Brief by Central Staff
Recreation – May 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
If you don’t have enough yard work to do this spring, you can still get the exercise, as well as the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from volunteering for a good cause.
The good cause here is the Blue Heron Recreation Site near Florence. It’s part of the 150-mile-long Arkansas River Headwaters Recreation Area, but the 247-acre site (recently acquired by the federal Bureau of Land Management) has been closed to the public because it lacks visitor facilities and user-access trails.
That problem is being addressed by Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado, which plans a working weekend on May 3 and 4 at the site, so that it can be opened for fishing, hiking, wildlife-viewing, and boating. VOC plans to construct two trails around fishing ponds and to build a footbridge and other structures. The hardest work might be the habitat restoration, which involves planting some native vegetation, and removing Russian olives and other unwanted invasive plants.
Blue Heron has more than a mile of river frontage, along with wetlands, cottonwood groves, and two ponds. Its wildlife includes bald and golden eagles, osprey, wood ducks, merganser, sandpipers, turtles, mule deer, and, you guessed it, blue herons.
Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado is a non-profit celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and its projects range from restoring 14er trails to community gardens in the metro area. For more information — or to enlist on the Blue Heron project — call 303-715-1010 or visit www.voc.org.