The Dolores River begins high among the San Miguel and Rico ranges, tumbling recklessly past long-defunct hardrock mines and flowing south-southwesterly to Dolores, Colorado. But irrigation and aridification have reduced it to a tepid trickle, and the banks have been thoroughly grazed, mined, and otherwise abused for well over a century. Thus, the lower 160-mile stretch has come to earn the melancholy moniker the Spanish friars gave it in the 1700s: El Rio de Nuestra Señora de Dolores, the River of Our Lady of Sorrows.

LINK (via High Country News)