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Art Goodtimes created quite a stir a few days ago when he announced that Club 20 should henceforth be known as Club 19. Art's been a friend for years. He's a poet and for the past decade or so, he has served as a San Miguel County commissioner. And as far as I know, he's the only elected Green Party officeholder in Colorado.
He was also an officer in Club 20, which bills itself as
the voice of the Western Slope
in Colorado. Its
membership ranges from individuals and corporations to
counties and two Ute nations. That's a diverse group; just
the counties range from Democratic upscale resort zones
like Pitkin County (its seat is Aspen) to Republican
cattle-and-mining areas like Moffat County (Craig).
Basically, Art said the extractive energy industry had taken over Club 20, and it no longer represented the interests of places like Telluride and San Miguel County. The best account I've read is on Colorado Confidential, and there's no point in repeating it here.
When Club 20 started in 1954, its main goal was better
roads on the Western Slope of Colorado. There were actually
21 counties involved, but Club 21 sounded too much like
a night spot,
then executive director Greg Walcher told
me once, so they made it Club 20.
The Continental Divide winds through the Rockies in Colorado, dividing Western Slope (where when water flows naturally, it goes into the Colorado River or one of its tributaries like the Yampa, Gunnison, or San Juan) from Eastern Slope (mainly North Platte, South Platte, Arkansas, and Rio Grande).
It is somewhat presumptuous for us to refer to this as
the Continental Divide,
for actually there are
several such divides in North America, as explained in this article.
Back to Colorado, where we it's not easy to say precisely how many counties are on the Western Slope. Often the Divide is also a county line, so it's simple. But two counties with seats on the Eastern Slope, Saguache and Mineral, extend over the Divide for considerable distances. Neither is a member of Club 20. San Juan County's seat of Silverton is definitely on the Western Slope, but the county includes some Eastern Slope drainage into the Rio Grande.
Lake County also belongs to Club 20, and of its 384 square miles, only about a dozen are on the Western Slope. The rest drains into the Arkansas River on the Eastern Slope. There's a long story behind this anomaly; it involves imprecise boundaries from 1861 and litigation with neighboring Summit County as to which would get the Climax Molybdenum Mine and its millions in property taxes.
Thus part of the border between Lake and Summit is a straight line, not the twisting Divide, and so a tiny portion of Summit County (county seat Breckenridge) is on the Eastern Slope.
And then there's the problem of defining the
Continental Divide.
When you cross 10,200-foot
Cochetopa Pass between Saguache and Gunnison, the sign at
the top says Continental Divide.
But the east side
does not drain into the Atlantic Ocean; it drains into the
Closed Basin, which has no natural outlet to any ocean.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has altered that with a project that puts some Closed Basin water into the Rio Grande and eventually the Atlantic. But by that reasoning, I could be on the Western Slope, even though I live only six blocks from the east-bound Arkansas River. That's because another Bureau project puts about 60,000 acre-feet a year of Western Slope water into the Arkansas.
So the Continental Divide can be hard to define. In an
economic and cultural sense, the north-south divides like
Monument Hill between Denver and Colorado Springs can be at
least as significant. Club 20, the voice of the Western
Slope,
includes several counties with Eastern Slope
drainage, and doesn't include some with Western Slope
drainage.
Perhaps it's time to quit paying so much attention to the Continental Divide -- it's just another ridge, after all, and in a lot of ways, from politics to hydrology, it doesn't mean that much any more.
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