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Natural Migration Paths in Autumn

How many times have you smiled at a school bus? But I did yesterday. It was labelled as "Gunnison Watershed Something-or-Other". It's rare to see something labelled as XYZ Watershed, but in a state like Colorado it should be common. To finally see "justice" done was a delightful surprise. I smiled myself into a nostalgic fit over it.

So many American rivers start here, although the Colorado River, ironically, isn't one of them. But we needn't rehash the sorry history of that bit of political chicanery, perpetrated in 1922; you can read on it at Wikipedia.

When RVing in Colorado for the first time, many years ago, it was difficult to memorize the names and locations of individual mountain peaks; there are too many of them and the names are not always interesting. So the brain aims at unifying this clutter of details: it groups them into mountain ranges, or studies up on the geology and orogeny of the area, seeking order from the chaos of individual facts. That helped, but only a little.

Seeing the mountains is the main reason why visitors come to Colorado, isn't it? Aha, that's the trap. A single inversion of this type of thinking makes the breakthrough for the frustrated geography nerd: don't visualize the mountains, the high spots; rather, visualize the low spots, the river courses. Stop thinking like a motorist and start thinking like a:


You can carry a simplified sketch around in your head that resembles something you might have drawn in grade school. Halfway between adjacent rivers you can draw in upside-down "V"s, just like a grade-schooler might. Color in the top of the upside-down V with the white crayon. (Funny, I can't remember having white crayons back then. I wonder if little kids have crayons at all these days. Maybe they draw with their damn iPads instead of a box of crayons.)

At any rate, this simplified sketch in your own mind is more mobile than anything GPS or Google Earth can give you, and it doesn't require you to take your eyes off the road when driving in order to access the data. No batteries, either.

Until I saw that school bus with its fine label, I wasn't really sure how to migrate this autumn. But now it would be dishonorable and unnatural to pay attention to random and meaningless highways rather than river courses. Now we will, to paraphrase Lincoln after the Union won the battle of Vicksburg, follow the great Southwestern Father of Waters as it rolls unvexed to the sea.

Very well then, it's time for a quiz, to see if the reader has been paying attention. Let's start in the central western part of the state, near the city of Grand Junction, where the Grand River flows down to Moab, UT; let's circle around the state, going clockwise. Let's see how many you can visualize and if you know what they drain to: the Yampa, North Platte, South Platte, Arkansas, the mighty Rio Grande (Rio Bravo del Norte, actually), San Juan, and Dolores.

How did you do? Ahh, did you catch my omission? Here's a hint: it starts near Colorado's southern border and has a northern name.

Comments

Ed said…
Since you are now camped almost upon it I have to say the Uncompahgre River. However, it could also be the Gunnison River into which the Uncompahgre flows. Then again you may have the Animus River or the Mancos Rivers in mind.

None of these bring a 'northern name' to my mind so they could all be wrong.
Ed, I should have mentioned my somewhat arbitrary classification scheme for a "river", rather than a mere tributary stream: I only count as "rivers" those moving bodies of wet water that travel a couple hundred miles or cross the state boundary, before emptying into the great western or eastern Father of Waters.
Ed said…
Ok, it travels over multiple state lines and is almost 1,000 miles in length. It has a northern name however it empties into another river before reaching the great eastern Father of Waters.

It must be the Canadian River!

ps I went to Google for this one, couldn't visualize any more rivers in southern Colorado.
Right you are, Ed! People overlook this lengthy river, but it almost makes it Ft. Smith, Arkansas.
Unknown said…
There is no way that I could come up with the Canadian. Took a while like Ed, but eventually I found the answer. A technicality, but the Canadian does begin in Colorado -- just a few miles north of the New Mexico border.
Wandrin, it might be a "technicality", but it wasn't a trick question. And as they say, "the decision of the judges is final."