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<br />. <br /> <br />Starting in the I 920s, individuals and irrigation companies constructed and created reservoirs in <br />the Uinta Mountains. Today, these high mountain lakes store and supply approximately 22,000 <br />acre-feet of water to non-Indian land in the Duchesne River Basin. In the 1960s, Big Sand Wash <br />Reservoir was built. This reservoir has a capacity of 12, I 00 acre-feet of supplemental irrigation <br />water for non-Indian lands, In 1982 construction of Brown's Draw Reservoir, an off-stream <br />storage facility, was completed by the Moon Lake Water Users, Brown's Draw provides 6,600 <br />acre feet of storage for supplemental irrigation of non-Indian lands on the Uinta River. <br /> <br />Numerous other small reservoirs have been constructed throughout the Duchesne River Basin <br />totaling approximately 25,000 acre feet of supplemental storage for non-Indian lands, In <br />summary, approximately 122,000 acre-feet of storage and exchanges have been developed by <br />non-Indian farmers on the Uinta and Lake Fork River systems. <br /> <br />FEDERAL WATER DEVELOPMENT <br /> <br />Federal non-Indian water development in the Green River Basin (and principally the Duchesne <br />River Basin) began at the turn of the century and increased dramatically under CRSP. While <br />some of this development was for the benefit of non-Indian farmers in the Basin, the vast <br />majority was designed to divert water from the Basin over the Wasatch Mountains to Utah and <br />Salt Lake Counties on Utah's western slope. <br /> <br />Flaming Gorge Dam, Reservoir, and Powerplant, which make up the Flaming Gorge Unit of the <br />Colorado River Storage Project, were authorized for construction under CRSP and began <br />operations in 1963. The dam is a 502- foot tall concrete structure and the reservoir capacity is <br />3.79 million acre-feet. The reservoir area is about 42,000 acres and the powerplant capacity is <br />152 megawatts. <br /> <br />The Strawberry Valley Project provided the first large-scale transmountain diversion from the <br />Colorado River Basin into the Bonneville Basin. Early investigations began in 1903 and the <br />project was authorized in 1905, Construction began in 1906 and the completed project was fully <br />operational by 1922. Water is stored in Strawberry Reservoir on the Strawberry River, a <br />tributary of the Duchesne River, The reservoir also receives water through direct diversions from <br />Indian Creek, Trail Hollow Creek, and Currant Creek, all tributaries of the Strawberry River and <br />hence the Duchesne River. The stored water waS historically diverted into the Bonneville Basin <br />through the Strawberry Tunnel under the Wasatch Divide. The water was discharged into <br />Diamond Fork, a tributary of the Spanish Fork River, from which it was delivered for irrigation <br />of about 44,500 acres of land and power production purposes. With the authorization and <br />construction of the Bonneville Unit of the CUP, discussed below, the capacity of this <br />transmountain diversion project was dramatically increased. <br /> <br />29 <br />