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? Colorado Central Magazine November 1999 Page 13 Page 8 of 10 enabled the river to be restored. A lot of the leadership in this effort came from Dick Bratton, a savvy Gunnison water lawyer who has been counsel for the UGRWCD since 1961, and has been the closest thing in the valley to a bridge between the old utilitarianism of "get it out of the river and onto the land," and the kinder and gentler (one hopes) "new utilitarianism" of the in-stream recreational industry. That unique "refill right," for instream non-traditional beneficial use, was granted in 1990 -- and just in time because, across the Continental Divide, the first major assault on the Upper Gunnison was gearing up. The Metropolis looks over the hill Through most of the 20th century, growth on the Colorado Front Range -- the increasingly homogeneous and unseparated strip of cities from Fort Collins on the north through the Denver-Boulder nexus to Pueblo on the south -- has been significantly watered by Colorado River Basin water, but almost all of it has come from the tributaries of the Upper Colorado River, north of the Upper Gunnison. There are three major diversions: the Colorado-Big Thompson Project which carries water in a tunnel from Grand Lake to the northern end of the Front Range for urban and agricultural purposes in the lower South Platte basin, the Dillon Reservoir-Roberts Tunnel Project which carries water from the Blue River tributary of the Colorado over to the 5outh Platte for the Denver area, and the Frying Pan-Arkansas Project which carries water from the Roaring Fork valley through another tunnel to the Arkansas River basin and the Colorado Springs and Pueblo areas. There is also an interesting diversion from the Fraser valley (also part of the Upper Colorado basin) to the Denver-Boulder area via the Moffat Tunnel, built first for trains. Historically, transportation systems have tended to follow waterways; but when the steam engine freed transportation from having to follow rivers, western rivers seemed to start going (neither naturally nor easily) where the transportation systems converged. In that era of what Colorado's West Slopers call "water grabs" (albeit entirely legal), the Upper Gunnison basin was fortunate in being more or less isolated from Front Range growth by the geographic fact that the Upper Arkansas River valley separates it from the South Platte River and Denver. Diversion over into the Arkansas was, and is, always a possibility, but the Arkansas valley end of the Front Range has been the slowest growing part of the Front Range, with a post-war history of industrial decline. People in the Upper Gunnison knew of course that this "protected" status would not last forever, as the cities on the Front Range grew ever larger, wealthier and thirstier. In the mid-1980s, an independent group of "water buffaloes" -- several retired Bureau of Reclamation engineers and a retired Air Force officer named Dave Miller -- drafted up plans for a huge reservoir in Union Park, a large mountain- ringed meadow high in the Taylor River valley, several hundred feet above the Taylor Reservoir. Into this reservoir -- which would boast about nine times the capacity of Taylor Reservoir, and be as large as Blue Mesa Reservoir in the Aspinall Unit -- would be pumped "surplus" waters during fat water years from most of the Gunnison tributaries on the east side of the Upper Gunnison basin via an intricate plumbing and pumping system. The water would then be available on both sides of the Divide in the lean water years. Because Miller's plan seemed to promise a win-win situation for both sides of the Divide there was tentative early interest in the Upper Gunnison as well as along the Front Range. The City of Aurora and Arapahoe County (southeast Denver area) signed on, and the City of Gunnison's council gave the idea a stamp of approval, believing it would help protect the Upper Gunnison from downriver calls and http://www.cozine.com/archive/cc 1999/00690133.htm 7/9/2003