, and as long as 80% of Colorado’s precipitation falls on a drainage with 10% of the state’s population, somebody is going to see that as a mistake in need of correction.
–Ed Quillen