Click the link to read the article on the Sibley’s Rivers website (George Sibley):

February 17, 2025

Well, with the fate of constitution democracy in the courts where we know the mills grind slowly (as opposed to the grinders who break things quickly); and with the money frozen for farmers doing well by doing good in water conservation; and neither white smoke nor black smoke arising from the chimneys of the enclaves trying to envision the next decade or so for the Colorado River – I’ll take a break from my wonkish efforts to think outside the box, to remember a friend and mentor, and friend of the River, who thought outside the box often in the last half of the 20th century.

The cantankerous Colorado River water community recently lost a valued member, L. Richard Bratton, a water attorney in the Upper Gunnison River Basin from 1958 till his death January 28.

Dick Bratton’s scope of influence went beyond the Upper Gunnison mountain valleys, however; he was a creative thinker who never met anyone he could not talk to – or listen to, or work with. A born “connector,” he became an active player in events on the cusp of major changes in the development of water in the entire Upper Basin of the Colorado River.

Born in 1932 and raised in Salida, Dick Bratton came to Gunnison to attend Western State College, then went to the University of Colorado Law School. While at school in Gunnison, he had met Ed Dutcher, a somewhat legendary West Slope water attorney. Shortly after Bratton completed law school, Dutcher invited him to join his firm in 1958.

Bratton joined Dutcher’s firm that year – and in 1959, the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) came to the Upper Gunnison River Valley in a big way, with Congressional approval of funding for CRSP’s Curencanti Project (Blue Mesa, Morrow Point and Crystal Dams, now renamed the Wayne Aspinall Unit), and he found himself plunged into all of the ongoing and emerging challenges faced by small communities with agrarian roots in an urbanizing and industrializing world.

The first challenge was Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation vision. The “Father of American Conservation” had a different view of conservation than most of us have today; to him and his philosopher sidekick Gifford Pinchot, conservation meant first the orderly development of resources otherwise wasted – like the Colorado River pouring itself into the sea in a two-month uncontrolled and mostly unused flood of snowmelt. And when it came to what should be developed and by and for whom, their rule was “the greatest good for the greatest number,” with “for the longest time” sometimes remembered, sometimes not.

In the Upper Gunnison, the Bureau of Reclamation had chosen the Curecanti Reservoir site not to benefit the small ranches and farms of the Upper Gunnison valleys, in accord with their original Rooseveltian mission. It was chosen because it was a great site for a major reservoir in a regional water development for four states that were paranoid over their obligation to make sure a set amount of water passed on to the three more populous states below the Colorado River canyons. The greatest good for the greatest number.

The Curecanti Reservoir as originally proposed, however, would have backed 2.5 million acre-feet (maf) of water almost up to the city limits of Gunnison, with the shallow end exposing major mudflats every summer as the reservoir was drawn down, and the prevailing westerlies would have turned Gunnison into a dust bowl. Bratton’s partner and mentor Ed Dutcher had invested much of his career into opposing this local sacrifice for the greatest good for the greatest number – not just standard NIMBYism; the community was fighting for its life, and also for the life of two small towns that would be inundated along with 30 miles of legendary fishing stream, 23 small river resorts, and 6,000 acres of ranchland.

After much noisy negotiation with the Bureau of Reclamation for Dutcher and his “Committee of 39,” the Bureau dropped the reservoir size to just under one million acre-feet, saving Gunnison from the dust inundation, but still losing the two smaller towns and their economic activities – and the great fishing.

Being sensitive to the cost the project was imposing on the ranchers and farmers that the Bureau was actually created to serve, however, an “Upper Gunnison River Project” with seveeral small reservoirs was included as a future participating project in the CRSP Act, to be paid for partially by the revenues from the hydroelectric plant on the three largest CRSP dams: Glen Canyon, Flaming Gorge and the Curecanti Unit.

So one of Bratton’s first jobs in Gunnison was helping talk the people of the valley into taxing themselves a little to create an Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District under state law, both to help the Bureau lobby for project funding in Washington, and to nudge and harass the Bureau into getting project planning and execution done. Creating the Conservancy was accomplished in an election in 1959, a busy year for Dutcher and Bratton.

In 1961 Dutcher was appointed to a judgeship, and Bratton took over the law firm. That same year, the Bureau opened an office in Gunnison, and began the preliminary work for the Curecanti Project – clearing the land of trees, relocating roads, and buying out all of the human occupants, an unpleasant and depressing process in the valley. The “greatest good for the greatest number” rule, applied in many areas other than conservation, has nothing in the formula for the “lesser numbers” – probably one source of our current urban-rural troubles.

