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By Dan MacArthur <br />Don Schwindt (above), Dolores Water Conservancy District board president, irrigates alfalfa fields <br />just outside his native Cortez. According to Schwindt, the Dolores Project has been a real boon to the <br />Four Corners' economy by keeping water in agriculture and opening up new lands for cultivation. <br />Balancing those benefits with municipal, tribal and environmental needs is also important, he con- <br />cedes. "They're all equal. You can't have them competing." <br />A undant snows making Telluride a ski mecca melt into the headwaters of the <br />Dolores and San Miguel Rivers and begin their westward journey. Yet once <br />these waters reach the lower mesas and rolling hills of the Colorado Plateau, <br />they are quickly in short supply. <br />It is said that in 1776 while blazing a trail from Santa Fe to California, Spanish <br />Fathers Dominguez and Escalante saw promise in this and region when they camped at <br />what is known today as the Escalante Ruins, a village abandoned by ancestral Puebloan <br />people three miles west of the present -day Town of Dolores. Standing atop this slight <br />divide separating the Dolores and San Juan river basins, it is believed that the two <br />priests were the first to envision the area's prospects for irrigated agriculture if the <br />waters of the Rio de Nuestra Senora de Dolores, or the River of Our Lady of Sorrows, <br />could be diverted into the Montezuma Valley. Many years after, their vision would take <br />shape in the form of a major transbasin diversion, and later the Dolores Project. <br />In the mid- 1880s, private developers wasted no time constructing two transbasin <br />diversions, a tunnel and canal to bring water from the Dolores River into the Montezuma <br />Valley. But by 1920, these private ditch companies were bankrupt and their systems in <br />disrepair. The following year, the Montezuma Valley Irrigation Company (MVIC) was <br />formed to continue to operate and maintain the ditches that supply some 33,000 acres <br />of farmland surrounding the Town of Cortez. <br />Transbasin diversion water allowed agriculture to function as the center of the <br />economy in the so- called "Montelores" (Montezuma/Dolores) area. Yet without a place <br />to store the water rushing out of the San Juan mountains in the spring, irrigators often <br />12 COLORADO FOUNDATION FOR WATER EDUCATION <br />