Curecanti, Three Dams on the Gunnison

The deep blue water you are driving alongside is Blue Mesa Reservoir, the largest body of water in Colorado. It holds nine hundred forty thousand acre-feet of water within ninety-six miles of shoreline, and none of it existed before nineteen sixty-six. Before the dam was built, this was the upper Gunnison River, one of the most rugged canyon rivers in the West.

Curecanti National Recreation Area wraps around three reservoirs created by three dams built in sequence by the Bureau of Reclamation during the nineteen sixties and seventies. Blue Mesa Dam came first, completed in nineteen sixty-six. Morrow Point Dam followed in nineteen sixty-eight, creating a narrow, steep-walled reservoir that can only be reached by a steep trail. Crystal Dam completed the chain in nineteen seventy-six. Together the three impoundments back water into the upper Gunnison canyon for more than forty miles, generating hydroelectric power and storing Colorado River water under the terms of the Colorado River Compact, the nineteen twenty-two agreement that divided the river's flow among seven western states.

Below the third dam, the Gunnison enters the Black Canyon, one of the deepest and most dramatic chasms in North America, where in some places the canyon walls rise two thousand feet above the river and the gorge is so narrow that the sun reaches the bottom for only minutes each day. The Gunnison cut that canyon through about one point seven billion year old Precambrian rock over the last two to three million years. The Bureau of Reclamation once considered damming the Black Canyon itself; that plan was abandoned after fierce opposition, and the Black Canyon became a national monument in nineteen thirty-three and a national park in nineteen ninety-nine.

The archaeology here runs deep. Ancestral Puebloans lived in the canyon country for centuries before the Spanish arrived, and the Ute people used these high valleys until the late nineteenth century. Curecanti takes its name from a Ute chief, Currecanti, who lived in this region. When the reservoirs filled, some of those archaeological sites went underwater permanently. The trade-offs of the dam age are written in the landscape you are driving through.