McPhee Reservoir
reservoir in Montezuma County, Colorado, United States
McPhee Reservoir is located in Montezuma County, Colorado, United States. It was constructed and is operated by the United States Bureau of Reclamation as part of the Dolores Project, and dams the Dolores River to furnish municipal and irrigation water for Montezuma and Dolores counties and the Ute Mountain Ute Indian Reservation.
McPhee Reservoir is named for McPhee, Colorado, a company town founded by the New Mexico Lumber Company that is now submerged under the reservoir. In 1927, the McPhee sawmill produced over half of Colorado's lumber. The town housed up to 1,500 employees. The sawmill closed in 1946.
The lake itself may be accessed from near Dolores, Colorado, by state highways 145 and 184, and offers various boat-launching facilities, picnic areas, and campgrounds in the McPhee Recreation Area operated by the U.S. Forest Service. The lake fills the lower end of the Dolores Valley, with the dam completed in 1985 across Dolores Canyon.
Dams
The reservoir has two dams. First, McPhee Dam, NID ID CO02707, is a 295-foot (90-meter) high rockfill and earthen dam that can store up to 399,200 acre-feet (492,400,000 cubic meters) of water.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “McPhee Reservoir” as reservoir in Montezuma County, Colorado, United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the places & architecture register because the source frames it as reservoir in Montezuma County, Colorado, United States. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1915342. VIAF identifies the subject as 315528621. Authority coordinates are 37.578, -108.572. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1927, 1946 and 1985.
Modern boundaries and familiar names can conceal earlier jurisdictions or structures that do not align with the present site. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “McPhee Reservoir” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.