In Colorado, the stay-at-home order issued by Gov. Jared Polis allows exemptions, including grocery shopping and dispersed outdoor activities. But where to go?
The pandemic emphasizes once again the need for outdoor spaces where it’s possible to meander and connect with those things of nature that soothe. For some people, a park with nicely clipped grass will suffice. Not for me nor many people I know. I hunger for the seeming chaos of nature.
Hunger for that experience is every bit as real as hunger of the sort that can be satisfied by victuals. The stay-at-home orders, with the notion that we should stay reasonably close for our recreation, has revealed just how little local there is to choose from.
Denver and most of its suburbs were expanded on the premise that the mountains were just a hop, skip, and a jump away. The premise has been in doubt for decades because of the crowding of I-70 and other highways. Now, the mountain towns don’t want to play host even if city folks are willing to put up with the drive. Stay away, they’ve said.
Eagle County, which is Colorado’s 15th largest county by population, ranks 7th in the number of covid-19 cases as of Friday. “The virus is rampant up here,” one woman from the Eagle Valley told me. She said of her 6 family members in the Vail area, 2 had contracted covid-19 and in a “pretty severe” way. No wonder the signs on I-70 at Vail say “essential travel only.” Keeping the locals from clogging up trailheads and risking injury that would impose risks on rescuers has been challenge enough. No need for an additional crush of out-of-towners.
Staying local in metro Denver produces its own crush. A photo was circulated several weeks ago of the scene at North Table Mountain, an icon of where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains. There’s an old road that ramps up the west side from Highway 93 between Golden and Boulder. The photo I saw showed a congestion of people, looking a bit like Denver’s 16th Street Mall in normal times. So much for social distance.
Metropolitan Denver has some other locations, including two former Cold War military sites. One will eventually become available for hiking, despite nagging fears about residual plutonium from when triggers were made for nuclear bombs. Another, once a lab for chemical warfare, is already a national wildlife refuge. I live 10 minutes by car from yet another national wildlife refuge, the smallest in the country, where it’s a 10-minute walk from one end to the other.
A migrating pelican flies above Barr Lake, about 30 miles northeast of downtown Denver. Top, partially submerged logs at Barr Lake, one of the few state parks relatively close to Front Range population clusters. Photos/Allen Best
During this lockdown my companion and I have taken to driving 25 minutes to a state park on the northeast flanks of the expanding metropolitan Denver. Barr Lake once was Denver’s sewage lagoon. Now it’s an irrigation reservoir. The foul smell of my youth has been replaced with water fowl, pelicans gliding, geese squawking. The governor’s order specified that state parks would remain open. But there just aren’t that many, nor are they necessarily close.
Northward from Denver, along the foothills, in Boulder and Larimer counties, are more wonderful open spaces, wide and broad, and suitably ragged.
East of Interstate 25, though, nearly all land is private, the agrarian landscape now teeming with hydrocarbon infrastructure of the Wattenberg Field, flag-flying country estates, and small towns getting big. This is where a majority of Colorado’s new residents will live as the state population grows from 5.8 million today to near 9 million by mid-century.
Weld County, partly a bedroom for Boulder and Denver and other job centers, had the nation’s third largest population growth last year, reaching 314,000 residents. With its water and land, it’s easy to imagine Weld County becoming Colorado’s most populous in another 20 or 30 years. Directly on the eastern flanks of metro Denver in Arapahoe and Adams counties, the densely settled urban fabric also pushes steadily onto the Great Plains, offering less and less space to breathe deeply.
The northern Front Range includes Weld County, the red county in upper right.
The governor’s stay-close-to-home directive has “shed a light on how crowded our open spaces and public lands can be,” said Melissa Daruna, executive director of Keep it Colorado, a non-profit that seeks to spare private lands from development with conservation easements. She acknowledges questions of equality about access to open lands. But the effort to preserve those open spaces that people like me desire must originate from local jurisdictions, she emphasizes. Only then can they gain financial and other assistance from other organizations.
The coronavirus has exposed too little investment in preserving large chunks of semi-native landscape amid the expanding urban fabric of the northern Front Range. They need to be large enough to escape the roar of traffic and rough enough to excite the mind. A few falcons or rattlesnakes will be just fine, too. Chicago early had the vision for these big urban green belts, and the Front Range needs that same vision now.
When the stay-at-home orders end, I’ll be back to restaurants. But if I enjoy a store-bought meal, I am even hungrier to just ramble in wide open spaces. It’s a public privilege I’d pay for. Future generations shouldn’t have to drive hours to get to such places. That will mean preserving some of Colorado’s prairie, too.
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You are so right, Allen. I’m just north of Fort Collins, and the closest hiking trails are a 30 min. drive west to USFS lands. That’s fine unless you just want to go for a walk after dinner at which point it seems ridiculous. We have very few parks and virtually no sidewalks outside of Old Town to recreate in or walk upon – especially if you have a dog. Larimer county is no better – there are no public lands at all from N. Fort Collins north to almost Wyoming. We need many more areas in which to hike and recreate located where people actually live.
Hah, and from my perspective, being north of Fort Collins would be wonderful, at least from the perspective of evening strolls. At the very least, you’re within a half-hour of Soapstone Prairie. From here, it’s more than 90 minutes of driving. We’re trying to keep it down to 30 minutes, with a bit of fudging perhaps,. Definitely no bowel movements when away from home.
I guess we’re spoiled a bit in that at least we do have some public lands. But I see sooo much freaking land around here – empty, unfenced, calling out to me to walk on it, and yet knowing it is owned by someone…well, I just can’t. The people who own all this land don’t know how lucky they are! You can’t even hike on the school trust lands. Sheesh!