Geography

Two thousand feet deep, forty-eight miles long, and two million years old, western Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison is one of the most stunning geologic features in the American West. The fourteen miles along the Gunnison River have been protected as a national park since 1999, drawing more...

Clear Creek flows from the Continental Divide at Loveland Pass, eastward through a deep and wide glacial valley down to Idaho Springs , where the valley narrows and the stream gradient increases as it enters narrow, relatively undeveloped Clear Creek Canyon. Through Clear Creek Canyon the stream...

The Colorado is the premier river of the American Southwest. Rising in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming, this river and its tributaries provide water and hydroelectric power for nearly 35 million people in the United States and Mexico, as well as habitat for several fish species found only in...

Eastern Colorado, bordered by the foothills of the Rocky Mountains on the west, Kansas on the east, and the corners of Nebraska and Oklahoma, constitutes a portion of the Great Plains. It is the agricultural heartland of Colorado. This semiarid region is characterized by silty and sandy loam soils...

The Front Range is a corridor of the Rocky Mountains and surrounding land stretching 200 miles from the Wyoming border on the north to the Arkansas River on the south. The western border of the Front Range consists of a collection of high mountain ranges, from the Medicine Bow and Laramie Mountains...

The story of irrigation in Colorado’s Grand Valley speaks volumes about the reciprocal relationship between land and community in the arid American West. Early white colonizers of Colorado’s Western Slope espoused concepts of landscape and water control that physically transformed the landscape...

The Gunnison River is a major tributary of the Colorado River , contributing about one-third of the Colorado’s flow at the Colorado-Utah state line. The basin drained by the Gunnison stretches from alpine meadows and forests along the Continental Divide to the arid canyon country around Grand...

From the sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, the king of Spain and the Mexican government awarded land grants to individuals and communities throughout the American Southwest. All seven of Colorado ’s land grants, comprising more than 8 million acres, were awarded by the Mexican government...

The Royal Gorge is a spectacular canyon along the Arkansas River near Cañon City in south-central Colorado. With a narrowest width of just 30 feet at the bottom of the canyon and a depth exceeding 1,200 feet in some places, the nearly ten-mile-long canyon is considered a world wonder of geology ...

Covering nearly 8,000 square miles in southern Colorado, the San Luis Valley is the largest valley in the state and the largest high-altitude desert in North America. Known as “the Valley” by locals and other Coloradans, the San Luis Valley is bordered by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east...

The South Platte River flows from its headwaters in the Mosquito Range west of South Park across Colorado’s northeastern plains . From downtown Fairplay to the Nebraska border at Julesburg , its course through Colorado is approximately 380.3 miles. Today, water administrators and water...

“A Fantasy land,” “a mystique,” “a state of mind”—these are only some of the expressions used to describe the Western Slope of Colorado, commonly defined as the roughly one-third of the state that lies west of the Continental Divide . The serpentine divide forms the region’s eastern boundary,...