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Since neither our finances nor our schedule would support an excursion to Mexico for an escape from the wind last week, we decided to take a long-postponed trip. In the spring of 1978, when we lived in Kremmling, we had made plans for a trip to Dinosaur National Monument. As matters developed, we ended up moving to Salida that weekend, and the Dinosaur trip was never made.
The weather cooperated. For instance, Grand Junction usually seems unbearably hot if you live in the mountains, but this time of year, it's pretty nice, so nice that we spent a day nearby wandering around Colorado National Monument before we headed north to Dinosaur.
This trip inspired some thought about place names, and how we ought restore an old one.
Our state was named for the Colorado River. Colorado means red in Spanish, and the river was named in the 1770s by a Spanish priest who saw its rusty sediment-laden flow in the lower reaches.
It's not an uncommon name for rivers. There's another Colorado River, the one that flows through Austin, Texas, as well as the Red River of the north, which forms the eastern border of North Dakota, and the Red River which rises in the Texas panhandle and forms much of that state's border with Oklahoma.
However, it's not an accurate name for the Colorado River any more -- reservoirs like Powell and Mead trap the sediment, so the river runs cold and green rather than warm and red.
The major problem with the Colorado River in Colorado,
though, is that the Colorado River drains everything on the
Western Slope, and that makes it difficult to talk about
drainages -- you have to use some awkward locution like
main stem of the Colorado.
Things were simpler before 1921. Then, the Colorado River didn't start until its two main branches joined in eastern Utah. The northern and longer stem was the Green, which headwaters in Wyoming.
The southern stem from Colorado was the Grand River, which starts at Grand Lake in Grand County and flows through the Grand Valley to Grand Junction where it joins the Gunnison and proceeds to Grand County, Utah.
It had been known as the Grand since the days of French trappers. But for some reason, Colorado Congressman Edward T. Taylor (better known as the author of the Taylor Grazing Act, which pretty well eliminated homesteading on public lands) thought that the Colorado River should start in Colorado, instead of Utah.
After 15 years of work, he got our legislature to endorse the change in March of 1921. That, however, did not change the name in Utah. The Colorado River ended at the state line and flowed as the Grand for about 100 miles until it joined the Green and became the Colorado again. Congress soon fixed that, and after President Warren G. Harding signed the bill on July 25, 1921, the Grand River was no more.
But we still have all these Grand place names reflecting the old name, and restoring the Grand River would sure simplify hydrologic discourse. Besides, would it really hurt anything if the Colorado River didn't start in Colorado?
So I'm looking forward supporting to the Alliance for Restoring the Grand River, if one is ever formed. And while we're at it, we could fix other inaccurate names.
For instance, I just discovered that very little of Dinosaur National Monument has anything to do with dinosaurs. The name made sense in 1915 when President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed an 80-acre national monument around the fossil quarry.
But in 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt expanded the monument by about 200,000 acres at the behest of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. There is allegedly some gorgeous stuff where the Yampa River joins the Green, but that part of the monument was still closed for winter last weekend, so I'll have to see Echo Park and Steamboat Rock on some other trip -- and maybe by then, it will have a better name, like Split Mountain National Park.
And as you might expect, the monument entrance at the Colorado town of Dinosaur is the entrance to the part of the monument that has no dinosaur remnants -- you reach those from the entrance at Jensen, Utah, which is near Vernal, which must lead the world in dinosaur sculptures per capita. The national monument should be renamed to be more accurate, and so should our town of Dinosaur.
There's another name in need of adjustment. U.S. 50
through Nevada is often billed as America's Loneliest
Highway.
That may well be true, but there's no reason
for Colorado to be totally left out.
U.S. 40 between Dinosaur and Maybell could support a
slogan like This could be America's second-loneliest
highway
or Certainly in the Top Ten of America's
Loneliest Highways.
Then again, it's nice not to have to worry about traffic, and if the highway had a slogan, then there would be more traffic, so maybe we should just leave well enough alone here.
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