Farmington, N.M. – Jim Dunlap stands on the shore of Lake Nighthorse, looking at the acres of sparkling fresh water filling its banks. Dunlap has worked nearly fifty years to complete the lake, hoping to provide a steady water supply for arid New Mexico communities.
                 “Supply doesn’t run flat,” Dunlap said, describing communities who supply drinking water from rivers. “You may get 96 percent flow this year, but what happens when you get 74 percent next year?
                 “Now you don’t have enough water. You have to put some of that into storage to avoid the pitfalls.”
                 The project is designed to divert a small percentage of the water flowing in the Animas River into Lake Nighthorse, located near Durango, Colo., for storage. In normal years, the lake will store up to 120,000 acre-feet of water. In dry years, that water will be released back into the Animas for use by down-stream communities, including towns and Native American tribes in Colorado and New Mexico.
                 Dunlap compares Lake Nighthorse to big dam and lake projects that preserved and revitalized communities in Arizona and California. Despite the benefits, it was a long and difficult process to get the project completed.
                 “I’d heard rumblings about a storage project in 1966,” explained Dunlap, who started the rural water system near Farmington, N.M. and once served as president of the National Rural Water Association.
                 He attended a meeting hosted by the Department of Reclamation. The proposed project addressed several communities in Colorado and New Mexico, but made no mention of rural water.
                 “The mayor of Farmington stood up and said his town didn’t want water from this government project, so I jumped up and said ‘rural water will take any water Farmington doesn’t want, and if he doesn’t want any, we’ll take it all,’” Dunlap said.
                 In the early stages, it appeared the storage project would be fast and easy.
                 “There wasn’t a lot of fighting back then,” Dunlap explained. “They just went out and went to work.”
                Dunlap helped found the San Juan Water Commission, an organization that would collectively represent the beneficiaries in New Mexico. It included 13 entities, three towns and ten rural water utilities. The commission even negotiated a tax with the county to help fund the project.
                 “The Department of Reclamation wanted to negotiate the use contracts with individual users,” Dunlap said of the motivation for founding the commission. “Some of those utilities had lawyers, and some didn’t.”
                 The Water Commission proved successful in negotiating the use contracts, and plans were being made. The group formed construction committees to ensure that all the entities were informed of any changes or decisions.
                 “We were just developing plans for storage, when we got into an environmental fight,” Dunlap said.
                 The Animus is the last free-flowing river in Colorado, and one of the last remaining in the United States. It is considered free-flowing because it has no dams or controls along its course. The project leaders had to find a compromise.
                 “We decided to pump water to off-stream storage,” Dunlap said.
                 A pumping plant in Durango pumps the water just over two miles into Lake Nighthorse. When needed, the water can be released to flow by gravity back into the Animas. The solution didn’t satisfy all the environmental groups.
                 “They didn’t want the water to be used for irrigation,” Dunlap explained. “We had different Secretaries of the Interior, some who were for irrigation, and some who were against it.”                 Dunlap said that the project began to make progress again, with the help of Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, a politician from Arizona.
                 “We limited the yield and we limited it to human use,” he explained. The project was initially intended to hold up to 280,000 acre-feet.
                 The project broke ground in fall of 1988. Construction was halted in the spring of 1989 and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department issued a jeopardy decision for the Colorado Pikeminnow.
                 “They initially issued a no jeopardy decision, because they couldn’t find any in the river,” Dunlap explained. “Later, they found what they call three ‘young of the year’ which meant there was a reproducing population.”
                                For the storage project to continue, the group had to show they could recover the fish population. It proved to be a major hurdle for construction, because the dam project was blamed for the fish declines.
                 “The users were already being blamed for the extinction of a fish,” Dunlap said. He explained that the real declines started when the fish were exterminated in the 1950’s largely to help promote trout fishing.
                 “The jeopardy decision stopped everything,” he said.
                  The biological recovery team, which included members form the project and wildlife agencies, had a plan to remove competing, non-native fish from the Animas. Dunlap thought their solution was unique.
                   “They spent years floating the river in rubber boats, shocking the fish,” he explained. “They don’t kill them, but they stun them and net them out of the water to be relocated.”
                 It was only one step in getting construction started again. The pumping station has to include a fish by-pass structure and fish ladders.
                 “They wanted to ensure that nothing blocked the fish’s ability to move up and downstream,” Dunlap said.
                 Secretary of the Interior Babbitt found that the project could protect the fish without decreasing the yield taken by the users. Construction restarted in 1999, and most operations were finally completed in 2009. The pumping facility is operational and the lake is filling, but the project is not technically complete. Roughly 90 percent of the work will be completed at the end of 2009. Dunlap spent 43 years of intensive work on the project.
                 “I was acting on it every month of every year,” he said. He admits it was a long time to dedicate to a project.
                 “I once told my engineer ‘if you don’t finish this dam before I die, I’m going to make you use my ashes in the construction. He told me: ‘Jim, your ashes wouldn’t meet spec.,” Dunlap said with a laugh.
                 Even after such a long-term commitment, Dunlap only sees the project as something that needed to be done.
                 “I never received a penny for any of the time or work I put into this,” he said. “That’s how we do it in rural America.
                 “Somebody has to do it.”       

Project Features
Ridges Basin Dam
Height above streambed	217 feet
Crest Length	1,670 feet
Lake Nighthorse
Active Storage capacity	90,000 acre-feet
Inactive Storage capacity	30,000 acre-feet
Total Storage capacity	120,000 acre-feet
Waster surface at peak capacity	1,490 acres
Durango Pumping Plant
Maximum Lift	511 feet
Capacity	280 cubic feet per second  (2,084 gallons/sec.)
Ridges Basin Inlet Conduit
Length	2.1 miles
Capacity	280 cubic feet per second

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