The Ghost Town (and railroad!) UNDER Navajo Lake
With water levels in the Colorado River Basin dwindling, the Bureau of Reclamation has had to release water from its Upper Basin reservoirs on the Colorado River Storage Project. The reason? If the level of Lake Powell, which has been decimated by over-usage and climate change, drops too low, then water cannot be used to generate power. This means that reservoirs in Colorado have felt the brunt as they released water in 2021 to avert this situation. Both Blue Mesa Reservoir between Gunnison and Montrose and Navajo Reservoir between Pagosa Springs and Farmington, New Mexico have seen drastic drops, with the latter nearly seventy feet under the level of full pool. This allowed me to travel up to the town of Arboles Colorado in the spring of 2022 and search out the remains of the original town, which was at the confluence of the San Juan and Piedra Rivers near Chimney Rock National Historic Site (once a home to the Chacoan Culture of the Ancestral Puebloans). The town was once a stop on the Denver and Rio Grande Western's far flung narrow gauge network. Specifically, the town was a water stop between Chama New Mexico and Durango Colorado on the San Juan Extension, the line that is preserved as the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad, and the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroads in the towns above. With the creation of the Navajo Reservoir in the 1960's the Bureau of Reclamation was tasked with building a bypass for the railroad and moving it's one of a kind water tank above the rising waters of Navajo. The water tank in its later years was the remnants of a tender cistern from one of the Rio Grande's scrapped standard gauge Class M-75 4-8-2 No. 1600. We'll start there and go around the Piedra River arm and go into the lake bed and see what we can find of the old town and railroad.
With water levels in the Colorado River Basin dwindling, the Bureau of Reclamation has had to release water from its Upper Basin reservoirs on the Colorado River Storage Project. The reason? If the level of Lake Powell, which has been decimated by over-usage and climate change, drops too low, then water cannot be used to generate power. This means that reservoirs in Colorado have felt the brunt as they released water in 2021 to avert this situation. Both Blue Mesa Reservoir between Gunnison and Montrose and Navajo Reservoir between Pagosa Springs and Farmington, New Mexico have seen drastic drops, with the latter nearly seventy feet under the level of full pool. This allowed me to travel up to the town of Arboles Colorado in the spring of 2022 and search out the remains of the original town, which was at the confluence of the San Juan and Piedra Rivers near Chimney Rock National Historic Site (once a home to the Chacoan Culture of the Ancestral Puebloans). The town was once a stop on the Denver and Rio Grande Western's far flung narrow gauge network. Specifically, the town was a water stop between Chama New Mexico and Durango Colorado on the San Juan Extension, the line that is preserved as the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad, and the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroads in the towns above. With the creation of the Navajo Reservoir in the 1960's the Bureau of Reclamation was tasked with building a bypass for the railroad and moving it's one of a kind water tank above the rising waters of Navajo. The water tank in its later years was the remnants of a tender cistern from one of the Rio Grande's scrapped standard gauge Class M-75 4-8-2 No. 1600. We'll start there and go around the Piedra River arm and go into the lake bed and see what we can find of the old town and railroad.