No mere pipe dream: water visionaries in Colorado rarely stand up under scrutiny, but even some early skeptics have become believers in Aaron Million's plan for a $4 billion, 400-mile pipeline that could solve the state's water woes for 200 years.

Aaron Million vividly remembers the moment of his epiphany. He was on the first floor of the Morgan Library on the Colorado State University campus and it was a Sunday evening in the summer of 2003.

Colorado that summer was still reeling from what scientists have concluded was the most severe drought in at least 150 years. For lack of water, some Colorado farmers had been forced to let their crops wither. The state's third largest city, Aurora, was reduced to a one-year supply of drinking water. Dillon Reservoir had shrunk to a puddle in a giant sand bar. Million, former president of a farm-and-ranch management firm, had returned to school in Fort Collins to work on a master's degree in resource economics, which is why he was in the library that evening. Examining the map, he studied Colorado's major sources of water: the Colorado River near Fruita, the White River near Meeker, and the Yampa near Steamboat Springs and Craig.

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Finally, his eyes inched up the map to the far extreme northwest corner of Colorado where his firm had previously managed ranch properties, to a place called Brown's Park. There, below Flaming Gorge Reservoir, the Green River hooks out of Utah then loops briefly through Colorado before swinging back into Utah. Million, raised part of his life near the Utah town of Green River, knew instantly the impact that loop could make on Colorado's water problems. "I knew the Green River was a legal tributary of the Colorado River mainstream," he said. "That would allow for a legal filing and appropriation of the water for the state." And nobody from Colorado was using it.

Million's mind began racing. What if that water could be piped across the state to the Eastern Slope to satisfy both urban and rural water demands in the South Platte Valley and even as far down the Front Range as Pueblo? What if this new water could be the carrot that would force wiser use of land and other natural resources? Could one private citizen leverage the forces of federal, state and local governments to build a multi-billion-dollar pipeline more than 400 miles long? If the answer was yes, Million figured he had just come up with a Colorado solution for saving crops, nourishing people, and building businesses for the next 200 years.

"I was literally stunned," says Million of his eureka in front of the map. "I think I went out for a double-espresso, and then I went for some beers."

Since that night, Million has continued to explore his idea for his master's thesis--which, he says sheepishly, remains incomplete--by acting out the mission of that private citizen seeking a new solution to the state's historical dilemma: how to find enough water to keep growing. And his task has grown beyond academia.

Million has formed a sole proprietorship, called the Million Conservation Resource Group. He has recruited a well-credentialed water-development team that includes former state water engineers from both Colorado and Wyoming, Jeris Danielson and Jeff Fassett, respectively, Jim Eddy, a former television executive, who handles strategy; the former director of Utah's Division of Water Resources, Larry Anderson; and Thornton's former head of water resources, Walid Hajj.

All are now consultants to Million's firm. For legal counsel he has retained Bill Hill-house, of Denver's White and Jankowski, a firm that specializes in water, and Denver's nationally influential law firm, Brownstein Farber & Hyatt, which includes political and policy consultant Ted Trimpa, and respected water lawyer Jim Lochhead, who represents all major Colorado water districts in informal discussions involving the Colorado River.

For the last 2 1/2 years, Million has traveled throughout the West and to Washington D.C, laying out his ideas to local, state and federal officials. He explains how his idea provides the state with an alternative and untapped water source, making use of already captured water supplies along the Front Range more flexible. It gives Colorado the benefit of an entirely different and distant snowfall, he says. In other words, when it's not snowing on Colorado's Western Slope, it might be snowing heavily at the source of the Green River, the Wind River Mountains in far west-central Wyoming.

In his presentations, Million tells people about how use of that alternate snowpack would take pressure off Colorado's headwater areas, like Grand County, where Denver Water and the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, based in Berthoud, already take 60 percent of the water from the Winter Park-Grand Lake area, and where together they want to increase that take to 80 percent. "Cumulative effects are tremendous," agreed Fraser Valley water activist Kirk Klanke.

