It is called the Silver State, the Centennial State, the Highest State.

Fifty-four peaks of more than 14,000 feet. More than 1,000 that are two-miles high. Seventy-five percent of the area above 10,000 feet in the United States.

The highest average elevation of any state in the nation at 6,800 feet. A mountainous area six times that of Switzerland.

But when it comes to land, it is not just the height, but the breadth, that defines Colorado.

Three states in one, all packed into a single perfect rectangle that straddles the Continental Divide.

The Front Range. The High Plains. The Western Slope.

A landscape of peaks, prairie and plateau that once was a great inland sea, once a prehistoric playground, once a subtropical jungle.

Native Americans came first, 10,000 years ago, prehistoric people who left traces of their presence scattered across Colorado's 104,247 square miles.

During this millennium, the Ancient Pueblans built castles on the cliffs at Mesa Verde; the Utes lived in the mountains.

The Spanish were the first Europeans to see the state. They called it Colorado -- red -- after the land.

The migration came from the East in 1859, and from almost everywhere in 1999. The earliest wave came searching for gold; the latest considers the land itself the greatest treasure of all.

A century ago, Colorado's natural resources seemed endless: vast acres of farmland and pasture, dense forests, minerals -- gold, silver, coal, oil.

Now a $7 billion tourism industry helps fuel the boom, and the land brings the tourists. They come to play, and sometimes, to stay.

Colorado has added about 700,000 residents this decade, the size of another Denver and Aurora. Last summer, the state's population hit 4 million.

Two Colorado counties, Douglas and Elbert, are in the top 10 fastest growing counties in the nation, and Colorado's population is growing at a rate of more than 2 percent a year -- double the national average.

Such galloping growth fuels passionate debate over how best to use Colorado's land, both public and private.

The new century brings a new sense of urgency: to balance the pressures of growth with the desire to preserve and to protect the beauty that brought so many people to this land in the first place.

Colorado had 1 million people in 1924. By 2020, it could have 5.5 million.

And so it grows.

In Old Fences, New Neighbors, his book about Ouray County, Peter Decker notes the loud complaints of newcomers when their expensive view is altered by new buildings, power lines or roads.

"They want the county to stay just the way it was when they discovered it," he writes.

"It is not easy to maintain beauty in paradise."

March 28, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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