Brief by Central Staff
Local events – May 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Arkansas missed this list
Four major rivers originate in our part of the world (which explains why George Sibley calls this the Headwaters Region), and three of them made the list of America’s Most Endangered Rivers of 2003, which has “Ten rivers reaching the crossroads in the next 12 months.”
The list was released on April 10 by American Rivers, a conservation organization founded in 1973, and it “is not a list of the nation’s ‘worst’ or most polluted rivers,” but instead those facing “acute threats rather than chronic conditions.”
Our three are the Gunnison in fourth place, the Rio Grande in fifth, and the Platte in seventh; others on the list, in descending order, are the Big Sunflower in Mississippi, Klamath in Oregon and California, Ipswich in Massachusetts, Mattaponi in Virginia, Snake in the Pacific Northwest, Tallapoosa in Georgia and Alabama, and Trinity in Texas.
Our three rivers are over-appropriated, and thus their flows are diminished to where they no longer properly support fish and wildlife, according to American Rivers. As for specifics:
The major threat to the Gunnison, according to the report, is that the U.S. Department of the Interior will not claim a sufficient flow to preserve the natural state of the Black Canyon. That threat materialized a few days before the report was released, when Interior and the State of Colorado reached an agreement that minimizes the federal claim, and may allow up to 240,000 acre-feet a year to be diverted east from the Upper Gunnison (of which we plan to publish more next month).
The Rio Grande starts above Creede in Colorado, but the threatened parts are downstream, where Albuquerque, N.M., and Brownsville, Texas, have both announced plans to take more water out of the river. The report notes that “parts of the river have run dry for the past five years, and the river failed to reach the Gulf of Mexico in 2001.”
The north and south forks of the Platte start in Colorado (in North Park and South Park), and meet to form the Platte at North Platte, Nebraska, where the state government “continues to allow unchecked drilling of irrigation wells in most of the Platte River basin,” and more water-development plans are underway. If that happens, “migratory birds of the Central Flyway may lose their most important stopover.”
A full copy is available at
www.americanrivers.org/mostendangered/2003report.htm
Leadville hoping it can land Alco
It seems that all of the ski towns and their suburbs are either fighting to attract big-box retailers or else fighting to avoid them. Either way, the fight is about money. Big boxes are only interested in places where there is enough volume to justify their existence.
In Leadville, the one-time mining giant that has become a bedroom to the Vail Valley and Summit County, something similar is going on. Instead of a big-box retailer, however, the city is courting a small-box variety retailer, an Alco, which is something of a poor man’s K-mart. Its predecessor, Duckwall’s, was found in small towns across the land in an earlier era.
Alco has a keen interest in Leadville at the site of a former slag pile that the Environmental Protection Agency removed some years ago. Chet Gaede, the former lawyer from Boulder turned Leadville mayor, is pushing for the city to buy the property and sell it to an economic development council. He reasons that projects fall apart if they linger, hence this faster route to development is best, reports the Leadville Chronicle (March 27).
Leadville and Lake County expect to get annual tax revenues of $52,000 should Alco open. The goal is to stem the loss of shoppers to outside communities, particularly to the I-70 corridor.
The Big Dump of ’03
Much of Colorado, including the Denver area, got hit by a major snowstorm that started on March 17 and continued through that week, dumping as much as seven feet of sloppy went spring snow in some locations.
However, it missed most of Central Colorado, except for the Wet Mountain Valley (see Hal Walter’s column at the back of this edition for a first-hand snowed-in account) and the Bailey area along U.S. 285. They got hit so hard that roads, schools, stores, and just about everything else were closed for several days.
The San Luis Valley and the Gunnison Country got little, if any, moisture from the storm. Most Colorado precipitation comes from the Pacific (that’s why the Western Slope is wetter), but this one resulted from a stationary low-pressure zone along the border with Oklahoma. It attracted moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, as well as cold air from Canada, and swung the combination against the mountains. Thus it was the eastern-most mountains that caught the brunt of the storm.
The upper Arkansas Valley got some snow out of it, but only a couple of feet which soon melted; the major storm effects were secondary. Interstate 70 was closed for nearly two days, and so the Safeway in Leadville had to post a sign “Yes, we have no bananas,” since no new produce had come in. Postal service and other deliveries were disrupted; that was also the case in Salida, since U.S. 285 was closed in the foothills.
