The 40th Parallel: Celebrating a Line of Demarcation On Baseline Road

The 40th Parallel just north of Basemar Center is now marked by a red line.

Billie and I stopped by the Basemar Shopping Center this afternoon for the dedication of a public art project that marks the 40th parallel north (40 degrees north) of the equator. Baseline Road runs roughly along that line here in Boulder, with the new sculpture marking the exact location of the line and honoring the surveyors’ part in the creation of that line.

I have known about Baseline Road’s significant 40º position since I moved here but never thought much about what it means. The 40º parallel moves through many counties, including North Korea, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Albania, Greece, China and many of the –stan countries of the former Soviet bloc.

The line was surveyed in Colorado after the Kansas-Nebraska Act created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska in 1854. As it says on the sculpture, the 40º parallel was also known as the Baseline, and it was to terminate “at the summit of the Rocky Mountains,” the easterly line of Utah Territory. It took the surveyors 55 painstaking days to traverse 345 miles in 1859, the same year that Boulder became a city, which ties everything up nicely with the city’s sesquicentennial celebration. And had things not changed, CU would be in Nebraska and Chautauqua in Kansas. Whew.

I always like to remember that up into the 1950s, Baseline Road was a dirt road west of Broadway. Basemar Center first opened in 1955. Here are a couple of photos of the sculpture, created by Boulder artist Christian Muller, who spoke at the event along with Deputy Mayor Crystal Gray and city officials.

The sculpture is two huge chunks of rock bisected by the red line.

The new bus stop near the sculpture is painted like a map.

You can see the LED lights inside the sculpture. I'll get a night shot and post it, too.