Both farmers and cities would benefit from his project, Million says. Cities would get a fresh infusion of relatively clean water from the Green River. That would keep cities from extending their straws onto the Eastern Plains to outlying farming communities like Fort Morgan and Sterling, allowing those farm-based economies to remain viable. He emphasizes, too, how the collection of water operators, cities and water customers who might get involved in his project could in turn encourage a region-wide approach to conservation. At one meeting held in Parker, for example, where most water providers along the Front Range were present--perhaps the first time they had ever been assembled in one place to consider potential cooperation on a shared project--Million said he received "strong but guarded interest" from several participants.

"It's like anything," he said, "everyone's waiting for someone to reach for the saddle" before starting a long ride.

Chips Barry, general manager of Denver Water, the largest and most powerful water supplier in the state, has been among those respectful but cautious listeners.

"I think it's intriguing, because it is a rare--in my view--new idea," says Barry. "The reason you hear me hedge a little bit is that I haven't seen anything that tells the cost, nor the practical geographic difficulties of making it happen."

One unabashed supporter of Million's project is Frank Jaeger, the outspoken manager of Parker Water and Sanitation District since 1981. "I would recommend it, loudly and strongly," said Jaeger. "This is the salvation for the state of Colorado. If we run out of water on the Front Range, what happens to the economy of the state?"

Jaeger has experience weighing lofty storage and diversion proposals vs. increasingly critical water demands. His district's Reuter-Hess Reservoir currently is under construction three miles southwest of Parker and with regulatory approval and funding could ultimately be approved to hold 70,000 acre-feet of water--double the size of Cherry Creek Reservoir.

Yet even then it would be only a partial solution to Parker's long-term water demands, Jaeger has said. He maintains that if Million's project can meet needs for all water providers up and down the Front Range, funding will be relatively simple. "Dancing around the mulberry bush, talking about smaller projects, doesn't get the job done. It will pay for itself if you get everybody involved," he said.

"This is some pretty big-picture thinking," Jaeger adds. "But we'd better be thinking big. We are looking at another 2 million people along the Front Range."

GREEN RIVER

Historically, because of its remoteness, Brown's Park, the area of Colorado where Aaron Million's eyes gravitated, was a hangout for Butch Cassidy and other outlaws and cattle rustlers. Yet for a state that is the birthplace of so many rivers, Brown's Park also has another distinction. The Green River, after originating in the Wind River Mountains, flushes into Colorado from Utah in an excitement of whitewater called the Gates of Lodore. Here, it runs for exactly 41.5 miles, the only major river that does not originate in Colorado but that also flows into the state. After being joined by the Yampa River in Dinosaur National Monument, the Green leaves Colorado, again in a flurry of whitewater. In Utah again, it is joined by the White River, which originates north of Glenwood Springs, before finally flowing into the Colorado River. At that confluence southwest of Moab, the Green is almost as big as the Colorado, carrying 4.46 million acre-feet annually on average, compared with 5.22 million acre-feet for the Colorado.

Million estimates the Green, even though it runs mostly outside the box of Colorado, could yield the state 250,000 to possibly even 450,000 acre-feet of water, an amount that is larger--and potentially double--the state's largest existing trans-basin water diversion, the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, which yields 213,000 to 225,000 acre-feet.

Some of the hesitancy Million has encountered when presenting his project to water officials stems from the novelty of his idea. It's not just the source of the water, but also the public-private business model he envisions that would be necessary to make it reality. Such a public-private partnership has never been done in Colorado on anything approaching the scale of Million's pipeline.

