BOARD02386

• Board Meeting Date: 3/8/1972
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Memos
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

"And this (slide) is the granddaddy of the
reservoirs of the state. taken last October -
John Martin Reservoir. If you wanted to grow
corn. you could probably grow corn there: but
this is another example of the water resources
of the state.

How many lakes do we have? We tried to
put together a map showing how many lakes we
have. (slide) Those little blue dots were put
together rather quickly. showing all the lakes
that show up on a map of the State of Colorado.
with a scale of 1:500.000: in other words, an
eighth of an inch to a mile. Maybe the base of
each blue dot is 20 to 30 acres. I don't know
exactly. Down here are the Great Plains res-
ervoirs. and John Martin reservoir. which you
just saw. Others are on the southern trib-
utaries above Cucharas reservoir. It shows
all the lakes located up around Fort COllins.
the ones that you saw the pictures of before.
Also down along the Front Range. a number of
lakes store water. Big reservoirs and the high
reservoirs up in the Big Thompson system show.
Getting now to the western part of the state,
there is the Blue Mesa reservoir. Of course
if you don't think lakes are important in
Colorado, I would like to remind you that we
have both a Lake County, and located out in
here in southern Gunnison County, we have a
town called Lake City. Somewhere or another
those people were attracted to water.

Little bodies of water are scattered all
over the state. At least most of them at the
lower elevations are artificial. Many of them
at the higher elevations, except for the big
reservoirs. are natural. Roughly counting. we
figure that there are some 2,000 lakes in the
state. It depends on where you draw your base.
We figure when they are full they have a capac-
ity of storing some 6 million acre-feet of
water: that's by the old surveys. We know, of
course, that some of them are highly loaded

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