Three Gunnison River reservoirs managed for recreation in western Colorado.
Curecanti National Recreation Area
Curecanti National Recreation Area is a National Park Service unit that runs along a roughly 40-mile stretch of the Gunnison River in western Colorado, encompassing three reservoirs created in the 1960s and 1970s: Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, and Crystal. The recreation area occupies portions of Gunnison and Montrose counties, with the nearest city being Gunnison, and it functions primarily as a water-based recreation landscape rather than a traditional wilderness park.
Blue Mesa Reservoir dominates the unit and is Colorado's largest body of water, a long, broad lake that holds the state's premier lake trout and Kokanee salmon fisheries. The narrower Morrow Point and Crystal reservoirs downstream cut into the upper Black Canyon of the Gunnison and provide a more remote, canyon-bound character. Together, the three reservoirs create a setting of open water, steep canyon walls, eroded volcanic ridges, and upland mesas shaped by both river action and the geology of the larger Gunnison basin.
Beyond recreation, Curecanti is significant as one of the tangible legacies of the Colorado River Storage Project, born from the 1956 Colorado River Storage Act and designed to hold, regulate, and use the upper Colorado's water. The recreation area also carries cultural layers, including a name drawn from a 19th-century Ute sub-chief, a preserved narrow-gauge railroad trestle from the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, and ties to early irrigation history through the historic Gunnison Tunnel at East Portal.
