Celebrating it’s 75th year:
Now located in Berthoud, Colorado
I think I’ve mentioned before that water is an important topic in Northern Colorado. And if you need to learn as much as you can about what’s going on with our water (us being Northern Coloradoans) you can get on the waiting list to attend a NCWCD tour. Once you are on the guest list, you can get on over to Berthoud, Co. (Remember Berthoud?) and get on the bus to either the east or west slope tours.
Windy Gap blow holes
The pumping station at Windy Gap pushes tons of water up-hill in an eastern direction towardLake Granby with the intention to control the water level of the lake: It is not to change by more than 12 inches! If something happens to the pumps that would make them stop, tons of water flow back to the station and shoot out of the blow holes.
Not an ICBM bunker
It’s a tunnel that goes under Rocky Mountain National Park
The Alva B. Adams Tunnel, specifically
One of many tunnels in the “System”, the system being the Colorado-Big Thompson Water Project (aka, the C-BT) , but this one is the largest water tunnel, 13.1 miles long, 9.75 feet in diameter, drops 109 feet end to end (How did they do that?) it takes the water from Grand Lake on the east on the mountains and delivers it at 5 miles per hour to Mary’s Lake on the east side of the mountains.
Pumping station talk
Among other talks on the tour– Oh, about the tour: This was the West Slope Tour: it was free, and it included a continental breakfast and lunch and a bus ride through Rocky Mountain National Park and back; Total time on tour: 10 hours!
Windy Gap Reservoir bird island
This was a very environmentally friendly area and it was great for viewing the local wildlife. Of course there are many more reservoirs in the chain of the C-BT, let’s see: Our water comes from Green Mountain to Windy Gap to Lake Granby to Shadow Mountain to Grand Lake to Mary’s Lake to Lake Estes to Pinewood to Flatiron and finally Horsetooth.
Eric tells us how
Eric is one of the plant engineers at the C-BT and he gave us even more information about Colorado water than the engineer on the 2 hour bus ride up to Windy Gap. Really it’s information overload unless you are a water engineer or something like that.