The state's recent water history is full of proposed silver bullets to deliver water across mountain ranges to the Front Range. Among the most prominent ideas is something called the Big Straw, a long talked-about pipeline solution that would have drawn Colorado River water over the Continental Divide somehow for delivery on the Front Range. In 2003, after the worst year of drought in the state's history, the state legislature approved $500,000 to study the concept, and that study offered a variety of possible Big Straw routes estimated to cost anywhere from $3 billion to $15 billion. The different configurations would have had a pipeline draw water from the Colorado, the White, the Yampa or other rivers and ship it to the urban corridor along the foothills.

None of the suggestions of the study have been taken off the table by people in the state's water industry, but none of them have generated much support either.

To recall the most successful public-private mountain diversion of water for the Front Range, you have to go back a half-century when an engineer named John P. Elliott filed on rights to Eagle River water that are now important to both Aurora and Colorado Springs. The project, called Homestake, made Elliott a millionaire, but the engineer didn't live long to enjoy his wealth. He died from a fall suffered in his Denver home even before the first waters from the Western Slope arrived on the Front Range.

Skepticism is bound to accompany any new solution for Colorado's water problems, even though the severity of the problem will at some point demand a solution. Melinda Kassen, well-known in Colorado as a staunch environmentalist and the managing director of Trout Unlimited's Western Water Project, says of Million, "He has big ideas, and from where he sits, it all seems logical and easy."

Yet, she allowed, "Sometimes dreamers can pull things off."

Navigating the state's water establishment promises to be a challenge. Most water delivery systems in Colorado in the last century have been the direct vision of water and agriculture districts, often financed by the federal government, not the work of private entrepreneurs. In Million's case, he sees the water and infrastructure that is built eventually being turned over to end users, similarly to the way E-470, the toll-road that skirts the far eastern Denver metropolitan area, is to be turned over to the Colorado Department of Transportation in 2035. Kassen, however, also sees environmental hurdles to the project.

"We're talking about a river that doesn't make it to the sea half the time," she says, speaking of the Colorado, which is the basis for the state's claim to water in the Green River. She said it's not inconceivable that Million could follow his dream for two decades and still find himself battling against "an unmovable, status-quo water bar."

But it is that "unmovable" water establishment that Million has been courting for two years, and even he has been surprised by some of its response.

400 MILES OF PIPE

In delivering Green River water to the Front Range, Million at first contemplated a route roughly along the Highway 40 corridor to Hayden and then Yampa and across Gore Pass, a route that is similar to one alignment proposed in the Big Straw blueprint, and also one that remains a remote possibility. The current favored alignment, however, was suggested by Jeris Danielson, Colorado's former water engineer, and it could take Million's pipeline out of Colorado most of its way.

The seven- to eight-foot-wide pipeline is now to jog into Wyoming, joining Interstate 80 to cross the Continental Divide, which is only about 7,000 feet at that crossing, and down into Laramie. From there it would drop into Colorado, skirting Fort Collins on the north and east, having covered by then about 310 miles. The next leg would skirt Greeley on the east and plunge south, delivering water into Parker Water and Sanitation District's new Reuter-Hess Reservoir. That leg would be 82 miles long. From there, Million suggests a 42-mile extension past Castle Rock and through the Palmer Divide that could deliver water to Colorado Springs and Pueblo.

The Wyoming route has two distinct advantages, Million said. First is the more yielding geography. The first transcontinental railroad similarly bypassed Colorado's peaks and canyons, which have frustrated and even bankrupted westward-looking visionaries from Denver. Builders of the nation's interstate highway system had the same instincts about geography and costs. Interstate 80 was approved in the original congressional legislation for the interstate highway system, and it remains a federally designated energy corridor; Interstate 70 west from Denver was an expensive addendum to the highway system, and one that ultimately took 35 years to complete.

A second advantage of the Wyoming route is that, because it hews to a well-defined corridor, already the location of three railroad tracks, four highway lanes and numerous natural-gas pipelines, it may be easier to get permits there for a new water pipeline. Million estimates the pipeline laid across Wyoming and down into Colorado might cost anywhere from $3 billion to $4 billion.

