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VERSY over the use of the upper unnison River would have ended a long time ago, if the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had been able to go ahead with a 1948 proposal. There would be nothing to argue about, because every potential drop would be di- verted to the Eastern Slope in the "Gunnison-Arkansas Project," an ancestor of the current Fryingpan-Arkan- I $aS Project which serves the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District. "Gun-Ark," as well call it here, was inspired by the Colorado-Big Thompson (CBT) project in nonhero Colorado, so that's a good place to start the story. Some of Colorado's most productive agricultural lands are in South Platte drainage east of the Front Range. But the fanners' water supplies were unreli- able, and so they began looking west to the wetter Western Slope. In 1937, during the New Deal and Dust Bowl years, they organized the Nonhern Colorado Wa- ter Conservancy District. They also lobbied Congress to allow the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to build a facility that would capture water near the headwaters of the Colorado River at Grand Lake, then send it under the Continental Divide through a 13. I-mile tunnel that emerged near Estes Park on the Big Thompson River. From there, it wouJd drop into a maze of reservoirs, power plants, pipelines, and canals that stretched for 60 miles nonh from Boul- der Creek to Horsetooth Reservoir above Fort Collins. Electricity sales, as well as revenues from water users, would presumably repay the Bureau for the COSt. CBr construction began shonly before World War II, suffered some delays on account of the war, and began delivering water in 1947. It was expanded in the 1980s with the Windy Gap Project, and .CBT delivers about 330,000 acre-feet in an average year. CBT made agriculture much more productive in its territory, which extended to the Nebraska line, and northern Front Range cities grew with their share of CBT water. Colorado also got a major source of electric- ity from the hydropower. By almOst any political or ec0- nomic measure, it was a success story for the Bureau. Even so strong and persistent a Bureau critic as Marc Reisner described it positively in Cadillac Desert: "One of the Bureau's most successful projects, Colo- rado-Big Thompson, was already delivering Colorado River water across the Continental Divide through a runnel to the East Slope; the power produced by the steep drop down the Front Range was enough to justify the expense of the tunnel, and the additional water di- verted from the upper Colorado to tributaries of the Platte River was welcomed by everyone from canoeists to Whooping cranes to irrigators in Colorado and Ne- braska." That was the model for Gun-Ark, which was de. scribed in a "project planning report" issued in 1948 by the Denver office of the Bureau of Reclamation. It was an immense project, and although all of the developed water was bound for the Arkansas, not all of it came from the Gunnison basin. Gun-Ark comprised what eventually became Fry-Ark, which has a collec- 26'Colorado Central Magazine'June 2003 Fry-Ark started out as Gun-Ark . In 1948 tion system above Basalt on the Western Slope, a run- nel (eventually the Boustead Tunnel) under the Sawatch Range west of Leadville, and includes Pueblo Reservoir to store water for downstream farmers. In es. sence, that's the Fry-Ark we have now, and it delivers about 70,000 acre.feet each year. But Gun-Ark would have delivered a lot more than that. On the nonh side of the Elk Mountains on the Western Slope, in the general area of Aspen, it would have collected water from the Crystal River and run it through a runnel south to the Gunnison basin. Similar tunnels would have taken water from Maroon and Cas. tie creeks above Aspen. The Nonh Fork of the Gunnison, above Paonia, would have been tapped, too, with tunnels that led to the S!tte River near Crested Butte. MOST OF THE WATER would have been gathered into an expanded Taylor Park Reservoir, and a new reservoir would have been built at Aimone A tun- nel under Cottonwood Pass would deliver water to the Eastern Slope - but not directly to the Arkansas River. Instead, Gun.Ark water - starting with the Fryingpan system west of Leadville _ would have flowed in a canal along the east flank of the Sawatch Range, and every few miles, there would have been a hydro-elecrric plane Twin Lakes, Granite, Wapaco (8 miles nonh of Buena Vista), Princeton (5 miles west of Buena VlSta) , Salida (7 miles northwest of town). All told, Gun-Ark would have generated at least 110,000 kilowatts, and delivered as much as 540,000 acre-feet a year to the Arkansas River near Salida _ al- most eight times as much Water as Fry-Ark now sup- plies (another diversion, the Twin Lakes Thnnel under Independence Pass, supplies about 30,000 acre-feet annually to the Arkansas). In other words, it would have more than doubled the annual flow of the Arkan- sas at Salida and points east. Those post-World War II years were heady days for the Bureau. At the time, it seemed possible to bt.:ild just about any project in the West, and Gun-Ark was mod-