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, Colorado Central Magazine November 1999 Page 13 Page 3 of 10 enough and rich enough to challenge the status quo. So far as this body of water law was concerned, if any water was left unappropriated in a river, then the settlement process probably just wasn't done yet. This body of law is deeply woven into the Knot. The Bigger Picture There is nothing particularly new about this: for most of the six millennia that people have been gathering in cities, they've been moving water around to suit their urban purposes. But never before has it been done on the scale we're doing it now in the American West -- especially in that most arid quadrant of the American West, the Colorado River Basin, in which the Upper Gunnison basin is one small wet place. The Colorado River is a 1,400-mile desert river that -- in its natural state -- carried water from the southern Rockies west of the Continental Divide down through canyons in the high deserts of the Colorado Plateau uplift, and thence out across the low deserts of the American Southwest to the Sea of Cortez and Pacific Ocean. Today, of course, the Colorado River no longer flows to the ocean with much volume, except in an unusually wet year like 1983-84. Its water is far too valuable to go to the ocean (which doesn't appear to need the water). Instead, the water is spread out to dry on the southwestem deserts, which do need it if they are to bloom like the rose. Down in the Colorado's Lower Basin, the region of the low deserts, the river's water is spread in a vast manmade "delta" from the Phoenix-Tucson corridor in central Arizona on the east, over thousands of irrigated acres of desert in southwestern Arizona and southeastern California, and all the way west to the huge metropolitan area around Los Angeles and San Diego. The massive plumbing system for this Lower Basin desert delta is the apotheosis of desert-river development: two huge canyon dams each backing up almost twice the average annual flow of the river, billion-gallon aqueducts pumping water more than 200 miles both east and west over desert and mountain to cities with combined populations of around 20 million, sprawling irrigation systems that produce most of the nation's winter vegetables. Different circumstances prevail up in the Colorado River's natural tributary region -- the Upper Basin, above the Colorado Plateau canyons. This region of mountain valleys does not have the big expanses of potentially fertile desert land to irrigate, and there are many smaller flows to draw from rather than one big one. But there is a similar situation in the Upper Basin States with large out-of-basin population centers whose boundaries have no relationship to the basin watersheds. So "Utah water" from the Green River and its tributaries is siphoned out of the basin to the Salt Lake valley. "New Mexico water" from the San Juan River goes out of the basin to Albuquerque and Santa Fe. And "Colorado water" from the Upper Colorado River goes out of the basin to the metropolitan region around Denver east of the Rockies. The Upper Gunnison River is, in fact, the only remaining major tributary of the Colorado River that is remotely accessible to those growing metropolitan areas surrounding the basin but is untapped by any of them. It's the Southwest's last waterhole -- or so it seems. This is not, at this point, for lack of desire for the water. An ever-changing array of water providers in the Denver metropolitan area -- some of the fastest growing counties in the nation -- have been making a http://www.cozine.com/archive/ccl999/00690133.htm 7/9/2003