Where precisely the Green River would be tapped remains open for discussion. Million sees several alternatives. Two of them involve using existing Flaming Gorge. Built and operated by the federal government, it is a huge reservoir, extending 91 miles across Utah and Wyoming. It holds nearly 3.8 million acre-feet of water, four times the capacity of even Colorado's largest reservoir, Blue Mesa, and 14 times the capacity of Dillon Reservoir. Construction of even small reservoirs within Colorado have become major civic and environmental battles. The genius of Million's project is that it effectively establishes use of an existing major reservoir for Colorado without having to build a new one.

Does Million face obstacles in tapping Flaming Gorge? "Sure, he has lots of them," says Rick Gold, regional director of the upper Colorado Region of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates Flaming Gorge. However, assuming Colorado has water available under various compacts governing Colorado River water, it's possible that water can be contracted from Flaming Gorge, says Gold.

Brownstein Farber water lawyer Jim Lochhead, who represents both Denver Water and now Million in Colorado River matters, says that based on the historic record, Colorado has 500,000 acre-feet of water remaining in the Colorado River's watershed. Further, he sees no reason why Utah or Wyoming should object.

"Each of these states has a similar issue. It's hard to argue that any one state should not use its compact apportionment," says Lochhead. Utah, for example, is planning a long overland pipeline from the Colorado River to the fast-growing retirement mecca of St. George.

Million sees another alternative for a takeout pump: dipping into the Green River as it passes through the city of the same name in Wyoming, hard along 1-80. The fourth option would be to divert water from the Green within Colorado, at Brown's Park. That, however, might involve problematic access in a national wildlife refuge.

CRITICS

Some people think Million's idea has more problems than just a wildlife refuge. Other environmentalists, like Kassen, have been overtly skeptical.

"I think this is absolutely undoable for a host of reasons," says Dan Luecke, an environmental scientist and hydrologist who also has been labeled the single most influential opponent of Two Forks Dam, a Denver Water project for the South Platte River that was killed by the federal government in 1990. Luecke predicts Million's project will cause difficulty in protecting populations of the Colorado pikeminnow, an endangered species in the upper Colorado River Basin.

Kassen, too, predicts considerable opposition from downstream groups. In Glenwood Springs, Eric Kuhn, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, which is usually just called the "River District," sees Million's chances for completing the project as slim. "I think it would be every bit as controversial as Union Park or Two Forks and everything else. Plus, I think you would have Utah in there. The Green River mainly runs through Utah, and there are problems with endangered fish," said Kuhn.

The fiercest public-policy battles over the pipeline, however, are more likely to be about whether the additional imported water would induce population growth along the Front Range. Also, just how much water really exists for the taking may be far more uncertain than people now think.

"The shakiness (of the idea) is that we don't know how much water remains," says Kuhn. Conventional wisdom in Colorado water circles for decades has been that the state was not using its allocated share of the Colorado River, but the drought of the early 21st century has exposed some skinny legs propping up that assumption. Water compacts governing the Colorado assume annual flows of 15 million acre-feet, and they have been based on what has become increasingly clear was an unusually wet period during the early 20th century. Since then, the watershed has rarely produced that much water.

As such, Colorado may be closer to having already developed its full share of the Colorado River. The state's still-emerging energy sector, including potential oil-shale extraction, also plays into Colorado's claims on water. "The energy industry is probably the owner of the largest block of unconditional water rights, and they could suck up to 500,000 acre-feet in a heartbeat," says Boulder water lawyer Glenn Porzak, whose clients include Vail Resorts, Coors Brewing, several ski towns and some of those very rights-holding energy companies.

At Denver Water, Chips Barry warns against Colorado over-extending itself. Depleting the Colorado River drainage, he says, could cause the lower-basin states to put a "call" on the upper-basin states--a move that would cause the finely ordered mechanism governing water diversions in Colorado to shudder as if rocked by a magnitude seven earthquake. Whether Utah would see any benefit from the project is also a question, although Wyoming could use the same pipeline to send water from the Green River east to its own water-short North Platte River drainage.

