The Grand Ditch: Stealing a River Across the Divide
Near Grand Lake, Colorado
High on the eastern flank of the Never Summer Mountains, if you know where to look, you can see a thin straight line cut across the slopes above timberline. That is the Grand Ditch, one of the oldest and boldest water diversion schemes in the American West. It is a hand dug canal roughly fourteen miles long that intercepts streams tumbling off the highest peaks and carries their water sideways along the mountainside, then over the Continental Divide at La Poudre Pass, at more than ten thousand feet.
Instead of flowing down into the Colorado River, that water is delivered to the eastern plains for farmers. Work began in eighteen ninety, and the first diverted water crossed the pass in October of that year, but the ditch was not fully completed until nineteen thirty six. It was built with hand tools and black powder, much of the labor done by Japanese and Mexican workers laboring at brutal altitude.
The Grand Ditch skims off between twenty and forty percent of the runoff from the Never Summer Mountains, which starves the valley below. In two thousand three, a section of the ditch bank breached, and the escaping water tore down the mountainside, knocking down twenty thousand trees and dumping tons of debris into the headwaters of the Colorado River, a scar still visible today.
