The Gunnison Knot - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

Colorado Central Magazine November 1999 Page 13 The Gunnison Knot Article by George Sibley Water - November 1999 - Colorado Central Magazine - No. 69 - Page 13 Copyright (D 1999 by George Sibley and Central Colorado Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Return to November 1999 table of contents. Page 1 of 10 FOR THOSE WHO DREAM OF EMPIRE, there is the story of the Gordian knot. Gordias was a peasant in Phrygia, one of those little Asia Minor kingdoms back about Minus-Y1K. His people chose him to be king. His only notable feat was to dedicate his wagon to Zeus, which wagon he tied to a pole with an intricate knot -- a knot so intricate that someone (Zeus, I hope) said that whoever was able to unravel the knot would go on to reign over an Asian empire. Alexander of Macedonia -- on his way to becoming Alexander the Great -- came along and undid the knot with a stroke of his sword. Alexander went on to create an empire that stretched all the way from Greece to somewhere around India, where he died of alcoholism. There may be a lesson there about empire, and those who dream of it. But the analogy here is to the knot, the Gordian Knot. I want to describe a situation so tangled, so knotted up in its own contradictions and complications that its undoing might be an act worthy of those who dream of empire -- and certainly those who still dream of empire along the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies are in there plucking at threads. This is the Gunnison Knot, in the upper valleys of the Gunnison River in central Colorado. Like all mountain rivers, the Gunnison begins in many places: on the western slopes of the Collegiate and Sawatch Ranges on the Continental Divide, on the south and east sides of the Elk Mountains, and the north slopes of the San Juans. Five major streams (and a number of smaller ones) come together in the Upper Gunnison basin. The East River, a broad-valley stream flowing off the Elks, and the Taylor River, more of a canyon stream coming off the Collegiate Peaks, meet to form the Gunnison River about ten miles north of the present-day City of Gunnison. They are joined near Gunnison by Ohio Creek, flowing off the West Elks, and Tomichi Creek, another broad-valley stream from the Sawatch Range and Cochetopa Hills. Then another fifteen miles downstream, the Lake Fork of the Gunnison flows in from the northern San Juans. West of that junction, the river (in its once-and-future natural state) drops through a series of canyons culminating in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a dark cut in Precambrian rock that has one of the greatest depth-to-width ratios of any canyon in the world. All of that is what can be called the Upper Gunnison basin. Below the canyons, the river is joined first by the North Fork of the Gunnison flowing out of the Elk and West Elk Mountains, then by the Uncompaghre River flowing out of the northern San Juans. The Gunnison then flows on into the eroded high desert of the Colorado Plateau where it joins the Upper Colorado River at Grand Junction to make up the mainstem of the Colorado River (which is later joined by the Green, Dolores and San Juan Rivers). The Upper Gunnison River basin (and other mountain basins like it) is what you might call "the enabling anomaly" for the modern American West: it's a wet place in a dry land. Most of the American West is http://www.cozine.com/archive/ccl 999/00690133.htm 7/9/2003 i