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...-/ 00 CO -1 GUNNISON RIVER DIVERSION PROJECT 3 sold for the opening run of the fifteen-mile stretch of canyon, good publicity having been insured by giving free tickets to members of the press. The Gunnison Boys' Band accompanied the excursionists, making the canyon walls echo with its music. The last mile of tracks, costing more than the entire line through the Royal Gorge, had taken a year to build. The terminus, Cimarron, was nothing more than a tent city at this time, with only one log house on the townsite. Early in December, 1882, Byron H. Bryant, in charge of construction for the Uncompahgre Extension of the Denver and Rio Grande, received a telegram from the line's chief engineer, J. A. McMurtrie, asking him to undertake an explora- tion of the Black Canyon from Cimarron at the end of the road downstream to Delta. Immediately Bryant organized a survey- ing crew with C. E. Telvirer of Aspen in charge, and including H. C. Wright, transitman, James Robinson, levelman, Gunder, topographer, McDermott as rodman, Usher as head chainman, and a pack train outfit headed by Charles Hall. The party left Grand Junction on December 12, and pro- ceeded up the north rim of the Black Canyon to Crystal River, about five miles downstream from Cimarron, where it en- camped high above the river. A few days later the men started their line downstream from Cimarron, spending their first night with an old frontiersman and contemporary of Kit Carson and Jim Bridger, Captain Cline, who had a home up the Cimarron and who claimed to have run the Gunnison in a canoe some years before, a most unlikely feat. Bryant expected to make the survey through the canyon in some twenty days, and the party was provisioned for that period. As it developed, the work took from sixty-five to sixty- eight days, about ten days of which were spent in moving from the north to the south side of the canyon when further move- ment along the north side became impossible because of steep walls and open water. Every morning the workmen would leave their rim camp and clamber down into the chasm depths, returning to the rim that evening. This arduous procedure left little time for actual surveying, as one might judge from Bryant's account of the daily routine: One of our camps was made on precipitous side of the range, 500 feet below top, and daily task consisted of climb of 500 feet to top of range, a climb down a much more precipitous slope 2600 feet to river, a scramble up or down river to our work, when we would do such work as time would permit, and then climb up 2600 feet and down 500 back to our camp. This type of activity was wearing on the men. When the transfer was made from the north to the south rim, all but three of the crew quit. These three, Gunder, Robinson, and Wright, with Bryant, completed the survey while Charles Hall