What public works programs brought to our valley

A few weeks ago, a group of young fellows let me tag along with them on a dandy little adventure up Spring City Canyon. We drove about three quarters of the way to the top, parked the truck, located the nearby trailhead, and traipsed our merry way along an undulating path that ushered us up to a plank covered spillway.

A narrow gap in these 2×10 planks formed the entryway to a dank, dark, subterranean place that they referred to simply as, “The Tunnel.”

I lowered myself slowly and carefully down through this gap until I was standing in a foot of ice-cold water, inside a spooky, echoey, concrete culvert, about five and a half feet in diameter, that cut all the way though the center of the mountain.

Being six inches taller than the cement roof of this catacomb, I had to hunch down. Switching on my headlamp, I followed my similarly hunched guides, as we sloshed through the freezing water, my beam of light revealing countless tiny, inch-long stalactites, hanging from the ceiling.

After a long and chilly slog of at least a quarter-mile, we eventually broke out into welcome warmth and sunlight, and the chance to finally extricate my numb feet from cold water.

Blinking in this dazzling light, I glanced up to spy a curious engraving on the concrete facade of that portal from which we had just emerged; something that my energetic young comrades were too distracted and preoccupied to notice: three letters: USR; and four numbers, 1938.

I have since learned that those three letters indicate a project undertaken by the United States Bureau of Reclamation, and that the work was begun in the year 1938.

This particular project was intended to bring surplus irrigation water from the eastern side of the Wasatch Range, across the Great Basin Divide, via a tunnel cutting directly through the mountain range.

After Federal feasibility studies, President Franklin D. Roosevelt eventually approved the Spring City Tunnel, along with a second, Ephraim Tunnel, under the provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, enacted to help boost the country out of its economic doldrums in the wake of the Great Depression.

While two different private contractors won the bid to construct each tunnel, it was members of the Civilian Conservation Core (CCC), each working for just one dollar a day, that did most of the actual excavation work.

Picks and shovels were used for most of this laborious digging, but punching through thick shale and limestone required the occasional stick of dynamite.

Teams of CCC workers tunneled from either side of the mountain, until they eventually met somewhere in the middle. Due to severe winters, this dual-tunnel project took the better part of three years to complete, with water from the eastern side of the mountain range finally being diverted for the first time in 1941.

These tunnels have generally worked as intended; and sometimes too well, as in 1948, when excessive rain on both sides of the range brought so much supplemental water to our Sanpete side, that the tunnels had to be closed-off to mitigate flooding in the valley.

Today, both tunnels continue to provide supplemental irrigation water to the farmers and ranchers of Ephraim, Spring City, Mount Pleasant and Fairview.

This tunnel project is just one of the many local CCC projects completed here in Sanpete Country, including their work in connecting all the many high-mountain logging roads carved out by 19th Century settlers, into that continuous 100-mile stretch of gloriously elevated roadway that we know today as Skyline Drive. CCC workers also planted thousands of trees, and improved a number of camp-sites in this area.

While our Spring City and Ephraim Tunnels may not quite equal the eye-popping enormity and grandeur of the CCC-built Hoover Dam, they remain two of our very own lasting legacies from that by-gone era.

So, the next time my young friends and I go sloshing our way through that historic tunnel, perhaps I’ll take the time, as we dry our wet shoes in front of that 90-year-old eastern portal, to tell them the whole story. Who knows? One of their great grandfathers may well have had a hand in its excavation!