Brief by Central Staff
Geography – September 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
Fairplay on the Move?
A brief item in The Denver Post announced that U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard would complete fulfilling a campaign promise to hold “town meetings” in every one of Colorado’s 63 counties.
So far, so good, but then we read that he would hold “five town meetings on the Western Slope” in Meeker, Craig, and “Aspen, Eagle, and Fairplay.”
Last time we checked, Fairplay was on the banks of the South Platte River, which flows into the Platte, which flows into the Missouri, which flows into the Mississippi, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico on the Atlantic side of the continent.
That is, Fairplay on the South Platte, like Denver on the South Platte, is on the Eastern Slope, not the Western Slope.
Granted, the South Platte carries considerable Western Slope water, but even at that, the big diversions, like the Roberts Tunnel, don’t enter the river above Fairplay.
Maybe the error was a reverse of the geography often employed in Central Colorado. We often say “Denver” to mean anything developed between Fort Collins and Pueblo, ignoring the fine distinctions between Englewood, Lakewood, Sheridan, Glendale, Commerce City, Westminister, Thornton, Aurora, Arvada, Wheat Ridge, Lakeside, etc.
And perhaps there, they use “Western Slope” to mean “anything up in the mountains” rather than “on the Pacific side of the Great Divide.”