BOARD02516

• Board Meeting Date: 11/12/1958
• Description: Minutes
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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MR. SPARKS:

MR. NELSON:

MR. SPARKS:

"The only natural reservoir site of
any size on the Roaring Fork is the basin
just above the town of Aspen, the Aspen
Reservoir. When you get above that site,
the river drops off'very rapidly which means,
to get any storage, you have to go very high
with your dam. That whole valley is heavily
overlain with glacial deposits. It is almost
impossible to find what we call bedrock in
that valley. You can drill for several
hundred feet and still not find it, which
means, then, that you have a very expensive
base. The reservoir can be built on the sand
base that exists there but you will have some
leakage. If you build a small reservoir and
only a small reservoir is possible anywhere
above Aspen, then your leakage under the dam
may be so great that you don't accomplish
much holdover storage.

You could figure the Aspen Reservoir
itself would leak through the sand below but
it would not be a significant amount if you
had a 28,000 foot reservoir. When you get
down to 10,000 feet or less then that leakage
becomes very significant."

I

"I would like to ask another question.
Has the controversial Ruedi site been checked?"

"The Ruedi reservoir site has been
thoroughly gone over before. It was one of the
original plans of the Bureau of Reclamation.
There again the reservoir site itself is quite
feasible, that is, the dam site. But there is
a chalk or limestone formation on one of the
abutments which is a dangerous type of forma-
.tion. If that limestone formation extends any-
where through the dam site itself, eventually
your whole dam will go out - leak out. There
is quite an extensive chalk deposit there.

Now that site has not been ruled out I
entirely as yet. We are looking, at the
present time, for sites which present no .
great problem on the face of it. We may have
to go back and take another look at the Ruedi
site. The top engineers from the Bureau who