The first picture is of one of three old railroad tunnels dug by hand along the course of the Arkansas River, whose headwaters are about 20 miles up the road.
John C. Frémont spent a long time, and lost many men, looking for the heawaters of the Arkansas River, which is located near Leadville, Colorado, the highest incorporated town in the US at 10,119 feet.
Gold was discovered near Leadville in 1859, and the immediate area produced many fortunes in gold, silver, lead, zinc, and copper. Huge slag and tailing piles greet visitors as they drive through the area, and it’s truly a toxic dump site due to the lead and all the arsenic once used to separate out the gold.
Ironically, most of the water in the nearby Arkansas River cannot be used as drinking or irrigation water in Colorado. By treaty, most of the river’s water flows out of state to be used elsewhere.
Adding to the Kafkaesque water story, the Nestlé corporation pumps 65 millions of gallons of water a year from an aquifer under an old fish hatchery in Buena Vista that they bought, and they send it 120 miles away to Denver to be bottled and sold in over 40 million plastic 16.9-ounce bottles. If you buy bottled water in Buena Vista, it’s water from 2 miles away that traveled 240 miles to be sold to you at a price per gallon that would make a Saudi oil sheikh weep.
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