Running Creek: A Novel of the Palmer Divide

A 150-year struggle for water, wood, and survival on the Palmer Divide. When the wells run dry in 2027, the answers lie buried in the blood and sawdust of 1881. In 1881, Elias Thorne arrives at a sawmill camp on the Palmer Divide-a windswept highland of Ponderosa pines that will fuel the building of Denver. He is a carpenter, a man who believes that some trees are worth keeping standing. The choice he makes-to protect forty acres of forest when every other man is cutting-sets in motion a covenant that will bind his descendants to this land for five generations. From the arrival of the Denver & New Orleans Railroad in 1882, through the devastating flood of 1935, to a modern-day water crisis that threatens to drain the ancient aquifer beneath the town, Running Creek follows the Schroeder family and the community of Elizabeth, Colorado, as they confront the same question across 145 years: What is worth preserving, and what is the cost of forgetting? Inspired by the real history of Elizabeth, Colorado, and the Palmer Divide, Running Creek is an epic generational saga in the tradition of James Michener's Centennial and Annie Proulx's Barkskins-a story about extraction and stewardship, about what we build and what we leave behind, and about the covenant between the land and the people who dare to call it home. "Some things are worth running toward."