The South Platte

The South Platte River does not look like much through Denver, a shallow, braided channel between concrete banks. But this is the river that built the city, and the one that nearly destroyed it. It rises in the South Park basin, fed by snowmelt off the Mosquito Range, and runs about four hundred thirty-nine miles northeast until it joins the North Platte in Nebraska.

When gold prospectors arrived at its confluence with Cherry Creek in eighteen fifty-eight, the South Platte looked harmless. The Arapaho and Cheyenne warned it could rise without notice. Newcomers did not listen.

On June sixteenth, nineteen sixty-five, heavy rains sent a wall of water roaring through Denver. The flood washed out thirteen bridges, destroyed around two thousand five hundred homes, and caused more than five hundred million dollars in damage in the metro area alone, the costliest flood in Colorado history. Twenty-four people died across the basin.

Flood control dams went up afterward at Chatfield and Bear Creek. In nineteen seventy-four the city formed the Platte River Development Committee, which became the Greenway Foundation two years later. The Foundation transformed miles of dumping ground and industrial bank into trails, parks, and whitewater chutes, a model that other cities have since copied.

The river is still reclaiming its place in the city.