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, Colorado Central Magazine November 1999 Page 13 Page 5 of 10 it was dry except for a few small tributaries below the dam. Then in the early 1960s the Bureau began a much larger dam project on the Upper Gunnison -- the Wayne K. Aspinall unit of the Colorado River Storage Project. The CRSP was a massive program for the beneficial development of all the remaining water in the Upper Colorado River Basin. The Bureau wanted to build four big hydropower projects in the Upper Colorado Basin, then plow the proceeds from power sales back into a host of small water developments for domestic, agricultural and industrial purposes throughout the Basin. Three of the big power projects were built: Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado's mainstem, Flaming Gorge Dam on the Green River -- and the three-dam Aspinall unit in the canyons of the Upper Gunnison. The Aspinall Unit (named for western Colorado Congressman Wayne Aspinall, architect of the CRSP legislation) was begun in 1962 and finally completed in 1980: Blue Mesa Dam, Morrow Point Dam, and Crystal Dam. This was not a popular project in the Upper Gunnison: partly because it destroyed a world-class trout fishery around which a lot of resort development had already been built; and partly because people in the Upper Gunnison feared that, since the Aspinall dams would store all the remaining water from the Upper Gunnison and its tributaries, there would be no water left for any kind of Upper Gunnison development. This led the Bureau to make some promises that were perhaps not so well written down as they might have been. They promised, for one thing, to replace the lost fishing stream with improved fisheries elsewhere in the Upper Gunnison -- a promise that remains largely unfulfilled. And to alleviate fears about lost development opportunities, the Bureau agreed to "subordinate" its claim to up to 60,000 acre-feet of the water it would store for power generation in Blue Mesa, enabling the Upper Gunnison to consumptively develop that much water at any time in the future with no fear of the Bureau putting a call on it. The Bureau also agreed to help the Upper Gunnison water users in the event of a downstream call from the UVWUA or any other senior downstream user. An "Upper Gunnison Project," consisting of half a dozen small reservoirs and a network of canals to distribute the subordination and then some (around 100,000 acre-feet in total), was added to the list of small projects the Bureau planned to fund and build with all its power revenues from the big "cash register" dams. The Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District (UGRWCD) came into being in 1959 as the local agent for coordinating development of the Upper Gunnison Project and its water rights. The Knot thickens. Making plumbing look like a river Those four dams (Taylor Dam and the three Aspinall Dams) plus the Gunnison Tunnel are the major physical water development structures on the Upper Gunnison. All of the rest of the traditional water development in the Upper Gunnison is much smaller in scale: primarily ditches (some several miles in length) or pipes to divert water for agricultural or municipal uses, and a few small municipal or ranch reservoirs. But like all manmade physical structures, these dams and diversions were underlaid by less tangible but probably more important legal, political, economic, and cultural structures that change through time -- more strands in the Knot. Throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, those societal structures all reflected a kind of relentless material utilitarianism: how can we turn this or that resource http://www.cozine.com/archive/cc 1999/00690133.htm 7/9/2003