January 4, 1969
It would be a watershed year.The Beatles were starting the project that would bring the band’s divisions to the surface. This was their last full year of recording together and the breakup would be announced in April 1970.Midnight Cowboy would win best picture, the only film rated X to win an Academy Award. The biggest box office picture would be Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid.In San Luis County the water supply for much of the south county was about to be secured.Quoting from the story by staff writer Jack Magee:
The Lopez Project is now Lopez Lake.Water is already being stored behind the huge, sprawling earthfill dam.Completion of the main project is scheduled by May, in time for the summer, just two years from the start of construction. Total cost will be about $16.5 million.“If the dam had been completed in December of 1966, the lake would be two-thirds full now,” says county hydraulic engineer Robert Born.That would be because of the heavy rainfall two years ago.
They expected the lake to take years to fill, but unknown to everyone, this was a watershed year.Photos were by David Ranns
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As a kid, I accompanied my Dad’s Boy Scout troop when they camped on the ranch. They usually hiked up the Wittenberg canyon (now the west “arm”)to where the water ski landing is now found. I was also one of the crazy kids that “surfed SLO” in 1969 during the flood.
The start of construction was stopped for about 3 years by the Sierra Club demanding $10 million for “changing the nature of Lopez Canyon”- before anything had started there!. When a judge ruled that me,a private citizen, could not be sued by the Sierra Club for planting trees at the future Biddle Park, then private property, I went and got the owners of the propes Lozez Dam Project to act as private citizens in contracting with the construction people as private citizens. The Sierra Club could not do anything about that! So Lopez Dam and Lake is there now because the mighty(?) Sierra Club picked on the wrong 11 year old boy- me! I went on to organizing about 10-12 more dam projects like that- all water projects for drinking water and some also for electricity and most for recreation. Screw those greedy environmentalists!