Durango – Just two miles south of town Friday morning, a big truck growled and whined its way across Ridges Basin and dumped the first load of clay where a dam will rise 275 feet to hold back the waters of the future Lake Nighthorse.
“And the dam will keep the water from going to California,” Animas-La Plata Project lead engineer Rick Ehat said to a smattering of applause.
More than 100 invited guests attended a celebration held by the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes to mark the start of construction of the A-LP’s single biggest feature, the dam. It was a day decades in the making.
“Many years ago when they put us on this reservation … they made a promise they would have water available to us,” Southern Ute chairman Clement Frost said. “That promise was never fulfilled until today.”
Water developers, the so-called water buffaloes, have dreamed for a century of a project that would divert and store the melted mountain snows in the Animas and La Plata rivers for farming, drinking and industry in southwestern Colorado.
When completed and filled, perhaps as early as 2010, Lake Nighthorse will provide southwestern Coloradans and northwestern New Mexicans with 120,000 acre-feet of long-term storage.
Linda Campbell, standing in for her husband – former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, for whom the lake is named – said she was remembering the 1991 groundbreaking, a premature celebration, as it turned out, because imminent environmental and other legal challenges delayed any actual work on A-LP sites until November 2001.
She also recalled a bumper sticker about her husband, one of A-LP’s toughest congressional allies, that read: “Dam Campbell, not the Animas.”
It’s been a long war. Congress first authorized the project in 1968, but it had many opponents among environmentalists, rafters and neighbors, and they were just as determined to stop A-LP as supporters were to build it.
But in 2000, the Bureau of Reclamation released a final decision to build a scaled-down project, roughly one-third the original size. “A-LP Lite,” as it became known, no longer has irrigation features or much to do with the La Plata River. And the project no longer has recreation features.
It does have municipal and industrial water for Four Corners communities, with the lion’s share going to the two Colorado Ute tribes. The project’s cost is now estimated at $522 million.
Because excavation work and construction of certain A-LP features began almost four years ago, Reclamation said the overall project is about 25 percent completed and on schedule.
“What we will end up with is a world-class dam,” Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner John W. Keys III said.
Ehat said the dam’s size will put it in the top 6 percent of Reclamation’s inventory of some 400 embankment dams.
“It took two generations to get to this point,” state Sen. Jim Isgar, D-Hesperus, said. “I was a little kid when my father became a founding member of the A-LP board. This is not the project we envisioned. This is not the project that could have kept us in agriculture. But we made a commitment to help our friends. We will not waiver. We will get the funding necessary to complete this project.”
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 970-385-0917 or edraper@denverpost.com.
