The coastal cities of Southern California dump a good bit of their diversion into the Pacific Ocean.What Denver returns to nature flows into the South Platte, a tributary of the Missouri River.Some of New Mexico’s share goes into the Rio Grande, eventually flowing south and east through Texas and into the Gulf of Mexico.Water from the Colorado River is piped across deserts, channeled through mountains, and - after being treated in local sewage plants - winds up in rivers that flow to the southern ends of the country: “We created the largest artificial watershed in the world,” says Pat Mulroy, the powerful head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, a wholesaler that supplies Las Vegas. That connection is the wonder and the marvel and the madness of the American West, a region whose diverse economies and ecosystems are linked by concrete and steel conduits that move water beyond borders. Yet all three - Kansas, the Front Range, and the pipeline advocate - are connected by Colorado River water. As it turns out, the man who proposed the pipeline does not live in the river’s watershed either. Neither Kansas nor the Front Range, a string of cities east of the Continental Divide, lies within the natural boundaries of the Colorado River, which flows west out of the Rocky Mountains. Included as a supply option was a pipeline from the Missouri River in Kansas to Colorado’s Front Range. Last December, the federal Bureau of Reclamation published a landmark study of water supply and demand in the Colorado River Basin. A water manager in Kansas proposes a pipeline from the Missouri River to Denver and other cities along Colorado’s Front Range. Gross Reservoir, 35 kilometers (22 miles) northwest of downtown Denver, stores water from the Colorado River Basin that is diverted in a tunnel through the Rocky Mountains.
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