Three Corners Monument

Stand here and you can touch three states at once. This is the point where Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming all meet, fixed in place by a government surveyor named Rollin J. Reeves in eighteen seventy-nine.

Reeves was finishing the survey of Colorado's western boundary and Utah's eastern boundary, and to mark the meeting point he chiseled the names of the three states and the coordinates into a slab of red sandstone, then piled rocks five feet high on top of it. The original was later found knocked loose and reset with a brass tablet in concrete. It is one of the corners of the great rectangular land survey that the young United States began in seventeen eighty-five, the grid that carved the West into the orderly squares of farms and ranches you see all around you.