Pecks Lake is a small reservoir, fed by water from the adjacent
Verde River
The Verde River ( Yavapai: Haka'he:la) is a major tributary of the Salt River in the U.S. state of Arizona. It is about long and carries a mean flow of at its mouth. It is one of the largest perennial streams in Arizona.
Description
The ri ...
, near
Clarkdale in the U.S. state of
Arizona
Arizona is a U.S. state, state in the Southwestern United States, Southwestern region of the United States, sharing the Four Corners region of the western United States with Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. It also borders Nevada to the nort ...
. The name of the nearby
Tuzigoot National Monument
Tuzigoot National Monument (, Western Apache: ''Tú Digiz'') preserves a 2- to 3-story pueblo ruin on the summit of a limestone and sandstone ridge just east of Clarkdale, Arizona, above the Verde River floodplain. The Tuzigoot Site is an elong ...
comes from an
Apache
The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...
word, ''Tuzigoot'', meaning ''crooked water''.
The "crooked water" reference is to Pecks Lake,
established in a cutoff meander of the river.
The shallow lake gets most of its water from the river through a tunnel on the northwest corner of the property, downstream from a large
slag
The general term slag may be a by-product or co-product of smelting (pyrometallurgical) ores and recycled metals depending on the type of material being produced. Slag is mainly a mixture of metal oxides and silicon dioxide. Broadly, it can be c ...
heap from the former copper
smelter
Smelting is a process of applying heat and a chemical reducing agent to an ore to extract a desired base metal product. It is a form of extractive metallurgy that is used to obtain many metals such as iron, copper, silver, tin, lead and zin ...
at Clarkdale. Overflow from the lake passes over a
weir
A weir or low-head dam is a barrier across the width of a river that alters the flow characteristics of water and usually results in a change in the height of the water level. Weirs are also used to control the flow of water for outlets of l ...
at the east end of the lake into Tavasci Marsh.
The surrounding area includes the capped and re-vegetated
tailings
In mining, tailings or tails are the materials left over after the process of separating the valuable fraction from the uneconomic fraction (gangue) of an ore. Tailings are different from overburden, which is the waste rock or other material ...
pond of the smelter, which processed ore from the United Verde copper mine at
Jerome
Jerome (; ; ; – 30 September 420), also known as Jerome of Stridon, was an early Christian presbyter, priest, Confessor of the Faith, confessor, theologian, translator, and historian; he is commonly known as Saint Jerome.
He is best known ...
.
History
Pecks Lake was built to provide process water for the smelter and recreation for the smelter community.
Amenities included a nine-hole golf course, a dance hall, and a club house near the lake.
Until 2003, the Town of Clarkdale leased the lake and surrounding property from the
Phelps Dodge Corporation
Phelps Dodge Corporation was an American mining company founded in 1834 as an import-export firm by Anson Greene Phelps and his two sons-in-law William Earle Dodge, Sr. and Daniel James (businessman), Daniel James. The latter two ran Phelps, Jame ...
and made it available to the public for fishing and other forms of recreation. However, after the lease expired, Phelps Dodge (later acquired by
Freeport-McMoRan
Freeport-McMoRan Inc., often called Freeport, is an American mining company based in the Freeport-McMoRan Center, in Phoenix, Arizona. The company is the world's largest producer of molybdenum, a major copper producer and operates the world's la ...
) closed the property to the public.
The lake is becoming
eutrophic
Eutrophication is a general term describing a process in which nutrients accumulate in a body of water, resulting in an increased growth of organisms that may deplete the oxygen in the water; ie. the process of too many plants growing on the s ...
, choked with aquatic plants, including invasive water lilies and
Eurasian milfoil. Peck's Lake supports populations of northern pike, yellow perch, smallmouth bass, and sunfish but no native fish species.
Land-use debate
In April 2010, Sustainable Clarkdale, an advocacy group, recommended that the Town of Clarkdale buy Pecks Lake and its surrounds from Freeport-McMoRan. The parcel, also known as Verde Valley Ranch, could then become home, the group said, to a variety of projects related to energy production (particularly solar, biomass, and
plasma gasification), recreation, water purification, and commercial development—all with as little negative environmental impact as possible. The project would be known as the Clarkdale Sustainability Park.
In November 2010, Freeport-McMoRan declined a Sustainability Park proposal by the Town of Clarkdale, suggesting that land uses on the parcel should be limited to recreation and habitat preservation consistent with those at Tuzigoot National Monument and Tavasci Marsh.
Town officials said they would consider siting the Park elsewhere and that they hoped that Freeport-McMoRan would eventually agree to public ownership of Verde Valley Ranch and remediation of Pecks Lake.
See also
*
List of lakes in Arizona
References
External links
Sustainable Clarkdale
{{authority control
Reservoirs in Yavapai County, Arizona
Reservoirs in Arizona