Why Colorado's Most Beloved Lake Is Dying Right Now

Blue Mesa Reservoir was supposed to be Colorado's crown jewel — the largest lake in the state, twenty miles of cold water in the high country outside Gunnison, stocked with kokanee salmon and surrounded by some of the most dramatic geology in the Rockies. For decades it delivered exactly what Congressman Wayne Aspinall and the Bureau of Reclamation promised: a recreation economy that transformed Gunnison County, a world-class fishery, and proof that western Colorado could put its share of the Colorado River to work. Then the water started disappearing. This is the story of how a deal made in 1922 — the Colorado River Compact — divided a river using numbers that were wrong by twenty percent, how every dam and reservoir built afterward inherited that error, and how a historic drought finally exposed the math. Blue Mesa isn't dying from neglect. It's being drained by federal order to prop up Lake Powell and meet legal obligations to downstream states that were promised water the river never reliably had. The small towns, fishing guides, marinas, and businesses that built their lives around this lake are watching it shrink season by season — while the foundations of communities flooded in the 1960s resurface from the mud. The bathtub ring on the canyon walls tells the whole story. — Sources: Bureau of Reclamation — Aspinall Unit (Curecanti) Operations and Water Storage Data Colorado River Compact of 1922 — Full Text, Bureau of Reclamation Archives Woodhouse, C.A., et al. — "Updated Streamflow Reconstructions for the Upper Colorado River Basin," Water Resources Research (2006) National Park Service — Curecanti National Recreation Area: History and Resource Management Colorado Parks and Wildlife — Blue Mesa Reservoir Fishery Reports and Kokanee Salmon Population Assessments Sturgeon, Stephen C. — "The Politics of Western Water: The Congressional Career of Wayne Aspinall," University of Arizona Press (2002)