People used to work

Cliff, Winky, and Kadizzle ended up clearing the path over at the Grapevine campground. The path goes along the canal that was built as part of the dam.  The canal supplied water to a small hydro plant where the dam would be built.  The canal was built about 1914. Kadizzle never sees the canal without thinking about the labor that went into it.  The canal is about twenty three miles long. Imaging digging a ditch twenty three miles long through terrible terrain by hand.  Add to the digging the tunneling.  There are 19 tunnels for the canal.  When you see what these people did by hand it is amazing. Many of the workers were Apache that were sort of impressed into doing the work.  It was not exactly slavery but pretty dam close.  Today the canal is overgrown and falling apart.  Snakes live in the tunnels, and erosion, and weeds have take their toll.  

Another aspect of wasting human endeavors.  The Grapevine campground is or was a wonderful group campground.  Do to under funding the place is falling apart.  It is heart breaking to see the wonderful facilities here just fall apart.  You have to be here and see this place to realize the incredible waste.  Kadizzle has written about it before, but here we go once more.  Kadizzle with Winky has traveled just about the entire United States.  In those travels there is nothing that remotely compares to the money spent for these campgrounds in any other state.  When the Salt River Project decided to raise the dam in 1990 forty million dollars was allotted for the recreation facilities.  It appears money must have rained on the place.  Roads, boat ramps, trails, showers, restrooms, picnicking areas all sprung up with the best of everything.  Mistakenly the planners figured people would flock from Phoenix to enjoy the wonderful area.  Wrong, they stayed home and watched television.  All of this is by the Roosevelt Lake. 

There is just not the money to run the place.  One solution would be to give some of the campgrounds to a private entity that would fix them up and try to make money from them.  Of course no one has the initiative to get anything like that done.  So the place will just rot.