Aaron Million vividly remembers the moment of his epiphany. He was on the
first floor of the Morgan Library on the Colorado State University campus
and it was a Sunday evening in the summer of 2003.
Colorado that summer was still reeling from what scientists have concluded
was the most severe drought in at least 150 years. For lack of water, some
Colorado farmers had been forced to let their crops wither. The state’s
third largest city, Aurora, was reduced to a one-year supply of drinking
water. Dillon Reservoir had shrunk to a puddle in a giant sand bar.
Million,
former president of a farm-and-ranch management firm, had returned to school
in Fort Collins to work on a master’s degree in resource economics, which is
why he was in the library that evening. Examining the map, he studied
Colorado’s major sources of water: the Colorado River near Fruita, the White
River near Meeker, and the Yampa near Steamboat Springs and Craig.
Finally, his eyes inched up the map to the far extreme northwest corner of
Colorado where his firm had previously managed ranch properties, to a place
called Brown’s Park. There, below Flaming Gorge Reservoir, the Green River
hooks out of Utah then loops briefly through Colorado before swinging back
into Utah. Million, raised part of his life near the Utah town of Green
River, knew instantly the impact that loop could make on Colorado’s water
problems.
“I knew the Green River was a legal tributary of the Colorado
River mainstream,” he said. “That would allow for a legal filing and
appropriation of the water for the state.” And nobody from Colorado was
using it.
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