Bridal Veil Falls and the House on the Cliff
Near Telluride, Colorado
Look to the head of the canyon and you will see it. A white ribbon of water pouring off a sheer cliff, and perched impossibly on the rock above it, a small wooden building. This is Bridal Veil Falls, at around three hundred sixty five feet the tallest free falling waterfall in Colorado.
The building at the top is the Smuggler Union hydroelectric power plant, and it may be the most dramatically sited powerhouse in America. It opened in nineteen oh seven to power the Smuggler Union mine. The plan was bold.
Build a generating station at the very lip of the falls and send the electricity down to the company's operations below. The plant ran through the first half of the twentieth century, then fell silent for decades. In nineteen ninety one, exactly one hundred years after Nunn's breakthrough at Ames, a man named Eric Jacobson repaired and restarted it.
Today it once again feeds clean power into the local grid, a working antique clinging to the top of Colorado's highest waterfall.
