Word: durango
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Cozily sporting fuzzy purple slippers, Danielle V. Brown ’05 says she loves the snow. Brown hails from Durango, a tiny town nestled in the southwest corner of Colorado amidst the Rockies. A self-described “intense outdoor fanatic,” she has been skiing, backpacking and rock climbing since the age of four...
...hometown boasts only about 12,000 residents, and while she can’t stop talking about the landscape, there wasn’t much else to talk about while she was growing up. “There is nothing intellectually stimulating there,” she says. Durango High School, which Brown attended, enrolls about 1,200 students, a good portion of whom drop out to farm on nearby ranches, and a majority of whom go on to Colorado colleges. Brown concedes that her school lacked many resources, but says that she was able to take eight Advanced Placement...
...mining town that once thrived on smelting gold and silver ore, Durango today is following Aspen and Telluride in remodeling itself as a tourist destination and a home for wealthy retirees seeking an outdoor life. The small town is quaintly restored, but the economy is sagging. Fires and drought have put an end to much of the hiking and whitewater rafting, restaurants are laying off staff, and many tourists have canceled trips. While the rest of the country keeps a nervous eye on the Dow Jones industrial average, everyone in Durango follows cubic-feet-per-second flow rates...
...what if Mother Nature doesn't comply? Some 35 miles west of Durango, in the Mesa Verde National Park, site of a fire in July, are the famous cliff dwellings of the Anasazi-or ancestral Puebloans, as they are now known-whose civilization flourished there until the end of the 13th century, when the combination of a 30-year drought, a population explosion and overuse of natural resources forced them...
...Durango is oblivious to the lessons of history. It plans to build enough houses to expand its population 160%, to 40,000. This growth will require more water, and the city is banking on another dam, the controversial Animas-La Plata project, which has been on the drawing board since 1968. It is still unclear whether Congress will appropriate the entire $350 million needed for the dam. Water flows toward money. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s pushed small farmers off the land and consolidated larger land holdings. The drought of today will force farmers like Gillen to sell...