Explorers Discover Western Slope

From Mega-Mega News – July 10, 2015

(Confront Range) There’s water in them thar hills! That has been the persistent cry of thirsty development on the east side of the Rockies since the first gold came out of Cherry Creek. Now a modern Lewis and Clark wagon train, featuring stand-ins, Admiral John Hickenlooper and Major John Elway, has finally stood on the land west of the perilous Continental Divide.
The exploratory commission, sanctified on South Broadway in April, has collected thousands of samples, snapped hundreds of photographs and mapped the region topographically and politically. Both men are looking forward to what promises to be a grand reception upon their return to civilization next week.
According to press particulars the party has chartered a vast stretch of land somewhere in that treacherous, yet mystical land between the Animas and the Yampa. High deserts, prominent alpine peaks, green valleys and rigorous canyons abound as does water, the fool’s gold of the 21st Century.
Hickenlooper has already appointed Colonel Walter Weiss as Magistrate General and named two of the higher peaks after Elway and himself. The governor then gave thanks that the discovery would surely provide food and fuel, as well as water, for the growing Front Range population.
Busy with a pick and shovel looking for accessible vote veins Hickenlooper refused to comment on well-publicized plans to dump toxic waste materials here.
Meanwhile Elway, acting as a special envoy from the Denver Water Board, has reinstated the Homestead Act of 1869 that allows urban tribes to occupy unused portions of land with full intent to claim it after improvements are completed.
“And yes, we will build skyscrapers, stadiums, parks, low income housing and interstates just like we have in the real world,” said General Hickenlooper, who hopes to be knighted for his efforts.
The successful exploration puts to rest silly fears and ancestral myths that warn of a great abyss, west of Loveland Pass, that would suck foolhardy travelers into evil vacuums and suffocating cirques that pepper the landscape. The tales tell of surviving trekkers, that had drifted too far in any direction, inevitably falling off the steep, shear edge. Prospects had once allegedly included up front confrontations with a frightening sagebrush eternity full of predator colfax bruins and hungry brown cloud leopards.
When asked about the sparsely settled villages and sophisticated river communities (Grand Junction?) Hickenlooper said the stoned-age tribes inhabiting the terrain had nothing to fear.
“The blissful peoples who live west of here will share in the progress that is right around someone’s corner,” interjected Elway almost on cue. “We plan to create thousands of subsistence level jobs at minimum wage and show them what life is all about. Any malcontents and rebels can easily be shipped off to Zutah where they will live happily ever after on sunny, wide- open reservations, counseled by pompous, incapable federal and state ritual technicians with sociology degrees. It’s happened before and not so long ago, no?” – Harv Birdseede