Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Kinky Colorado


Colorado is typically considered a pretty square state (or at least rectangular), but upon reading some geography blog postings today (yes, there are those blogs), it turns out Colorado is rather kinky!

If you use Google Maps and journey around the border, you'll discover a bunch of kinks in the boundary line.  See one of many examples below...


The strange thing is there's actually a pretty major kink that wanders about 1.5 miles about 80 miles north of Four Corners between Utah and Colorado just south of the town of Paradox, Colorado.  See below...


So how did it happen?  In 1879, a survey was conducted to set the boundary and surveyors journeyed north from Four Corners placing mile markers along the way, when they got to the Wyoming border, they discovered that they were about a mile west of where they expected to be.  Unfortunately, by the time it was discovered where the errors lay, the ground boundaries had already been accepted by the various states, territories, and congress, so the error was fixed.

In reality Colorado is actually a polygon.  Go figure!

8 comments:

Roger said...

Well, I just made a trip around Colorado on Google map Quest. I highly suspect that the surveyors might have had a large supply of White Lightning with them, and were drinking that instead of taking a chance of drinking the local water. Or someone dropped the compass.

Mathan said...

Even without the correction, neither Colorado nor Wyoming are "square". They theoretically follow latitude and longitude lines, which means that, since the earth isn't flat, the northern border is shorter than the southern border making the shape actually trapezoidal.

When I started reading the entry today, I was thinking that you were referring to the ?bezier? lines that you see when a straight line doesn't quite line up with a drawing tool abilities, i.e. a bunch of straight lines, not quite connected to each other. I know there's a name for that effect, but, can't think of it right now.

Anonymous said...

nice post. thanks.

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