One Creek, Two Oceans — Two Ocean Pass, Wyoming
At Two Ocean Pass in Wyoming a single creek splits at the Continental Divide. Both paths traced reach by reach through 8,128 river segments of NHDPlus High Resolution: 2,224 km to the Pacific, 5,534 km to the Gulf of Mexico.
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Transcript
There is a creek in Wyoming that cannot decide which ocean it belongs to. At Two Ocean Pass, it splits. One arm is named Pacific Creek. The other: Atlantic Creek.
Follow the left arm. Pacific Creek joins the Snake. The Snake crosses Idaho and joins the Columbia. Two thousand two hundred kilometers later, that water is in the Pacific Ocean.
The right arm rides the Yellowstone into the Missouri, the Missouri into the Mississippi, and the Mississippi to the Gulf. Five thousand five hundred kilometers — two and a half times farther, to the opposite side of the continent.
Both journeys traced reach by reach — eight thousand river segments from the national hydrography dataset. The divide is not a line on a map. It is a decision every raindrop makes.