Why Eastern Colorado Is Sitting On The Most Valuable Land In Human History

Forget the mountain montage. What's actually here is the wreckage of the Rocky Mountains, spread east across two hundred miles of plain almost nobody stops to look at. A mountain range rose, and everything it shed went east. That debris holds the largest aquifer in the United States. Underneath it sits a basin full of oil, a chalk bed laid down on the floor of an ocean, and the best record on Earth of what happened in the first million years after an asteroid ended the dinosaurs. You are not looking at flat ground. You are looking at a mountain range lying down. 25 facts, counting down. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 A mountain range lying down 0:54 25. The basement, and why depth is the only difference 1:30 24. The mountains that vanished completely 2:12 23. When all of it was underwater 2:49 22. That seafloor is the oil 3:26 21. The plains are the hole the mountains made 4:10 20. You can put your finger on the asteroid layer 4:50 19. Corral Bluffs 5:35 18. The Bone Wars 6:14 17. 1,300 dinosaur footprints 6:52 16. Ground-up mountain 7:29 15. The Ogallala 8:10 14. Denver's own buried water 8:48 13. Hail Alley 9:27 12. The soil already failed once 10:05 11. A century of water litigation 10:40 A question for people who live there 11:32 10. The sprinkler that unlocked the aquifer 12:12 9. The Wattenberg field 12:50 8. Two economies on one square mile 13:28 7. The cattle 14:06 6. Where we learned humans cause earthquakes 14:42 5. From arsenal to wildlife refuge 15:15 4. Wind as a crop 15:50 3. An airport bigger than Manhattan 16:30 2. Buy and dry 17:08 1. One accident — and the number that isn't a guess 18:43 Final thoughts 📍 COVERED Ancestral Rockies & Red Rocks • Western Interior Seaway • Niobrara Formation • Denver Basin • K-Pg boundary & Corral Bluffs • Morrison Formation & Dinosaur Ridge • Picketwire Canyonlands • Ogallala Formation & High Plains aquifer • Denver Basin aquifers • Hail Alley • Comanche National Grassland • Kansas v. Colorado • Wattenberg & the DJ Basin • Ro