Electric power was out in many of Park County’s rural subdivisions, and that accounted for the only serious storm-related injuries reported in local news papers.
That was a propane explosion in Jefferson which destroyed a house and caused second-degree burns on the hands and faces of two people, Joanna Saltz and Bernie Pertrone, who were house-sitting. The intermittent electricity had shut the furnace off, but propane continued to flow. When they attempted to light the pilot, they sparked the explosion.
The power stayed on throughout Custer County, where at least four feet of snow fell; the San Isabel area had 86 inches — more than seven feet. The biggest storm on record there previously was 46 inches on April 21-22, 1933.
By March 19 of 2003, just about everything was closed in Westcliffe and Silver Cliff, and the state was struggling just to keep the paved highways open.
The main problem was an over-loaded telephone system; on one day the sheriff’s office got more than 1,000 calls, mostly to ask when a given road might be plowed. Using snowmobiles and snowshoes, Custer County Search and Rescue was able to handle several minor emergencies, among them a seven-month-old girl with breathing problems in a snowbound house.
One problem was that many Search and Rescue volunteers were themselves snowed in, according to Cory Phillips, the captain. He noted that “We had requests for dog food,” and “most problems occurred because people put themselves in situations they were ill-prepared for.”
The county budget wasn’t prepared, either. Plowing cost $89,000, or about half the annual budget.
Hardly anyone is complaining, though, even if damages (mostly from collapsed roofs in the Denver area) exceeded $100 million. The storm pushed Colorado’s snowpack in the South Platte and Arkansas basins from about 80% of average to more than 100%, and Forest Service officials say the moisture will delay the fire season for a month or more this summer.
Figure the storm hit a quarter of the state with four inches of water content, and that’s 1.7 trillion gallons of water. At the new rates adopted on April 8 for the Round Mountain Water and Sanitation District (which serves Westcliffe and Silver Cliff with tap water), the storm dropped about $15 billion out of the sky.
More lynx, but not naturally
More than a year ago in this magazine (February 2002), Allen Best reported that Colorado’s lynx were feeding but not breeding. The Colorado Division of Wildlife monitored the felines closely this winter, and the result is the same: “We have not found evidence of any females with kittens this snow-tracking season.”
The population is growing, nonetheless. On April 3, the Division released four more Canadian lynx near Rio Grande Reservoir above Creede, and plans to release 28 more this year.
The hope is that the new lynx will meet some of those released earlier — in 1999 and 2000 — and that the males will start acting like tomcats instead of monks. If that happens, Colorado will have a self-sustaining population, and lynx won’t be an endangered species with the consequent land-management issues.
The first two releases put 96 lynx into Colorado, where none had been seen since 1967. Lynx are closely related to bobcats, but have larger paws, which enable them to walk atop the snow to hunt their favorite prey, snowshoe hares.
Of the original 96, about half have died, with causes ranging from starvation to roadkill. The survivors live in a core area that extends from New Mexico north to Gunnison, and from Monarch Pass west to Taylor Mesa, although some have wandered north into Taylor Park and the I-70 corridor.
Since they have radio collars, the Division can keep good track of them, and during the winter, teams track some lynx in the snow. This winter, 20 were tracked; researchers found 352 lynx sites, and 41 kills or caches. The Colorado lynx cuisine is primarily snowshoe hares (88%), but also included two red squirrels, a weasel, a pine marten, and part of a deer.
More will be learned once the scat is analyzed. Breeding season began in March, and the Division will send out crews in May and June to monitor females, find their dens, and look for kittens.
While the lynx re-introduction has yet to succeed, the Division has been successful with river otters. They were last seen in Colorado in 1906 before a re-introduction program began in 1976. Now there are at least three viable populations — one on the Gunnison River, the others on the Piedra and Green — and otter sign has been spotted on several other streams.
The Division notes that “otters commonly slide along mud or snow banks, a behavior that has led to their reputation for playfulness although that behavior is more likely an efficient method of moving around in deep snow.”
War starts
American and British forces invaded Iraq on March 20. After that, the “Attack Iraq” banners were no longer relevant, and the same held for the “Attack Iraq: No” bumper stickers. But there has been continued controversy between pro- and anti-war advocates, regardless — along with scads of jokes about the French.
