Sugar City is now a tiny place. Perhaps one paved street. A cafe is the only visible business since the Pot Pie, a marijuana dispensary, ceased its brief existence.

Outside of town the country is unnervingly dry and desolate. A desert has cactus and some ground cover. The fields outside Sugar City are brown dirt. They resemble the fields shown in old photos of the Dust Bowl.

Frankly, it is only fences and a great deal of charity that allow one to call this barren earth "fields." As a former farmer, now a Walmart greeter in Lamar, put it, "if you don't have water, you don't have land. You just have dirt. And that's what we have."

Beginning in the 1880s, the fields were irrigated with water conveyed from the Arkansas by the Colorado Canal. Water and the rail line led to a healthy agricultural industry. Sugar City was home to a large sugar beet refining operation. When the owner of the refinery, National Sugar, went out of business in 1967, many farmers sold their water rights to a cattle company that later sold them to Colorado Springs. Aurora purchased rights from individual farmers.

Most of Crowley County's land is now without water rights. 43,000 of 50,000 acres have no water rights - an area of 67 square miles. Little of the unirrigate land was revegetated, and revegetation wasn't universally successful.

Then throw in the drought and places I rode past look like photos of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. In places, to reduce the dust clouds, farmers are encouraged to plow the dry empty fields to turn up larger chunks of dirt.