Green Mountain Reservoir has not seen a summer this painful since the year it was built.
The reservoir, created by a dam on the Blue River in north Summit County, never hit capacity this year. At the end of summer runoff on June 10 the shoreline was down by 60 feet.
Yesterday, when Summit broke 86 degrees Fahrenheit, the shoreline at Green Mountain was down by 83 feet and falling.
Green Mountain Reservoir levels this year (elevation)
- Capacity…7,950 feet
- Jan. 1… 7,891 feet
- June 10… 7,890 feet
- July 12… 7,867 feet
Data by Colorado Division of Water Resources.
Summit’s own dustbowl
Sunday, July 12, was the hottest day of the year at the Krystalized weather station in Dillon. It would have set a record high – if not for July 1939.
In the summer of ’39, at the tail end of the Dustbowl, Summit weathered its hottest and driest July in modern history. The official record-keeping station in Dillon recorded 20 consecutive days of 80 degrees or warmer, topping out at 89 degrees on July 12 and July 15. That is the closest Summit has ever come to breaking 90 degrees.
But the summer of ‘39 wasn’t just hot. It was utterly dry and, at times, freezing cold. During that stretch, from June 27 to July 25, the county went 29 days straight without a trace of rain. The temperature would swing by as much as 56 degrees Fahrenheit, from daytime highs in the upper 80s to nighttime lows as cold as 25 degrees.
This year has been similar but not as dramatic. We went 25 days with barely a trace of rain, from May 31 to June 24, although the temperatures weren’t as extreme, swinging by as much as 49 degrees on July 19.
Compensation on the Colorado
Back to Green Mountain Reservoir. The lake began filling in 1939 as the first piece of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, designed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation as a remedy for drought.
In a brief history of the C-BT Project, the operator of the reservoir, Northern Water, explains how those Dustbowl years inspired Green Mountain, plus 11 other reservoirs, 35 miles of diversion tunnels and six hydroelectric plants.
“The 1930s (were) a time of great hardship in Colorado,” the history reads. “The economy struggled following the 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression. Scores of Coloradoans were out of work and finding a job was difficult. At the same time, a devastating drought gripped the region. Many of Colorado’s farming operations were failing as crops withered without much-needed water.”
Unlike the rest of the C-BT Project, Green Mountain Reservoir doesn’t water the Front Range. It was made to compensate the Western Slope for all the water pulled east through Lake Granby and the Alva B. Adams Tunnel. This one, like the Roberts Tunnel from Lake Dillon, pumps water from the Upper Colorado River Basin to millions of homes and farms on the Front Range.