As close-in water sources (such as Clear Creek) became increasingly polluted, Golden sought "pure" water from more remote sources. In 1904, the City built a pipeline from Beaver Brook, several miles to the west. The pipeline filled a reservoir atop Lookout Mountain (approximately where we now see a cluster of antennas).
There were problems with this system: sometimes the lines froze, sometimes the reservoir froze, and sometimes the reservoir went dry. When this happened, the old pumping station on Clear Creek was put into service and the water mains were filled with polluted creek water. (Hey, it's better than nothing, right?)
120 Years Ago
In 1906, the City was trying to improve capacity and resiliency of the Beaver Brook system. The Colorado Transcript was an inveterate booster of all City improvement efforts, but this time there was just too many errors to ignore.
This newspaper cannot be charged with pessimism or a lack of encouragement to the city authorities in their efforts to supply the city with pure mountain water, and it has in many instances ignored charges of mismanagement, hoping and expecting that all would come out right in the end. When fault has been found with the present council for apparent mismanagement upon the water system they have persistently thrown the blame upon the preceding council, under whose auspices contracts were made for the construction of the gravity system, forgetting, perhaps, that four of the eight members of the present council were also members of the preceding one.
Colorado Transcript - February 1, 1906
One major problem was that the water lines had been buried too shallowly, which meant they froze early and often. The crew working on the system upgrade in 1906 was already $20,000 over budget because they had spent so much time trying to thaw the existing pipes.
The other was that the dam on Beaver Brook had been built over the river rocks at the bottom of the creek. Instead of pooling behind the dam, the water just trickled down through the rocks and escaped underneath the dam. As the Transcript explained it,
The contract...for the reservoir at the head of the system did not stipulate that it should hold water.
