The maps that your geography teacher gave you in school showed Colorado as one of three states with only straight borders, therefore making Colorado a rectangular state.
Your geography teacher and his precious maps lied.
Colorado is actually a hexahectaenneacontakaiheptagon, meaning it has 697 sides, according to a 2018 bigthink.com article and Kutztown University’s math whizzes who create names for polygons.
The state’s true shape gained attention Wednesday morning when Gov. Jared Polis posted on his Facebook page the year-old bigthink.com article that says the state looks more like an isosceles trapezoid than an actual rectangle.
Take the New Mexico border as an example. The state line runs west to east until it reaches Edith,where the line makes a sharp southeast turn before continuing east, nearly 3,000 feet more south than before.
Because of this and other similar jukes and juts, Colorado isn’t four-sided.
So, how did this get so convoluted?
Blame 19th Century surveying techniques, bigthink.com said.
Human surveyors in the 19th century were given the mountainous task of establishing the borders by hand. A party embarked from the Four Corners and placed markers at every mile on the Colorado border with Utah before reaching Wyoming, the bigthink.com article said. Those results became official, much to the chagrin of later parties that discovered errors in the original. Fixing those issues would have required too much effort — an agreement between Colorado and Utah and congressional approval.
By the way, Colorado’s northern neighbor, Wyoming, isn’t perfect, either. The bigthink.com article says those 19th Century land surveyors messed up there, too.
