150 miles across the Continental Divide to link Santa Fe and Albuquerque to the gas wells in the mountains. It was an engineering effort that would have daunted lesser men. Murchison surveyed the route from an airplane, dropping flag-tipped bags of flour to mark the route he wanted. Roads needed to be laid across canyons and mountainsides, then huge sections of pipe trucked in and buried, often in rain- and snowstorms. The pipe alone cost three million dollars, all of which Murchison got on credit.
