The growing town of Rico wants to secede from Dolores County and become part of San Miguel County.

Rico’s planners have a couple fairly good reasons. To begin with, they’re following the money.

Telluride is a more affluent community, producing more tax revenue, than Dove Creek will ever be.

Rico is becoming more of a bedroom community for Telluride, and the geography is a large part of the picture, though. Rico and Telluride are 35 miles apart, but they’re next-door neighbors, along the same road. In order to get from Rico to the county seat in Dove Creek, you have to drive through Dolores, across to 666 and up to Dove Creek. It takes at least an hour and a half, and it takes you out of the mountains and onto the drylands, out into a different world.

That difference is one of the main reasons that political boundaries should be based on geographical realities rather than a superimposed thatching of straight lines and right angles. Rico and Dove Creek are at the opposite ends of Dolores County, and yet Rico has much more in common with Telluride, while Dove Creek shares characteristics with Slick Rock, in the west end of San Miguel County. Nucla and Naturita, in the western part of Montrose County, feel so far removed from Montrose that citizens there want to secede and form their own county. Residents of Norwood, just south into San Miguel County, feel more kinship with their neighbors in Nucla and Naturita than with the mountain denizens of Telluride.

It’s that way all across the west. The Jeffersonian grid that worked so well across the plains fails miserably here because of the physical obstacles nature has inconsiderately placed in our way. It makes more sense to observe natural boundaries, drawing political lines along ridgelines and rivers. The Continental Divide is more of a barrier than any line arbitrarily drawn on a map. So is the Colorado River along most of its length.

In some places we’ve recognized those realities. The Montezuma-La Plata county line follows the high points of the La Platas. The Rio Grande River provides a border between Mexico and the United States; the Columbia separates Washington from Oregon; the Great Lakes lie between us and Canada.

It’s difficult to go back and redraw political boundaries along geographic lines. Relationships must be undone and new ones forged. Dolores County would have to balance lost revenue to the lost costs of providing services many miles away from the county seat.