Citizen's Guide to Colorado's Environmental Era

• Year: 2005
• Title: Citizen's Guide to Colorado's Environmental Era
• Author: Colorado Foundation for Water Education
• Publications - Doc Type: Other

Taylor Park Reservoir located in the Upper
Gunnison River Basin was officially dedicated
in 1937. Faced with pressing water demands,
the river below the reservoir was changed to a
system that went from very low to high flows
with little concern for its environmental needs.
Ironically, what enabled the resurrection of the
Taylor from a waterworks to a river again was
the addition of more dams downstream.
One of Colorado's more interesting
examples of this reconstruction process
is the Taylor River, which joins with the
East River to form the Gunnison River, 10
miles north of the City of Gunnison. To
the visitor driving up the 20 -mile canyon
the Taylor has carved, it is just a beauti-
ful mountain river —until one reaches the
head of the canyon, where a 200 -foot rock
and earth -fill dam backs up a 110,000
acre -foot reservoir. The Taylor watershed
accumulates water from the west side of the
Collegiate Peaks on the Continental Divide
in a big open park now partially filled by
the reservoir, then cuts its canyon through
the Fossil Range. Today, as it splashes over
the rocks and through the pools in the
canyon, it's as natural - looking a mountain
river as you would want to see. But as the
old dam's presence indicates, the Taylor
was one of the first parts of the Colorado
River and its tributaries to be fully con-
trolled and harnessed for human uses, "a
river no more" for several decades.
The story of the Taylor River's death
and resurrection has two beginnings: one
in nature and one in culture. Culturally, the
story is grounded in the "first come, first
served" water law that evolved in the and
West. This "appropriations doctrine" was
purely utilitarian, and humans were the
only `beneficial users" that counted. Water
rights were granted for "beneficial uses"
that originally had to involve diversion out
of the river for some human use. It was
not a beneficial use to leave the water in
the river just because you liked free -run-
ning rivers, or because it was good for the
I rj I COLORADO FOUNDATION FOR WATER EDUCATION
fish. That political and economic frame-
work was applied to most of the American
Southwest after the Mexican War.
Nature's role in the Taylor's demise
begins farther downstream; where an acci-
dent of geology created the canyons of the
Gunnison River, including the deep canyon
now preserved as the Black Canyon of the
Gunnison National Park. Some millions of
years ago the San Juan volcano blew its top
and laid several hundred feet of welded ash
over what is now the Gunnison's canyon
region. The water shedding off the nearby
mountains worked its way down through
that relatively soft rock, establishing a river
channel —only to encounter a big blurp of
ancient pre- Cambrian granite. Already cap-
tured in a channel, the river had no option
but to continue on carving down into
that hard granite rather than finding the
softer rock a half -mile or so to the south.
So instead of gnawing out a "normal" river
valley, the Gunnison created 50 miles of
canyon that include one of the narrowest
gorges in the world.
This was construed by early settlers in
the adjacent Uncompahgre River valley as
a minor error in nature's design; surely that
river was meant to irrigate the mostly dry
land east of the Uncompahgre. So in 1902,
the Uncompahgre Water Users Association
set about correcting the error with an
ambitious tunnel from the canyon out into
the valley.
This "Gunnison Tunnel' began as a
local project with some state funding, but
soon exhausted those relatively limited
resources, leaving the tunnel far from done.
But also in 1902, the federal government
had put its larger resources behind the
development of water in the West, through
the Newlands Act that created the Bureau
of Reclamation. The Bureau cut its teeth,
along with a lot of rock, in the Black
Canyon: one of the first Reclamation proj-
ects was completing the Gunnison Tunnel,
between 1905 and 1910.
When water started running in the tun-
nel in 1910, irrigating hundreds of new
acres of farmland in the Montrose area,
the Bureau looked on its work and saw
that it was good —but not good enough.
The Gunnison was still a mountain river
in a dry region; most of its flow came in a
couple of months in the spring and early
summer as the winter snowpack melted. So
the tunnel ran full through the early sum-
mer but then trailed off to a trickle right
when those farmers and ranchers needed
water to finish their crops. Storage was