As construction proceeded on the Curecanti dams, though, a “big pivot” in the way the entire nation perceived the American West was becoming unignorable. The Bureau of Reclamation had depended on the willingness of the American people to continue investing in the “reclaiming” of arid lands to create more of the iconic “family farms” and to otherwise further the development of raw resources to feed the people and industries of an increasingly urbanized and industrialized economy. But the increasingly urbanized, industrialized – and after the Second War, increasingly mobilized – American people were enjoying a rising standard of living that included more time for recreation – paid vacations! – and “their” western public lands were increasingly perceived not as a resource hinterland, but as a vacation paradise, to be kept as pure and pristine as possible with millions of people trampling through.

On Bratton’s home front, the Crested Butte Ski Resort also opened in 1961 upvalley, forcing the beginning of a transition in the Upper Gunnison’s self-perception as part of the mining, farming and ranching “working west,” as opposed to a service sector serving visitors to the great western playground. “Conservation” was swinging from the Rooseveltian orderly development of otherwise “wasted” resources toward conservation as careful guarding of the West’s resources, including preservation of its residual wild magnificence, Wallace Stegner’s “society to match its scenery.”

Bratton himself was the son of a “working west” family, with a couple generations before him in Colorado engaged in mining and mining-related economic activities. But like the political creator of the Colorado River Storage Project, West Slope Congressman Wayne Aspinall, Bratton could see where things were going, and worked to make the transition at home as non-disruptive as possible for the “Old West” yielding to the “New West.” (Aspinall’s CRSP Act included provisions for recreational facilities around the major dam sites – but also provisions for a number of “Old West” valley-scale projects that could not meet cost-benefit analyses on their own without assistance from hydropower revenues.)

The creative quality of Bratton’s work in that transition is probably best shown in the story of the resurrection of the Taylor River. The Taylor River collected runoff from some of the highest and snowiest peaks of the Continental Divide and came down to the Gunnison River through 25 miles of canyons – a beautiful mountain river with a reputation among “anglers” (don’t even say “bait”) as a world-class fishery, even in the early 20th century.

But in the 1930s, the Bureau put a dam at the head of the canyons to store late-season water for farmers in the Uncompaghre River valley, more than a hundred miles downriver at the receiving end of the Gunnison Tunnel, the Bureau’s first big transbasin water project. That project to make life better for distant farmers effectively killed the Taylor and its aquatic life as a river, reversing its natural wet and dry cycles and turning it into an irrigation canal that ran at the will of the Bureau. This was a great loss to the people of the Upper Gunnison, who knew that the best time for fishing was after work anyway. The loss of the Taylor was their first lesson in what the greater good for a greater number meant for the lesser number.

And the Curecanti Project was their second lesson, inundating another twenty-some miles of world-class fishery, along with two small towns and a fishing-resort community that made decent livings from the river. But the Upper Gunnison farmers and ranchers held out hope that, once the Curecanti Unit was in place to play its role in the larger world of Colorado River Basin policy and politics, the Bureau would at least fulfill its promise and begin work on the Upper Gunnison River Project to give them a little help with late-season water.

But just in the decade-and-a-half from the difficult passage of the CRSP Act in 1956 to the completion of the Curecanti Project, public support for expensive irrigation projects to develop western lands basically dried up, replaced by active opposition to anything disturbing the natural beauty and magnificence of The West. It became obvious to the Upper Gunnison Conservancy board and Bratton – attorney on retainer to the board for its first 40 years – that there would be no federal funds for an Upper Gunnison River Project.

But Bratton – a convener and collaborator who managed to maintain good working relationships even with opponents – started to play on the Bureau’s guilt at not being able to fulfill their promise to the people of the Upper Gunnison. He found a willing collaborator in Bob Jennings, a Bureau manager in the West Slope office. Together, they devised a plan whereby the Bureau would let the Uncompaghre Valley Water Users Association store their Taylor Reservoir water in the Blue Mesa Reservoir – at least a day closer to where the water would be used. Then the water could be moved from the Taylor Reservoir down to Blue Mesa from in a schedule more in tune with the natural flow of a river. Maybe the Bureau could not create small upstream reservoirs for the “Old West” agrarian economy, but it could facilitate the resurrection of a beautiful river for the “New West” economy taking shape (and Old West workers who liked to fish).

