Theodore M.
of 1940 in Denver, it was beautiful weather, right up through Christmas. I
started going on Colorado Mountain Club trips every Sunday. Because the
snow had already started in the higher altitudes, the trips were mostly just little
hikes in the foothills, scrambling over rocks. But that started me on what
became a dominant force in my life-that is mountain climbing. From then on
I was hooked, and when the summer came, I was out climbing every weekend.
Like many newcomers to Colorado, I fell victim to what we called
fever. We just had to climb all of those mountains that were over 14,000 feet
in elevation above sea level. That happens to be 4,237 meters and one of my
friends would say, "What's the difference whether a mountain is 4,237 meters
or 4,210 meters? Why do you want to climb one and not the other?"
Well, it was just a kind of a feeling that you got. Eventually I teamed up with
some of my colleagues in the Bureau of Reclamation and got lots of advice
from one of the people that had already climbed all of them, Whitney Borland.
He was my squad boss in the spillway section in the Bureau, and we used to
talk about mountains. They certainly had a profound influence on our lives and
it's probably why I'm in as good health as I am now, and-you realize this is
my 50th year-I'm just finishing the 50th year of my professional career.
During the 18 months that I worked in the Spillway Design Section, I became
very much interested in hydraulic design and read a number of books on the
subject. I worked on design of spillways for dams such as Anderson Ranch
Dam in Idaho, Angostura Dam in South Dakota, Rifle Gap Dam on the silt
project in western Colorado, and Kortes Dam, which is a power dam on the
North Platte River in Wyoming. Those are the ones I remember. There were
a lot of others. And I had the opportunity on some of them, like Anderson
Ranch, which was already authorized, to make the initial design-being
supervised, of course, by others-and then following through with the model
testing and perfecting the design. The office of the Bureau was in the Denver
Custom House, at 20th and Stout Street then, and the hydraulics lab was in the
basement. And I had the thrill of making the initial design of the spillway and
observing them make a model test, watching them run the model, and making
adjustments to the design and so forth, and it really was a wonderful
opportunity for a young man just 22 years old.
I was working under the direction of the head of the Spillway Design Section,
D. C.
And he was one of these grand old men with a lot of
experience. He was a Scotchman, and for lunch he'd eat a few crackers and
45
Previous Page
