Roadside Rest

Roosevelt Lake's New Look a Dam Site Better than Roughing It

Exactly 50 years ago this month, my late and sorely missed brother Frank and I launched a 14-foot skiff into the gloomy mists and black waters of Roosevelt Lake. Bass fever gripped us, and within an hour our five-horsepower Johnson put-putted us to the cure. At the break of dawn, beneath a wall of ancient granite, Frank hooked a noble largemouth and deftly brought it to the net. The experience plus a corroborative witness gave him something to talk about the rest of his life. Even more, I recall the camping. We had practically hand-carried the trailer, boat, tent, bedding, chuck, and bait down a steep slope to the lakeshore from a primitive gravel road. We were obliged to make our outdoor home as best we could amid a field of leached boulders with nary a bush for shade. Frank and I stayed out three freezing nights and three blistering days. We had the vast reservoir almost to ourselves. It was called "roughing it."

This recollection impinged upon a recent day spent touring the latest in a complex of facilities taking shape around the vastly enlarged impoundment of New Roosevelt Lake.

Our air-conditioned vans paused at Windy Hill Campground, where sensibly designed hard-surfaced motorways linked together blue-roofed and landscaped campsites, administration kiosks, solar-powered rest rooms and warmed bathing facilities, children's playgrounds, launching ramps, and paved parking lots.

"When completed it will be the largest campground in the Forest Service system," our guide declared. "Here at Windy Hill, we will accommodate 5,000 guests overnight." Imagine that. Filled to capacity, Windy Hill would have ranked in the first 20, perhaps first 15, settlements in Arizona the week Frank and I went camping 50 years ago. Yet Windy Hill is only one of a dozen kindred developments to ring the New Roosevelt.

Naysayers were paid little heed at the turn of the century. There, 80 miles northeast of Phoenix, geology presented the perfect damsite. Through a narrow notch was channeled all the shed water from 5,000 square miles of the Salt River Basin. The opportunity thrilled that day's engineers: to tame floods, to offset drought, to make the desert bloom.

While Apache Indians were hired to build the freight road now known as the Apache Trail, Italian, German, Swiss, and Scottish stonecutters shaped massive blocks of native stone for the world's largest masonry dam. The labor lasted from 1905 to 1911 when President Theodore Roosevelt himself motored up the Apache Trail for the dedication. In hindsight, enormous environmental penalties were paid in submerged wildlife habitat, lost scenery, inundated prehistory, and altered ecosystems. But even latter-day critics grant that without Roosevelt Dam, Phoenix would not have grown to a city of 2 million, now the nation's seventh-largest, ahead of Detroit and Dallas.

Mother Nature, as usual, reserved veto power. Floods in the 1970s demonstrated that Old Roosevelt was woefully underbuilt. Emergency studies concluded that "Failure of Theodore Roosevelt Dam would cause the failure of three downstream storage dams and result in a catastrophic flood wave, producing more than $13 billion in damages... and placing more than 150,000 people at risk."

So the New Roosevelt. It took five years and $430 million to shape a thick concrete apron across and over the original masonry, raising the dam 77 feet for a 20 percent increase in capacity. Spillways, power generation, approaches - all were modernized. Vehicular traffic was redirected from the dam crest to a graceful steel arch more than a thousand feet long. An air-conditioned visitors center a mile and a half from the dam now welcomes tourists.

When enough runoff flows from the mountains, a higher lake will cover our old campsite. At a cost of $43 million, government agencies are making up the loss of such campsites by adding facilities complete with fish-cleaning stations and solidwaste disposals. On the busiest holidays, Roosevelt swarms with racing boats, sloops, ski craft, catamarans, windsailers, and jet skis. A luxurious marina caters to a culture attuned to physical fitness, the good life, and exquisite cuisine. Some visitors arrive in $100,000 motor homes.

So much for roughing it. With the presumed blessings of Frank (I do swear that bass weighed five pounds), next time I go to Roosevelt along with all the foreign guests, yuppies, and Baby Boomers, I intend to "smooth it."