Work began on the second part of the tunnel project. Vet Bradford and Marvin Lyman, partners in the tunnel contract.
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| Main cabin with kitchen, and cabins for living quarters. Vet Bradford, Thora Bradford, and their family lived in the main cabin, while Vet and his sons worked on the Blanding Tunnel. - Kay and LaRae Bradford photo. | A cabin on the south side, behind main cabin kitchen
area. This provided the men with a sleeping room while they helped work on the Blanding Tunnel. Thora cooked for the men who did not bring their families on the mountain.
- Kay and LaRae Bradford photo. |
The work was tedious and hard; old abandoned equipment was purchased from Colorado. A track was installed and the muck carts were pulled out by a mare. The jack hammers were run by a diesel air compressor.
At times the rock the men were drilling was so hard it took three or four times more explosives as usual. The softer slide rock areas had to be timbered. Walter Lyman, though an old man, completed the first 250 ft. of timbering.
"I tell you something about the tunnel most people don't know. For a long time I wasn't too enthusiastic about the tunnel. It only went so far until it just completely died dead as a doornail. There was no money and the whole project just died down. Marvin Lyman and I (Floyd Nielson) formed a committee. We decided to try and get enough [support] with the tunnel that we could get funds elsewhere."
"I put in a thousand dollars and several other people put in thousands and my mother even gave her cook stove and that's how the tunnel project was revived. We raised enough money to run the project until spring then the Utah Water and power board came along." (Lyman, Marvin F.)
From this point on the project came under the direction of the Blanding Irrigation Company.
Bradford and Lyman bid the remaining job at twenty-two dollars a foot. They didn't expect to make any money on the project. They just wanted it completed.
The work from both ends of the tunnel progressed through the summer and early winter. In the winter of 1951 and 1952 work progressed from both sides. When they got to where the two ends were to meet in the middle they didn't and they were bewildered. They drilled and drilled but didn't meet, so they stopped work and went home for Christmas.
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| Roger and George Foster on back row, primarily worked on the north side. They were there for the picture. Kay and Tex Bradford on front row, came from south side. The crew broke through on December 27, 1951, and the tunnel became known as the Blanding tunnel. - Donated to the San Juan Historical Commission by Thora Bradford (Blanding, UT) in 1988. |
"After Christmas we went back up there. Mr. Bradford, myself, and Don Smith took snow shoes and walked over the mountain in three feet of snow and came down to the other side of the project and went in from the north side. The boys that were going to be working came through the south side and started drilling. We could hear them drilling plain enough. We tapped on the rock to show them where we were. They stopped drilling, turned their machines around, set up again, and started to drill. They drilled 2 feet and came through. That was about the most exciting moment in my life when I saw that bit come through, because I knew that was it." (Lyman, Marvin F.)Inside of thirty minutes they had a hole blasted through big enough to walk through and that's the way we came back through the tunnel. This tunnel is about 5400 feet through the mountain.
The tunnel was cleared out and shored up, and the water turned in when spring came. Blanding would have the water that had been needed for 30 years.
"The (estimated cost)tunnel cost $125,000 dollars. When the job ended, Marvin Lyman and Vet Bradford were flat broke. Marvin had a garage and a truck line and he had $10,000 on his books when the project finished, much of which he never collected." (Lyman, Margie 45)
"Marvin said, 'We, Vet and I, were both flat broke when the tunnel was finished. We just had to kind of get a new start in life, but we didn't mind that so long as we had the water. It's the most valuable thing in this country in the way of sustaining ourselves here.'" (Lyman, Margie)
Walter Lyman had the dream; Dave Black and Marvin Lyman had the foresight, and Vet Bradford and Marvin Lyman had the determination. It took 30 years and thousands of dollars but in January of 1952 the Blanding tunnel project was completed and the town had the water to survive.
Chet Johnson wrote this paper as a junior in 1988, while he attended San Juan High School, Blanding, Utah.
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