"The fact that it crosses state lines is a non-issue in the (multi-state river) compact," says Million, who also has answers for most of the other concerns expressed by people who might oppose the project. A regional water solution, for instance, he said, will minimize the effects of periodic water shortages on existing water systems. He said he has been just as astonished as anyone by the encouragement he has received for the concept. "I have asked this question of almost everyone," he said. "Do you see any snake bite in this deal? Do you see any fatal flaws?

"No one," he said, "and I mean no one, has said yes."

RESPONSES

"When I first started reading (Million's plan)," said rancher Robert C. Norris, who operates 93,000 acres in El Paso, Lincoln, and Pueblo counties under the name T Cross Ranches, "I thought he had a wild hair. But after about 30 minutes, I decided he had something, and I still think he has something.

"If he pulls it off, it's going to be one of the biggest deals of the century."

As for himself, Million does not see Colorado's population growth slowing, with or without new water, and for that matter, neither do environmentalists like Luecke. Projections suggest the Front Range will be home to 2 million more people by the year 2030.

His project, Million says, could actually leverage Green River water to enforce better land-use policies along the Front Range, perhaps through conservation restrictions attached to the water rights, mandated conservation measures in contracts with user groups, or even water-use limits to municipal annexations. He admits this "proverbial carrot-and-stick (approach) to push conservation and land-use issues" is perhaps the "least fleshed" element of his proposals, but he adds, "I feel it has the greatest potential."

He also sees other environmental benefits in the project. Using Flaming Gorge as a shared storage structure would itself improve its regional efficiency and reliability, he said. "The problem with the situation right now," he said of regional resource planning, "it's like running the Tour de France with a half-flat bicycle tire. You need to have the right resource base in order to maximize efficiency. Efficiencies in this case means conservation of the water resource." Flaming Gorge, he believes, is that full tire for the Front Range.

Million also sees his pipeline benefiting farmers. Like most Coloradans, he wants to see farmers stay in business. Yet, for the last 40 years, farmers have sold their water in droves, first in South Park, then in the Arkansas River Valley and now, with a flurry, in the South Platte Valley. Parker Water and Sanitation District, for example, has been buying farms near Sterling, 140 miles away, to meet downstream endangered species requirements in Nebraska. Looking at the year 2030, a study called the Statewide Water Supply Initiative foresees the loss of anywhere from 185,000 to 428,000 additional acres. Simply put, water is worth more in cities than it is on farms.

Can Colorado's agriculture sector absorb those losses and remain viable? One view holds that it can. Upwards of 80 percent of Colorado water is devoted to agriculture, where it is often used to grow low-value crops, such as the corn, alfalfa, and hay used to feed cattle. The urban population could double with only a 10 percent reduction in water used for agriculture, says John Loomis, a professor in the agriculture and resource economics department at CSU. "It's not like we're going to dry up agriculture and starve to death," Loomis said. "There are phenomenal amounts of water out there available, fairly inexpensively, in many cases--at least compared to moving water from the Western Slope."

But other numbers warrant examination. About 25 percent of croplands in Colorado are irrigated, yet they are responsible for about 75 percent of Colorado's gross receipts from agriculture, according to James Pritchett, an economist, also from CSU's ag and resource economics department. Dryland crops yield far less. What is missing from arguments on behalf of ag-water conversions, Pritchett observes, is the fulcrum of sustainability. "The thing that is missing from those numbers is the tipping point," he said. "I don't know how many acres a community can lose before it loses that critical mass; and when you lose that mass, the community ceases to exist."

Cities, meanwhile, are experimenting with strategies to lease water at critical times, but still allowing the farmers to farm. Aurora, for example, has also bought farmer's water rights but draws on those rights sequentially in order to allow the farmer sellers to use the water in years when Aurora doesn't.

