1980 | Gene Wash Dam
Gene Wash Reservoir is tucked into the desert behind a modest dam and this even smaller peripheral dam, which closes off a pesky ravine cutting away from the selected ‘natural’ storage basin.
Water here is held after its first pump lift from the Colorado River impounded by Parker Dam, and from here it’s pumped up into Copper Basin, a remarkable place before and after the engineering, which feeds a tunnel through Whipple Mountain; then gravity takes the water sixty miles to Iron Mountain, where another pump station sends it up and through another tunnel at that site, and then it rolls through yet another tunnel under Coxcomb Mountain to Eagle Mountain, and one more lift after that allows the water to run through many more tunnels and siphons all the way down into the Los Angeles Basin.