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but tourists seem to have little meaningful effect on the "real" life of the towns- people. North from Silverton, Highway 550 crosses Red Mountain Pass, location of the Idarado Mine where intermittent digging brings a variety of base metals to the earth's surface. Most of the miners commute 13 harrowing miles from Ouray, over a section of Highway 550 marked by spectacular gorges and snow courses so reli- ably life-threatening that several of them have names. Entering Ouray, whose 1,925 inhabitants14 dwell in another National Historic District, one is met with a. vision of a toy village tucked between immense cliffs. Whereas Silverton is linked most strongly to Durango via the railway and relatively easy road access, Ouray is oriented mostly to Montrose, a larger town 35 miles northward over a. suddenly gentled Highway 550. Seventy miles to the east (and downwind) of the San Juans, lies . the San Luis Valley, headquartered by the town of Alamosa. The fertile Valley supports ranches and farms where potatoes, barley, lettuce and hay are the major crops. Springtime runoff from San Juan Mountain snowpack recharges groundwater and provides for summer irrigation of San Luis Valley agriculture. Summer rainfall in the Valley is sparse and unreliable (5-6 inches annually); crops are routinely threatened by periodic hailstorms. Over the Divide, to the West, snowmelt from the San Juan Mountains contributes to the flow of the Colorado River. The Colorado River Compact of 1922 committed set amounts of water from the River to other states in the Basin and to Old Mexico, and the quality of the water must be high. Over time, demands on the River have increased dramatically to the point where fulfilling the terms of the Compact has become problematic. One of the ideas considered for augmenting the water flowing into the Colorado and decreasing the salinity of water delivered downstream was cloud seeding to increase snowpack in the San Juan Mountains. Initiation of Ooud SeedinR Interactions within a network of federal, state and local entities set in motion a plan to augment snowpack. Early in 1968, the late Senator Peter Dominick of Colorado approached a Durango man, Fred Kroeger--bothVice Chairman of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and a member of the Southwestern Water Con- servation Board--about supporting a snowpack augmentation experiment in the San Juans. With. the resulting approval of these two Boards, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Udall issued a press release in September 1968 announcing a five-year experimental cloud seeding project to be conducted bY the Bureau of Reclamation in the San Juan Mountains, to determine the feasibility of increasing snowpack. The press release, routinely sent by the Bureau to local news media in the San Juan region, was almost overlooked by the editor of the Ouray Plaindealer, as a piece of "junk maiL" Joyce Jorgenson, the Plaindealer editor, later described her comments on it as "a funny little editorial,"IS but this was the opening salvo in a campaign to prevent, stop, or curtail cloud seeding that was waged for several years to considerable effect. Mrs. Jorgenson immediately contacted the Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec or Bureau) to request a public meeting in the San Juan area on the proposed experiment, and assured widespread publicity for. the resulting mee.ti~% by asking all the newspapers editors in the region to publish notices of it. Approximately 200 people, from Ouray, Silverton, Telluride, and Durango, attended the BuRec meeting in Ouray on December 7, 1968. The bulk of the. audience 4 -' ' , . I . ! II I II . 1 II 1 II . j 1 III I lMl j [II , lit f ~ -i