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its banks for gold, but later used it as a municipal dump. Recently, the river’s urban <br />stretch has been remade into a flood-proof gr eenway, complete with wide swaths of open <br />8 <br />vegetation, bicycle trails, even a kayak park. Flowing north through Denver, the river <br />absorbs the Big Thompson and Poudre Rivers be fore taking an easterly turn. It then flows <br />toward the state’s nor theastern corner some 150 miles away, irrigating along the way <br />9 <br />much of the state’s most productive farmland. The river finally ente rs Nebraska, later to <br />mingle with the North Platte, Missouri, a nd eventually Mississippi Rivers. In all <br />directions, the endless plains extend unbroken, flat as the sea. But this uniform landscape <br />conceals the uneven contours of an earlier age. <br />Below the ground, the South Platte valley a quifer is more than 200 feet deep in <br />places, containing more than 25 million acre fe et of water. A mixture of sand, clay, and <br />gravel, it sprawls beneath the flowing stream and its tributaries like a shadow, filling lost <br />subterranean channels once carved by Pleistocen e rivers. But its water is not ancient. In <br />fact, the aquifer’s vast subter ranean storage is more the product of ninet eenth-century <br />farming than of continental uplifts and I ce Age glaciations. Unwittingly, people altered <br />the aquifer and the river above, and these acti ons changed people and their institutions in <br />return. At once ancient and recent, natural and artificial, this strange aquifer has strained <br />the limits of the West’s most vene rable system of water management. <br />Above the aquifer’s silent chambers, the South Platte River flows. Novelist James <br />Michener once described it as “a sad, bewi ldering nothing of a river…a wandering <br />8 <br /> The river’s urban rehabilitation began in the 1960s. For an introduction, see Joe Shoemaker, Returning the <br />Platte to the People: A Story of A Unique Co mmittee, the Platte River Development Committee <br />(Westminster, Colo.: Greenway Foundation, 1981). <br />9 <br /> U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The South Platte River in Colorado (Washington: U.S. <br />Department of Agriculture, 1999). <br />6 <br />