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Alva B. Adams Tunnel

Beneath the glacier-carved peaks and valleys of Rocky Mountain National Park, below the alpine lakes and rushing streams, a concrete-lined tunnel belies the illusion of a pristine wilderness. In 1944, the two ends of the Alva B. Adams Tunnel were…

Boggsville

Founded in 1866 near the confluence of the Arkansas and Purgatoire Rivers, Boggsville became the first permanent settlement in southeastern Colorado. Its residents pioneered irrigation and large-scale farming and ranching in the Arkansas Valley. The town…

Bureau of Reclamation in Colorado

The United States Reclamation Service, later renamed the Bureau of Reclamation, was created in 1902 to advance settlement of the West through construction of large dams, reservoirs, canals, and other projects. Since then, the service has played an…

Carter Lake

Carter Lake is a reservoir located in the foothills northwest of Berthoud and southwest of Loveland. Created by three dams, it is approximately three miles long, with twelve miles of shoreline, a maximum depth of 180 feet, and a capacity of 112,228 acre…

Castlewood Dam

Built in 1890 along Cherry Creek south of Franktown, Castlewood Dam was meant to help irrigate Douglas County farms. In 1933 the dam gave way, unleashing a fifteen-foot surge of water on Denver and ultimately spurring development of the Cherry Creek Dam…

Colorado: An Overview

Colorado, “the Centennial State,” was the thirty-eighth state to enter the Union on August 1, 1876. Its diverse geography encompasses 104,094 square miles of the American West and includes swathes of the Great Plains, southern Rocky Mountains, and the…

Colorado–Big Thompson Project

The Colorado–Big Thompson Project (C–BT) is the largest transmountain water diversion in the state of Colorado. Built between 1938 and 1956, the C–BT Project provides supplemental water for municipal, industrial, and irrigation purposes in…

Flooding in Colorado

Coloradans have maintained a complex relationship with the natural process of flooding. On one hand, inhabitants of the arid West—from early indigenous communities to current metropolitan populations—have been attracted to the many resources floodplains…

Horsetooth Reservoir

Horsetooth Reservoir is located in the foothills just west of Fort Collins. The Bureau of Reclamation began construction of the reservoir in 1946 as part of the larger Colorado–Big Thompson Project, which provided additional irrigation water for the…

Land Use and Bird Life in Colorado

In the early to mid-1800s, when Europeans and Euro-Americans began arriving in what is now Colorado, they encountered a landscape that was significantly different from what we see today. The changes that have occurred to the landscape since then have had…

Lyulph Ogilvy

Lyulph Gilchrist Stanley Ogilvy (1861–1947) was an influential irrigator, rancher, journalist, and soldier in early Colorado. An immigrant son of Scottish aristocrats, Ogilvy helped build and maintain irrigation ditches in Weld County and later became a…

Milne Farm

First established in the 1880s as a homestead associated with the Greeley agricultural colony, Milne Farm sits just west of Lucerne in Weld County. The Milne family has owned the farm continuously for more than 125 years and has long been involved in…

Two Buttes Dam

Intended as a way to irrigate nearby farmland, Two Buttes Dam was built in 1909–10 on Two Buttes Creek, about seventeen miles northeast of Springfield. The resulting reservoir did not irrigate much land and was better used as a site for hunting, fishing,…

Wayne Aspinall

At the memorial service for long-time congressman Wayne Aspinall in 1983, Colorado Governor Richard Lamm said, “you can’t take a drink of water in Colorado without remembering Wayne Aspinall.” Wayne Norviel Aspinall (1896–1983) was born in Ohio and…