Inspired by a post in petty's toilet paper thread.
Every day that I am home I take a shit in the Arkansas River.
The headwaters of this 1,469 mile river are located in the Rocky Mountains in Lake County, Colorado near the town of Leadville (the highest incorporated city in the United States at 10,152' above sea level). It's a great rafting and trout fishing river up there. The clean, cold waters come from the snowmelt in the Sawatch and Mosquito ranges. I will be camping near Leadville in a few short weeks.
Downstream near Cañon City, Colorado it cut 1,250 into the granite to create Royal Gorge, home of the Royal Gorge Bridge. 955 feet above the water below, perhaps your parents or step dad took you here on some grand western road trip when you were 12. It was the highest bridge in the world from it's completion in 1929 until 2001 when China beat us with the Liuguanghe Bridge over the Wu River, and still remains the highest bridge in the Unites States.
Downstream from Cañon City, the river becomes broad and flat as it passes through Kansas, where people in towns such as Garden City, Wichita, and Arkansas City (pronounced Ar-kan-sas City for some reason) all take shits in it.
South of Arkansas City, the river flows southeastward torwards Tulsa. Along the way dams form Kaw Lake and Keystone Lake, large flood control reservoirs. Downstream from Keystone Dam, the river flows through Tulsa where I take a shit in it almost every day.
In Oklahoma the Arkansas is part of the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System, where the Port of Catoosa serves as the second furthest inland port after Duluth, Minnesota - allowing commercial barge traffic to reach the Mississippi River.
As we head southeast towards Arkansas, we come the site of the 2002 I-40 Bridge Disaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-40_bridge_disasterIn Arkansas the river continues on its eastward descent towards the Mississippi, passing through Little Rock where it gathers more shit.
The river then flows on to its confluence with the 2,320 mile long Mississippi River near the lost town of Napoleon, Arkansas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon,_ArkansasAnd via the Big Muddy, eventually ends up in the Gulf of Mexico in the brackish waters of the Mississippi Delta. The brown water you see in the aerial photo below could be the very mud and silt which make up the delta, or it could be shit. No one knows for sure.
Bonus Fact: Until Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the Arkansas River formed a large part of the U.S.-Mexico border