Luecke, the environmentalist from Boulder, also believes that creativity in sharing water between farms and cities has only begun. "We have really yet to show much imagination in how we can generate greater cooperation between urban users and irrigation users that is mutually beneficial, without the massive movements of water," he said. The massive movement of water, of course, is precisely what Million proposes.

WATER HAZARDS

Yet even those who admire the ingenuity of Million's pipeline concept say it won't be easy to pull off. First, there's the matter of a 1979 Colorado Supreme Court ruling stemming from a Vidler Water Tunnel Co. filing on the Yampa River water. The court said companies can appropriate, not speculate, on Colorado water. At issue is the control of a vital resource, says Russell George, who heads the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. George admits to being impressed by the scope of Million's plans, including the potential request for a water contract in Utah to benefit Colorado.

"It's fascinating to me as an old water lawyer," says George. But he also said Colorado has no interest in seeing a private company becoming gatekeeper for water. "Certainly it's not in the public's interest for a private company to have control over something as important as water, particularly in a time of shortage," he said. "And, of course, we cannot as a society survive very long without water."

Or, to put it more bluntly, "You don't want the public to get caught in a highest-bidder method of distribution of an essential commodity," George said.

But that's why Million has spent the past two years trying to convince potential water customers of the pipeline--municipalities, water districts and other government users--to support the concept. "You would certainly have to have hard contractual obligations from a user base, in order to satisfy the non-speculative clause," he said, referring to the Colorado Supreme Court ruling. "We have no intention of doing otherwise."

But Million also believes, in order to get the public discussion and permitting process for his project going, he can dodge the court requirement by filing for a water-supply contract from Flaming Gorge in Utah.

He said filing for a contract with the Bureau of Reclamation means he will not have to immediately file for the water right in Colorado water court--the "unmovable" bar Kassen referred to. Before even that, however, Million expects to file a request for right-of-way for the pipeline across Wyoming with the Bureau of Land Management. That action would most likely trigger application of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which often requires an environmental impact statement, and thus would open formal public discussion of his idea.

HEY BIDDER, BIDDER

But will Denver, Colorado Springs and various suburban water utilities be interested in buying water from Million and his firm? Eric Wilkinson, general manager of the Berthoud-based Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, says water utilities think in terms of increments. The cost per acre-foot of water of Million's project must be lower than any alternatives. "If, for example, his cost were $20,000 per acre-foot," Wilkinson said using hypothetical numbers, "and the water entity can develop its next phase of supply for $10,000 an acre-foot, they'll go ahead with that cheaper alternative for now. That will be the test," he added. "Is this a competitive project from the cost and water-yield standpoint? If it is, I think there will be interest."

Conservation of existing supplies is easily the cheapest source of "new" water. The recent drought has proven that Coloradans can do more with less. Environmentalists think tightening that belt even more can yield more gains--and many city officials agree to a point. But at some point new supplies will be needed. Many Front Range water groups are already looking to import more water from the headwaters of the Western Slope. Denver Water already is testing the idea of pumping water back from Green Mountain Reservoir to Dillon Reservoir, a portion of which could be shipped across the Continental Divide. Expanded trans-mountain diversions are contemplated from Granby to Vail to Aspen, and new pipelines could reach even farther, into the Yampa River near Steamboat Springs and the Gunnison River.

"It just seems to me like a huge leap, going all the way out to the extreme corner of the state and then bringing water back," says Boulder-based water lawyer Glenn Porzak of Million's idea. Yet Porzak, for several years, has been pushing a reservoir at Wolcott, between Vail and Eagle, that he believes will provide for local uses while indirectly accommodating a new trans-mountain diversion. "You've jumped a lot of intermediate steps," he says of the larger pipeline project.

But there are added costs, both financial and political, to smaller, closer projects as well.