This was accomplished with a 1975 agreement among the Uncompahgre Valley farmers, the Colorado River Water Conservation District, the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy, and the Bureau. The Bureau would manage the “new” river, but with input from the other three parties – input that begins each spring with a meeting of an Upper Gunnison River “Local Users Group”: representatives from Taylor River irrigators, whitewater recreation businesses, Taylor Reservoir flatwater businesses, anglers, and riparian residents. This group sits down with projections for the summer runoff, and compile suggestions for the Bureau on the operation of the Taylor River that will meet all their needs more or less (and being sure to get the Uncompahgre farmers’ water down to Blue Mesa storage in a timely way). The Bureau and other parties can override their recommendations, but seldom need to. And the Taylor is a beautiful mountain river again – “unnatural” only in being democratically operated by all of its Old West and New West users.

Bratton did not stop there. He led the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District through the process of filing for rights on a secondfill of the Taylor Reservoir. Taylor Park above the reservoir gathers on average half again the 110,000 af needed for the Uncompahgre users first fill. Any water collected in a second fill would be left in the river, for wildlife and other environmental benefits downriver – a right consistent with Colorado’s 1973 instream flow law, to sustain the aquatic and riparian environment “to a reasonable degree.” This water right, inconceivable before the 1970s and NEPA awarenesss, was granted in 1990 – just in time to help thwart a proposal for a transmountain diversion to the Front Range from the adjacent Union Park.

Even then, Bratton was not yet done playing on Bureau guilt for imposing the Curecanti Unit on the Upper Gunnison with no compensatory project for the local water users – even though the Upper Gunnison community generates a lot of economic activity from the Curecanti National Recreation Area around Blue Mesa Reservoir. Early in the 21st century, Bratton wanted to develop some ranchland he owned adjacent to the City of Gunnison, with a tributary of the Gunnison River running through it. This development was not received by local residents with any great enthusiasm.

But Bratton remembered a ‘handshake agreement’ with the Bureau from the Curecanti construction era, that the Bureau would replace the great sport fishery the reservoir would inundate with some good public access fishing streams elsewhere in the basin. So rather than developing a standard golf-course-rimmed-with-expensive-homes development, Bratton reminded the Bureau of its promise, and sold it the stream corridor through his land for public access, to be managed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

Bratton was also deeply committed to his alma mater, Western State College (now Western Colorado University). In 1975 – obviously a busy year in his life – he orchestrated the creation of the Western State College Foundation, with bequests from former Colorado Governor Dan Thornton and his wife Jessie, valley ranchers; the Foundation continues as an important support for program development at the University.

The following year, 1976, he collaborated with Western history professor Duane Vandenbusche on a water education course. The next year, 1977, that evolved into the “Western Water Workshop,” to which Bratton invited an incredible lineup of speakers, including – in the same room – longtime West Slope Congressman Wayne Aspinall, Denver Water’s longtime chief counsel and bitter West Slope adversary Glenn Saunders, Assistant Bureau of Reclamation Director Cliff Barrett, former Governor John Vanderhoof, and a number of other luminaries of the “water buffalo era.” Your author was privileged to sneak into those summer sessions – one of the most memorable of which was Bureau man Cliff Barrett trying to suss out the implications of President Carter’s recently released “hit list,” a list of water projects, including a number of CRSP projects, that did not meet a new cost-benefit analysis – essentially the official end of the era of federally-funded western water development.

The Western Water Workshop continued for forty years; a place where East Slope and West Slope, Old West and New West participants could gather for a couple days of off-the-record escape from the physical and cultural heat of the cities in the summer. I sserved as director of the Workshop for six year after the turn of the century until I retired from Western, and I found Dick Bratton to still be a great resource and idea person. At that time he had been appointed by President G. W. Bush to be the federal representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission. He once took pains to save my Water Workshop job when I had inadvertently offended one of the old “water buffalo” with a couple invitees to a session; Bratton reminded his old friend that the Workshop promised “the presentation of all reasonable points of view.”

The reader may feel this article is more a history lesson than the remembrance of a man. (A full obituary can be found in the Feburary 6 Gunnison Country Times – www.gunnisontimes.com) But it is my feeling that some people cannot be understood outside of the history they are part of, and Dick Bratton was such a person. Like his friend Wayne Aspinall, he tried to help Colorado’s West Slope (and the larger intermountain West) negotiate the difficult, inevitable, and ongoing transition from the “Old West working economy” to the “New West amenity economy.” His heart may have been more with the former, but he became at home with the latter because, basically, he was at home in the world, whatever it was, and enjoying working with whomever he encountered there. And he was a fisherman as well as the son of a miner.