BRECKENRIDGE – The Dredge Restaurant in Breckenridge is touted as the world’s highest floating restaurant and bar. But owner Carol Rockne hopes it doesn’t start to become the world’s highest tilting restaurant and bar.

Her establishment floats on the Skelly Pond in Breckenridge, an old dredge boat pond, and was designed to rise and fall with fluctuating streamflows through the Blue River.

Two bridges hold the mock dredge boat in place in the pond. Both were engineered to accommodate high and low flows. The floods of 1995 proved the bridges can accommodate record-high water levels, but the drought is testing the lower limits.

“I’m concerned,” Rockne said. “It’s flowing just fine now, but we have to keep very close tabs on it.”

The water in Skelly Pond belongs to the town of Breckenridge, and the town has no obligation to keep pond levels up, said Gary Roberts, the town’s water systems supervisor.

The Breckenridge Ski Resort, which uses the water for snowmaking, and the town both have worked with Rockne over the years to keep the Skelly Pond at a satisfactory level, Rockne said.

But there’s nothing anyone can do about Mother Nature.

Unless Summit County gets snow this spring – and a lot of it – there might be little anyone can do about Rockne’s floating restaurant.

“I’m totally helpless,” she said. “It’s all their water rights, all their water. No one anticipated a drought when they approved the dredge.”

The town council approved construction of the dredge in 1990. Rockne and her husband, Sigurd, bought the restaurant at a sheriff’s auction in 1992.

If the water level in the pond goes down in a drought, the 200-ton dredge wouldn’t rest flat on the bottom. One corner of the pond is 10 feet deep, and the other is 60 feet deep, Rockne said. In the past, water levels have fallen to the point the dredge almost touched bottom at the shallow end.

Any farther, however, and Rockne thinks the building would break apart. She estimates it would cost $3 million to replace it.

Rockne’s not sure what options exist.

“We could untie it and float it to deep water and build a foundation,” she said. “But there’s not much you can dredge. You can only go down so far.”

That fact alone is why the Skelly Pond is where it is. It is the southernmost point the last working dredge boat reached after munching its way through town.

———

Jane Stebbins can be reached at (970) 668-3998 ext. 228 or jstebbins@summitdaily.com.