The Black Canyon in western Colorado is
one of the world’s most splendid examples of the depths to
which erosion and uplift can go. A steep gash in ancient granite,
nearly 3,000 feet deep and not much wider at its rim, the Black
Canyon is the kind of geological anomaly we like to single out for
national park designation. The Black Canyon started on this path in
1933, with a national monument designation by Congress, and was
finally consummated in 1999, with full national park status.
But the Black Canyon has been in the news lately, not
because of its dramatic beauty, but because of the cracks in our
contradictory park creation policy.
This time the issue
is water. The canyon was carved by a river, and it wouldn’t
be a very meaningful park without a river. But with dams and
diversions upstream of the canyon, there’s no guarantee that
there will always be a river through the park, let alone what kind
of river.
This has long been known. So, after more than
60 years of fiddling around on the quantification of a 1933 federal
reserved water right on the Gunnison River, the National Park
Service filed a claim in 2001 for enough water to create a spring
flood in the canyon, one that would replicate the way things were
in 1933. This request was consistent with the agency’s
founding mission to “preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural
resources and values of the national park system for the enjoyment,
education, and inspiration of this and future generations.”
They need this annual flood, the Park Service said, to
replicate spring floods that regularly tore out any plant life with
the temerity to try to creep up the canyon, and that kept the rocks
rolling and grinding down to the Sea of Cortez.
That
application for a reserved water right is complicated by the
park’s existence on a highly controlled river just below
three dams built in the 1960s and 1970s. The dams’ purpose?
Controlling and storing spring floods so that there can be regular
releases throughout the year. The dams were built to stop the
floods the Park Service wants to create with its water right.
So it’s not surprising that there are more than 400
opponents, people who depend on the regular flows, to the Park
Service claim. From the other side comes a suit by environmental
organizations against the Interior Department and State of Colorado
that says the Park Service’s “protection” mission was
abandoned in a back-room agreement between the feds and the State
of Colorado last summer.
All of that is kind of
background noise to the coming-to-roost of a century of believing
there was enough water in the West to do anything we wanted if we
just moved the shells around fast enough. The Park Service is
missing an opportunity here to illustrate the consequences of that
shell game.
The real story in the Gunnison Basin is of a
proud — some might say arrogant — civilization whose
left hand did not always know what its right hand was doing: We
built dams upstream of a place dedicated to preserving a natural
river.
Out of one office, the Park Service now manages
the Black Canyon National Park and the Curecanti Recreation Area
— the flat water recreation on the three reservoirs. This
neatly encompasses its dual, if not dueling, mission. But the Park
Service has always been about history as well as pretty places,
with “National Historic Parks” that try to tell the American story,
warts and all.
I think of the Lowell National Historical
Park in Lowell, Mass., where I got hooked for a whole day once.
It’s a place where the industrialization of America is told
from the perspective of everyone from owners to engineers to
workers. The Harper’s Ferry Historical Park is another good
place to visit, examining an explosive nexus in America’s
racial ambiguity.
It may be time here in the West to
abandon our schizoid perception of this region as either scenery or
resources and never the twain should meet. The tug of war between
resources and scenery is the living history of the West: wilderness
versus mining, public-land grazing versus “Cattle Free,” forest
clear-cuts versus zero cut, dams versus freely flowing rivers.
It’s a great, dramatic and ongoing story. And where
else could you see it in a 50-mile drive? Well, in lots of places.
But the Black Canyon is a good place to start looking at our
contradictory past.
George Sibley is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). He is a writer, teacher and director of the regional
Headwaters conference held at Western State College in Gunnison,
Colorado.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
