15 facts about Florida
This beautiful, sunny state is hardly ever covered with snow. Even in the winter, the temperatures rarely drop below 0 degrees Celsius. It’s a popular ...
Colorado is one of the larger American states, bordered by longitude and latitude. The state is famous for its varied landscape of mountains, forests, highlands, canyons, rivers, and desert areas. It is one of the most educated, developed, and wealthiest states in the US.
It includes most of the southern Rocky Mountains, the northeastern part of the Colorado Plateau, and the western part of the Great Plains.
It is one of three states, along with Wyoming and Utah, whose boundaries are defined solely by straight boundary lines without natural features.
In 1861, the U.S. Congress defined the boundaries of Colorado’s territory solely by lines of latitude and longitude. The state’s borders are now officially defined by 697 boundary marks connected with straight boundary lines.
This place is called the Four Corners after the quadripoint (37° north latitude with 109° 03’ west longitude). It is the only point in the United States shared by four states, named the Four Corners Region.
Four Corners also mark the boundary between two semi-autonomous Native American governments: the Navajo Nation, which maintains the monument as a tourist attraction, and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s reservation.
The monument is a tourist attraction maintained by the Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation Department–Four Corners Monument Navajo Tribal Park. It consists of a granite disk set around a blade with a smaller bronze disk, surrounded by smaller, appropriately placed state seals and flags representing both the states and tribal nations of the area.
Encircling the point, starting with Colorado, the disk bears two words in each state, “Four states here meet in freedom under God.” The monument, located on the Colorado Plateau, is an example of a political boundary that is a tourist destination in its own right.
To the north with Wyoming and Nebraska, to the east with Kansas, to the south with Oklahoma and New Mexico, and to the west with Utah.
It is the only state whose entire area lies above 1,000 meters above sea level. Three-quarters of its area is upland and mountainous (above 1,500-2,000 meters above sea level)–this is the western part of the state, including the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado Highlands. The eastern part of the state is flat.
Colorado’s average elevation is 2,000 meters above sea level.
It is also the highest peak in the entire Rocky Mountains. It lies in Lake County, within the San Isabel National Forest protected area. The peak was named in honor of Samuel Elbert, governor of Colorado Territory (a historical administrative unit of the United States) from 1873 to 1874.
There are 54 peaks in the Colorado Rocky Mountains that are 4,300 meters or taller, known in the mountaineering jargon of the western United States as “fourteeners.”
The lowest elevation in the state is 1,011 meters above sea level and is located on the eastern border of Yuma County, where the Arikaree River flows into the state of Kansas.
Most of the snow melts by mid-August, except for a few small glaciers.
The Colorado Plains are mostly prairies but also include hardwood forests, hills, and canyons. The eastern part of the state is now mostly farmland and pasture, with small villages and farming towns.
Typical crops there are corn, wheat, soybeans, and oats.
This is known as the Front Range–an urban corridor covering eighteen counties. It includes cities such as Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, Loveland, Castle Rock, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Greeley, and other towns and communities in between.
Located on a plain in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains on the South Platte River, the city is also in Denver County. It is the largest city in the state of Colorado and the 19th largest metropolitan area in the US.
In 2021-2022, Denver was recognized as the 14th best place to live in the United States. Due to the fact that it is located at an altitude of 1,609 meters above sea level, it is referred to as the “Mile High City.”
Founded in 1858, Denver was a major gold and silver mining center. In the second half of the 19th century, an art museum with a collection of Native American art was established there. The University of Denver, a private university founded in 1864 as Colorado Seminary, also has its headquarters in Denver.
It is located on the border of the states of Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, and Utah, near the mouth of the Yampa River into the Green River. The monument was established by a decision of President Woodrow Wilson in 1915, on an area of 0.32 square kilometers. Today, it covers an area of 853.26 square kilometers.
The monument contains thousands of bones belonging to 10 species of dinosaurs. The first fossil skeleton of an Apatosaurus was discovered in the area in 1909 by paleontologist Earl Douglass.
The park also contains numerous petroglyphs and cave pictographs of Indians who lived in the area.
It was recorded on July 20, 2019, at John Martin Dam on the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado.
