Water

In the compass of the fourteen lines that grace the walls of the Colorado capitol rotunda, Thomas Hornsby Ferril, Colorado's poet laureate, expressed the life nurturing role of water in the semiarid West. All aspects are there, from the hydrologic cycle to the vital role of the winter snowpack, to evaporation, transpiration, and precipitation. Colorado lies on the watershed of the continent. From the central divide of the southern Rocky Mountains, in the Sawatch Range near the center of the state, streams that feed three major continental watershed systems flow outward: to the northeast and east, the Platte and the Arkansas feed the Missouri-Mississippi system. To the south, the Rio Grande flows to the Gulf of Mexico—both empty into the Atlantic Ocean. The mountainous portion of the state is a moist island surrounded by a barrier of aridity.