Blue Mesa Dam

Blue Mesa Dam is a 390ft zoned earthfill dam on the Gunnison River in Colorado. It creates Blue Mesa Reservoir, and is within Curecanti National Recreation Area just before the river enters the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The dam is upstream of the Morrow Point Dam. Blue Mesa Dam and reservoir are part of the Bureau of Reclamation's Wayne N. Aspinall Unit of the Colorado River Storage Project, which retains the waters of the Colorado River and its tributaries for agricultural and municipal use in the American Southwest. The dam's primary purpose is hydroelectric power generation. State Highway 92 passes over the top of the dam. Blue Mesa Dam houses two turbine generators and produces an average of 264,329,000 kilowatt-hours each year.DescriptionThe dam stands in an area where sandstone and shale overlay pre-Cambrian granite, schist and gneiss. It is situated at a narrows in the river valley where the Gunnison enters the upper reaches of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The dam has a volume of 3080000cuyd and the spillway intake structure has two radial gates. These discharge into a concrete-lined tunnel which in turn discharges through a flip bucket into a stilling basin.