Gunnison County, Colo. • The cold is just the cold. Bob Robbins and Bill Sunderlin know it all too well.
Their feet crunch the snowy ground floor of the Blue Mesa Reservoir, the land they know as Iola, the town that was here before the dam’s construction starting in 1962. They were among ranching families whose homes would be submerged by the dark depths of Colorado’s largest body of water. Iola was sacrificed with the bigger Sapinero and smaller Cebolla.
The people are gone, most anyway — Robbins and Sunderlin don't know of many others who stayed like them, settling in higher ground nearby.