Welcome to Home of the Brave. I'm Scott Carrier. I want to show you where I went fishing without using a map.

There's a mountain about 250 miles north of here, near the Yellowstone Plateau, an area with a lot of

mountains and mountain ranges. But there's this one peak. It's not as tall as some of the others and somewhat hidden from view.

Most people have never heard of it. It's a mountain with three sides are faces, like a pyramid, with three sides instead of four, 11,600 feet above sea level.

Most of the year, the faces are covered with snow, but in the summer the snow melts and the water runs downhill in three directions.

One side slopes to the east, where the water finds the Missouri River, which finds the Mississippi

River, which finds the Gulf of Mexico. One side goes to the snake, to the west, to the Columbia River, which empties into the

Pacific Ocean, and the other side runs south to the green river, which becomes the

Colorado, which used to run into the sea of Cortez, but now gets

sucked dry pretty much before it gets there.

So water that falls as snow on this one mountain ends up in the bodies of people in New

Orleans, Louisiana, Portland, Oregon, and Yuma, Arizona.

That's an enormous area to hold in your head without looking at a map

most of the Western United States.

So here's another way to think about it using a tree as a

basic shape. A river system or watershed is shaped like a tree with its trunk in the ocean and the upper branches

reaching to the highest ridge lines and peaks in the mountains far away.

There's the tree of the Mississippi watershed, which is huge.

One side of its canopy is in upstate New York, and the other side reaches Western Montana near the Yellowstone Plateau. Then there's the tree of the

Columbia, also huge, mostly in British Columbia, but reaching south down to Yellowstone.

And then the tree of the Colorado, skinny and tall in comparison, squeezing through the

southwestern deserts to get up to the same area, the Yellowstone Plateau,

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