Citizen's Guide to Colorado's Environmental Era

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extract the resources of American industry, but as a place to go to escape the intense logic of American industry —via some new industries that were growing up around a more sustainable kind of Western resource exploitation: rafting on rivers, fishing in rivers, sitting on a cabin or condo deck on the river bank and looking at rivers. Some dared to argue that there was more "benefi- cial use" (money- making potential) in these activities than in all the high - altitude hay production, tree harvest and metal mining the rivers could water. In 1968, some of this thinking was codified in a Colorado River Basin Project Act —a complex act in which the power- ful Wayne Aspinall traded his support for the huge Central Arizona Project down in the deserts to secure funding for smaller CRSP projects. But in that Act, for the first time, "basic public outdoor recreation" and "improving conditions for fish and wildlife" were made primary purposes for dams and reservoirs along the Colorado River. This wasn't necessarily sympathy for the fish; it was "beneficial" because humans were making money off of fishermen. But it was one of the first major concessions won from the Old West vision: this idea that humans might be able to thrive in the West without having to spread the streams and rivers out to dry for one economic purpose or another. Water users in the Upper Gunnison had created a conservancy district when construction began on the Aspinall Project dams. "Conservancy districts" are local agencies originally established to collabo- rate with the Bureau of Reclamation on "participating projects" to be funded by power production revenues and other fed- eral sources. The Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District had been formed to develop, with Bureau funding, an "Upper Gunnison Project" that would have included several small high- altitude reservoirs and some distribution canals. Most of that plan has since been aban- doned, given the drying -up of federal fund- ing for water projects. But the Upper Gunnison Conservancy, with the counsel of the aforementioned Dick Bratton, has taken a leadership role in the "reconstruction" of the Taylor River. Bob Jennings, of the Bureau of Reclamation's Western Colorado office, suggested a "stor- age credit" trade, whereby the Bureau would allow some of the Uncompahgre Water Users Association's Taylor Reservoir Black Canyon of the Gunnison.