Water in those snow-rich headwater areas, because of diversions, is already scarce for the people who live there. That scarcity is demonstrated in Summit County, where water prices have already reached Wilkinson's hypothetical $20,000 per acre foot. In Grand County, the Fraser River has been reconfigured because it carries so much less water. Western Slope businesses want to keep remaining water for existing and future businesses: residential construction, year-round resorts, the golf, biking and fishing industries. In some places, the water diversions to the Front Range have been compared with Los Angeles' historic diversions from the Owens Valley, encapsulated in the 1974 movie "Chinatown."

Million and his supporters also suggest the aggregate financial costs of the smaller projects already being planned by Front Range cities might ultimately dwarf the price of a Wyoming pipeline. A project planned by Colorado Springs is currently pegged at $900,000. Other ag-conversion pipelines may cost hundreds of millions more. And finally, there are ongoing costs from treatment of muddied, sullied agriculture water taken downstream from Denver, says Parker Water's Frank Jaeger.

The process for treating that water is called reverse osmosis, which is three times as expensive as conventional water treatment, and it yields brine that eventually will become a disposal headache. "In the long term it will be very expensive to treat agriculture water," says Jaeger. "If we are talking about $20,000 an acre-foot for clean water, it's something we will have to take a look at seriously."

RAISED ON A RANCH

Million's personal background, a curious mixture of farm and city, also qualifies him to appreciate the outcome of what Porzak called those "intermediate steps" to obtaining water for the Front Range. Colorado is a state Million knows from top to bottom. He was raised in the intermountain West, including Boulder, where his parents, Isadore and Bonnie, for 24 years operated a popular Pearl Street coffee shop called Penny Lane. It closed last year to considerable fanfare. Before that, however, Million's father had been a geologist who, among many other places around the world, worked in Utah during the uranium boom of the 1950s. There, he met Aaron's mother, who had grown up on a cantaloupe and watermelon farm along the Green River. It is Bonnie's father, Stewart Wilson, Aaron's grandfather, who Million counts as his ultimate hero, ahead of even John Wayne or Mick Jagger. When his grandfather spoke, Million says, the people of conservative Green River, Utah, where the young Aaron spent summers and some winters, listened.

Million brought a mix of Boulder liberal and Green River conservative to CSU in Fort Collins, where he studied farm and ranch management. After graduation, he managed agricultural assets for a company out of Denver for a couple of years, then headed out on his own, living at Montrose but stretching himself thin by growing grass seed in the San Luis Valley and managing sheep and cattle operations near Jensen, Utah.

Those were hard days financially, he said, and he remembers driving, tears in his eyes, across Cochetopa Pass, between the San Luis and Gunnison valleys, being $500,000 in debt and having just $80 to his name. However, as land values rose, he was able to leverage his way into some wealth--not from agriculture, but by owning hotel and office property. That success allowed him to return to graduate school at CSU to study economics and natural resources and work toward a Ph.D., while also putting together his sole proprietorship.

Million declines to quantify his personal financial investment in the pipeline idea. "More than a case of Fat Tire, and less than a Gulf Stream V," he says. But getting investment capital to finance construction of the pipeline is the least of his worries, he says. Investors who come up with that money will be repaid through fees for the water.

But whether he will ever leverage the pipeline idea into wealth is doubted by some people who have commented on his plans. Glenn Porzak, the Boulder water lawyer, said, "I represented a private party at one point who had a phenomenal idea, who marketed it to a big water district, and the water district stole it from him.

"There was nothing he could do, because there was nothing to prevent the government entity from going out and doing it itself."

That's a point Eric Wilkinson, of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy, also makes. "I think if something like that goes forward, the state of Colorado or entities within Colorado could cooperate and do it themselves," Wilkinson said. He added, however, that he does want to see the idea investigated further.

Million responded tersely, "We have a protectable business interest." Then, drawing on his roots, he adds, "Plus, you are dealing with guys who are good people, ethical people. I was raised on a ranch."