In contrast, the lowest was -51.7° C on February 1, 1985, at Maybell.
Despite its mountainous terrain, earthquakes are not frequent, and if they do occur, they are of low magnitude.
Since 1973, 525 earthquakes have been recorded there, most of which were between 2 and 3.5 on the Richter scale. A magnitude 5.7 quake was recorded in 1973.
The most populous is El Paso County, home to the city of Colorado Springs. The second most populous is the city and county of Denver.
Five of the 64 counties have more than 500,000 residents, and 12 have fewer than 5,000.
Colorado has a large percentage of Hispanic citizens, mostly Mexican-American. Spoken English in the state has many Spanish idioms.
The second most spoken language is Spanish. One Native American language still spoken in the state is the Colorado River Numic language, known as the Ute dialect.
Of great importance here is the emphasis placed on outdoor activities.
They also enjoy the longest life expectancy of all states at 80.21 years.
As a medicinal drug, marijuana was legalized in 2000, and for industrial and recreational purposes in 2012. In 2016, Colorado’s marijuana industry generated $194 million in tax, fee, and license revenue from legal marijuana sales. The first recreational marijuana stores in Colorado opened on January 1, 2014.
Colorado became the 38th state of the United States on August 1, 1876. On that day, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant signed Proclamation No. 230, allowing Colorado to join the Union as the 38th state. This happened a century after the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, hence the name Centennial State.
The state’s motto is “Nothing without providence,” or “Nothing without the Deity” (Nil sine numine).
It is preceded by Alaska, Texas, California, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. It ranks 21st in the country in terms of population.
The Lindenmeier Site–an archaeological site in Larimer County–contains artifacts belonging to the first Indians, dating back to about 8720 BC. Today, Indians in Colorado live on two reservations:
With the purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803, the United States acquired territorial claims to the eastern Rocky Mountains. After the Mexican–American War in 1848, the southern and western parts of present-day Colorado became part of U.S. territory.
In 1876, Colorado was declared the 38th state of the United States.
It is known as Trail Ridge Road and is the third-highest (3,713 meters above sea level) paved highway in the United States.
It is Leadville, the administrative seat of Lake County. The city sits at 3,096 meters above sea level and is surrounded by two of the highest peaks in the state, the so-called “fourteeners.”
It is a former silver mining town with many historical buildings and sites from the mining era. At the end of the 19th century, Leadville was the second most populous city in Colorado after Denver.
It was organized after the Civil War in the Town of Deer Trail in 1869.
It is called Colfax Avenue and is the main street running from east to west through the Denver metropolitan area. It is just over 50 miles long and is called the “longest continuous commercial in America.” It was named after 19th-century politician Schuyler Colfax.
Since 1999, the town of Fruita, Colorado, has held its annual “Mike the Headless Chicken Day” on the third weekend of May.
The holiday was created to honor Mike, the headless chicken (a rooster of the Wyandotte breed), which lived another 18 months after being decapitated. In 1945, farmer Lloyd Olsen from the town of Fruita intended to cook a chicken for dinner. He cut off its head in such a way that most of the brainstem was left in the upper part of the spine, and one ear survived.
The chicken nevertheless survived, having only lost the ability to see and foam. He could still hear and maintain basic vital functions, ruffled feathers, and attempted to make sounds. The farmer decided to keep him alive, fed him small grains, and gave him water with a dropper.
The chicken behaved almost completely normally, slept on the perch, and tried to crow every morning, but only a bubbling sound could be heard. Mike choked on his mucus, which was removed by the farmer with a syringe. The chicken at the time of decapitation was five and a half months old and weighed 1.1 kg. After eighteen months of living without its head, its weight had increased to 3.6 kg.
Mike became a tourist attraction in a traveling museum of strange creatures. His photos appeared in the press, and his owner earned up to 4,500 then-current dollars a month from showing the rooster. A severed, preserved head of the bird was also shown, although it was not the original head, as this one had been eaten by a cat.
When a farmer stayed at a hotel in Phoenix after the show in 1947, it turned out that he hadn’t taken a syringe with him to remove the mucus, and Chicken Mike suffocated.
