This was a student project by Jonathon Staker for Jake Boswell's course LARCH 8990 in Spring 2017. Trans-mountain water diversions via the Colorado Big Thompson Project (CBT) supplement the needs of more than three quarters of a million people and more than 720,000 acres of irrigated farmland on the Eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, in a region known as Colorado’s Northern Front Range. With its vast network of diversion infrastructure such as dams, reservoirs, pumping plants, and pipelines,the project represents one of the most unique and important engineering feats of the 20th century, moving water from one watershed into another. To illuminate the many consequential environmental, social,and political effects that this project has had, and continues to embody, while simultaneously revealing how this system fits into a much larger water landscape, a cultural trail network and accompanying field guide were proposed. The trail and field guide serve as a comprehensive deconstruction of the many components and characteristics related to water in the Front Range, past, present and future. The trail and field guide connect into CBT infrastructure through a series of significant moments know as “water markers,” as a means of understanding micro and macro relationships related to water in the Front Range, the Western Slopes, Colorado, and the American West.