Scott Balcomb, the state's official representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission, declines to judge the soundness of Million's pipeline proposal. He concedes the uncertainty about just how much water may be available from the river in the future, but he says, too, that if Colorado does not develop whatever water is available to it, the states in the river's lower basin, Arizona, Nevada and California, "surely will."

That's why Balcomb, noting that unborn generations are the beneficiaries of dreamers, at least credits Aaron Million with what could be "a brilliant idea." "It may turn out to be a brilliant idea, I don't know," said Balcomb. But the water official does see a need for water dreamers in the state, and he says he can cite a Colorado Supreme Court ruling to back him up.

Paraphrasing that citation, Balcomb said the court in effect ruled, "Sometimes another person's dream, a pipe dream, turns to be a reality." Aaron Million might just be that person.

RELATED ARTICLE: WATER VISIONARIES APLENTY 

Colorado's Front Range has built few major water projects in the last 40 years, but there have been many new visions of them.

Aaron Million's Regional Watershed Supply Project represents a return to the historical model of private entities being the architects of such projects in a state where water rights are considered private, not public, property.

"The mining and agriculture interests developed the water resource," Million said.

"It's the size of projects and economics that disallowed them to do that, and the federal or the state governments stepped in.

"And now, with Referendum A getting defeated soundly, and with the federal government and state governments backing away from funding these types of projects, it's a return to the historical premise; the private sector is stepping in. The private/public model is getting used all over the U.S., on all kinds of different projects, water transportation or otherwise."

That's why Million believes his vision of a privately financed regional pipe line from the Green River is far different from any of the most recent failed dreams of water visionaries.

The longest dreamer among those dreamers has been Dave Miller, a retired Air Force colonel who lives at Palmer Divide. Since 1986, Miller has lobbied tenaciously on behalf of diverting water from the Gunnison River Basin to the Denver area, initially with a dam at Union Park, between Buena Vista and Gunnison. That idea hit a bump last year, when the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that insufficient unallocated water existed in the upper Gunnison River for the diversion. It was given a knockout blow in mid-September when a federal judge ruled the government could not give away its long-standing water right in Gunnison.

Other water-diversion or storage strategies are far different from Million's pipeline, but have commanded big headlines in the recent past. One, proposed in 1986 by American Water Development Inc., was a plan to draw water from an aquifer partly located under the 50,000-acre, Baca Grant ranch in the San Luis Valley. The ranch then was owned by Maurice Strong, a Canadian who once served as secretary-general for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. To "green" up his company's board of directors, Strong recruited former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm and William Ruckleshouse, former director of the Environmental Protection Agency. Strong and others believed the aquifer contains the equivalent of 200 years of flows from the Colorado River.

But Strong's plan to sell the draw from the Baca to the Front Range was thunderously opposed by local residents, farmers and ranchers, and the AWDI plan eventually was defeated in water court. The next owner of the ranch, Gary Boyce, proposed to sell the same water down the Rio Grande, and he offered various inducements to environmentalists and local farmers to entice them to accept the plan. But Boyce also lost.

Much of the Baca ranch land has since been folded into Great Sand Dunes National Park.

Two Forks Dam, proposed by Denver Water for the South Platte River, came closer than any of those dreams to becoming a reality.

Denver had water rights, customers, and virtually all its permits, although full use of the reservoir would have required canals and tunnels within the Eagles Nest Wilderness Area north of Silverthorne and Vail. That, in turn, would have required a congressional exemption, something then seen as highly unlikely. The Environmental Protection Agency vetoed the project in 1990.

This 21st century's first silver bullet for solving Front Range water problems was actually an old idea to draw water from down-river locations on the Western Slope. All the talk of such diversions was finally given a name, "The Big Straw," in about 2000. A $500,000 study conducted in 2003 reported a potential for five alternative pipelines from different places on the Western Slope, with costs ranging from $3 billion to $15 billion. Those ideas are far from dead, but they do lack vocal proponents.