Farview Curve opens on the Kawuneeche Valley, the young Colorado River and the Never Summer Mountains, the only volcanic range in the park. The lot is on the left going west, on the outside of the curve, and on the right going east. There are no restrooms. The long horizontal line across the range is the Grand Ditch, which has carried Colorado River headwaters over the Divide since 1890, and the stop tells what is known of who dug it, including the Japanese crews who worked on it. The broad valley below once held the longest glacier in the park. Five switchbacks link the overlook to the valley floor, and they are worth taking slowly.
Slow down for this one. Just ahead, Farview Curve's lot opens on your left, on the outside of the curve, so watch for oncoming traffic. Coming back out, turn left. Five switchbacks follow, dropping to the valley floor. Now find the stripe. Look across the valley at the Never Summers, and through the middle of the range you'll see a horizontal line, ruled across the mountains about a thousand feet above the valley floor. That's the Grand Ditch. It's a canal, and it catches the headwaters of the Colorado River and sends them over the Divide to farms on the plains. The first water went over on October fifteenth, eighteen ninety. Year by year the ditch pushed south along the range until it was finished in nineteen thirty-six, and it takes about a third of the runoff from the east side of the Never Summers. A water company man named Edward Baker remembered the maintenance crews as strong brutes of men, who had to be brutes to handle those plows and that machinery. Many Japanese men worked on it. They hired on as companies rather than as individuals. One account says they weren't allowed to live with the other crews, and dug caves into the mountainside. The ditch's National Register file says the dugouts at Camp Two were supposedly for cooking. Nobody has managed even a rough count of the men on that ditch, and we haven't found a source that names a single one of the Japanese. The name on those mountains is borrowed. The Arapaho said it is never summer there, and that's the name. The range is the only volcanic one in the park, built between about twenty-nine and twenty-four million years ago. That broad valley held the longest glacier in the park, twenty miles of ice ending at the chain of islands in what's now Shadow Mountain Lake. Glaciers from the Never Summers flowed east into it, and glaciers from the Divide flowed west. From the wall at this curve, the stream on the valley floor is the Colorado River, the same river that carved the Grand Canyon, and it starts just a few miles up this valley. Down there it's small enough to wade.
Photo: Kimon Berlin · CC BY-SA 2.0