Citizen's Guide to Colorado's Environmental Era

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J� it sere river, ) A�of ('A riot 6avr it obt.t at � J o e eo ote a t eoAe a6 amA Anht it ad a ttz.teA to ✓4 LIr . Jain By Thomas J. Noel Mark Twain worried about Colorado's meager rivers in his clas- sic account of the American West, Roughing It. Of the trickle he crossed in a stagecoach at Julesburg, he wrote: "We came to the shallow, yellow, muddy South Platte, with its low banks and its scattering flat sand -bars and pigmy islands —a melancholy stream straggling through the centre of the enormous flat plain ... The Platte was'up,' they said —which made me wish I could see it when it was down, if it could look any sicker and sorrier." , ' Mother of Rivers Although Colorado's rivers have been maligned as skimpy-and unnavigable, the Highest State is actually the Mother of Western riv- r, '' ,-ers. Four major arteries of the American West begin on Colorado's Continental Divide where rivulets only inches apart lead to the world's two great oceans. The Platte, Arkansas and Rio Grande flow through eastern Colorado into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. The Colorado River drains the Western half of the state on its way to the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean. Meager as they may have appeared to Mark Twain, Colorado's rivers were, and still are, destined for greatness. For more than 14,000 years, they served the Native Americans who camped along them. Four hundred years ago, Spanish mis- sionaries, explorers and Conquistadores began traveling north along these waterways, mapping them with the sonorous names of saints and, in the case of the South Platte, Jesus y Maria. Religious names, however, did not protect Hispanic Colorado from an invasion of 100,000 fortune seekers. After the 1859 Colorado Gold Rush, once clear waterways became muddied with mining and human waste. Coloradans traditionally dammed, ditched, diverted and trashed their creeks and rivers. Not until the 1970s did Colorado communities begin focusing on cleaning up their waterways as sce- nic, recreational and alternative transportation routes. Since its establishment in 1971, the State Trails Program of Colorado State Parks has championed trail development. The State Trails Master Plan is an inventory of Colorado's trail system used by the Colorado Greenway Project, which funds local trail construction using Colorado Lottery proceeds and other sources. Since 1983, the Greenway program has put more than $11.5 million into more than 6L, 303 trail projects. The Trails Program also aids local communities �y; .'\. ;