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Naming "Headwaters
Hill"
Thomas Jefferson believed that Lewis and Clark would
discover a mountain in the west from which all the rivers of
the western half of the continent would flow - this was a
geographic theory at that time. No such mountain exists, of
course - but there are a few watershed divides on the
continent from which more than two rivers flow. One of these
lies east and south of Gunnison, in the Cochetopa Hills
between the Sawatch Range and the San Juans. From this
unpresumptuous 11,862-foot high hill -"Headwaters Hill" in
the photo above - water flows east into the Arkansas River
Basin via Silver Creek, west into the Gunnison and
ultimately Colorado River Basin via Marshall Creek, and
south into a closed basin that may or may not be a natural
part of the Rio Grande drainage. (As has often been the case
this century, what nature did not quite finish the Bureau of
Reclamation has completed; water is now channeled out of the
closed basin into the Rio Grande for river
augmentation.)
This modest hill - four miles south from Marshall Pass on
the Colorado Trail, about half a mile east of Windy Peak -
has no official name, and members of Western's Headwaters
Project think this should be corrected: as one of only half
a dozen or so "triple divides" on the continent, it should
have a name reflecting its significance in a dry region
where, as Colorado poet Thomas Hornsby Ferrill said,
"History is written in water." Western student Grace Nugent
has taken on, as an independent study, researching and
carrying out the steps necessary to name the hill.
"Headwaters Hill" seems to be "default" name, but more
creative options are still being considered.
Dale Sanderson, a cartographer for US West in Denver, is
also helping pursue this project, and has posted a web site
that offers a "virtual
hike to Headwaters Hill." And for those who prefer the
real thing, students in the Headwaters Regional Studies
program at Western State College hike to "Headwaters Hill"
every fall, in late September; these hikes are open to
anyone who would like to go, up to a total of twenty people.
Contact gsibley@western.edu for more information.
Return to the Headwaters main
page
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