Eagle Nest Dam: The Springers' Mountain Sea
Near Red River, New Mexico
High in the Moreno Valley of Colfax County, at an elevation above eight thousand feet, an artificial lake stretches four miles across a mountain meadow ringed by peaks that top thirteen thousand feet. Eagle Nest Lake looks as though it has always been there. It has not.
In nineteen oh seven, ranchers Frank and Charles Springer were granted a water permit by the Territory of New Mexico to impound the Cimarron River for irrigation. The Springer family were major landowners in Colfax County, heirs to the Maxwell Land Grant that had defined the economy of northeastern New Mexico since the Mexican period. They wanted reliable water for the dry eastern slopes below the mountains, where their cattle grazed on high desert grassland.
Construction of the dam began in nineteen sixteen and finished in nineteen eighteen. Engineers Willis Ranney and Neal Hanson designed an arched masonry structure of cyclopean concrete, a method that embeds large stones in the concrete matrix for strength and economy, rising about one hundred forty feet above its lowest foundation and spanning about four hundred feet at the crest. When it was completed it was one of the largest privately built dams in the United States.
Most of the labor was provided by Taos Pueblo workers, descendants of the pueblo communities that had lived in the mountains of northern New Mexico for centuries.
The reservoir behind the dam holds seventy-eight thousand acre-feet of water and supplies irrigation for farmers in the Cimarron valley to the east. The small town that grew up around it was initially called Therma, Greek for hot, before residents lobbied successfully in nineteen thirty-five to rename it Eagle Nest, after the golden eagles that nest in the surrounding peaks.
US Route Sixty-Four passes directly over the dam crest. The view across the lake toward Wheeler Peak, the highest point in New Mexico, is one of the most dramatic in the state.
