Natural disasters touch different people in different ways. For WRV’s William Vieth, the effect of the Cameron Peak wildfire on his three dogs, Cobb, Zelda and June, brought the incident home.
“We all experience the effects of fires burning next door,” says the Healthy Forests and Vital Rivers Program Manager. William’s home, which is outside LaPorte, was only a few minutes from the fire’s perimeter. “You could look out your window and see ash falling like snow.”
One week while the fire raged, William took his dogs out for a walk. They came back and coughed for several hours. “I felt like the world was burning down around my family, and I would do anything I could to help.”
For his canine companions, life goes on pretty much unchanged. But Northern Colorado’s wildfires have shifted William’s workplace priorities.
William is now focusing on post-fire restoration.
His plan: Deploy volunteer teams of 25 people in burned areas as soon as it is safe to do so. His goal is to have teams seed damaged areas with quick-growing native grasses, wildflowers, and other vegetation. Volunteer sawyers will cut dead trees and place them across drainages to catch ash and soil and prevent streams from choking with sediment.
William knows how important it is to act quickly. WRV can help reduce flooding and mudslides that follow high-intensity fires like Cameron Peak.
“The fires kill the vegetation that holds soil in place,” says William. “The following year, as snow melts and rain falls, it scours the soil and sends it down our streams. It reduces water quality for our communities downstream. The mud and sediment kill wildlife and put us at risk for catastrophic flooding.”
WRV undertook many restoration projects following the High Park fire. Thanks to your support, we have made stream restoration a priority ever since. William joined the staff in 2017 to lead forest-thinning and post-flood efforts.
William’s dual degrees in Range and Forest Management and Philosophy from Colorado State University inform his view of the fires. “Our species’ response to natural disasters is part of a bigger picture of stewardship… No place on earth is unaffected by human actions,” he says. “If we don’t counterbalance that by being stewards of this planet, then things are going to continue to decline.”
William will spend the next few weeks securing funds and organizing projects. The purpose is to address fire damage within the Cache La Poudre and Big Thompson watersheds. WRV has posted a “call list” for project volunteers. Folks can sign up on the WRV website to be alerted by email or phone when dates and locations for volunteer events have been secured. Project work could begin by the end of the year, weather permitting.
“We’ve done it before, it’s timely, and it’s right up our alley,” says William. “This work is the greatest need Colorado has right now.”
It was Bill Weber, world-renowned Colorado botanist, who first imagined Summit Lake Park as a public treasure for the Denver area. It offers the study of arctic plants without a costly trip to the Arctic Circle. In 1964, he nominated it for the newly-minted Natural History Landmarks program. But before the advocacy of Weber and others, human use had begun to harm the park. In 2010, WRV volunteers followed on his dream by starting a decade-long restoration of the rare, popular mountain landscape. Your support, and the care and energy of hundreds of volunteers helped bring the ecosystem back from the brink. This was a daunting feat at high elevation.
Summit Lake is a scenic and botanical gem. It features the highest-elevation lake in Colorado, accessible by a paved highway. Over the years, visitors built fire rings, and walked off-trail. They even backed pickup trucks to the margin of the alpine lake to angle for stocked fish. Visitors were unaware of the risk they posed to a community of plants that exists nowhere else in the lower 48.
In a 2012 interview, Weber said of Summit Lake, “You have no idea how rare that particular ecosystem is in North America…The loss is that we will be losing a piece of history that we have not yet fathomed. Rare ecosystems in Colorado should be the point of conservation.”
“Driving up to Summit Lake, you see aspens, then krummholz, then bristlecone pines. As you wind higher, the view swings from southeast to southwest. You see marmots, elk, bighorn sheep, and raptors. Then the view gets bigger in every direction, with an ocean of clouds down below, snaking up the valley. The road tops out below the 14,000-foot peak. It goes from the subalpine to the ridiculous!” says Liz Kellogg, WRV Volunteer Crew Leader.
Liz has volunteered at the Summit Lake Park project for its entire history.
To the east of the lake, permafrost keeps soils wet during the short growing season. Wildflowers and other alpine tundra fill the park. Many of its species are not found elsewhere outside the Arctic Circle. The rare plant community is a relic leftover from the Ice Age. It is the reason for the Park’s designation as Colorado’s first National Natural Landmark. But that’s not all! Summit Lake Park hosts populations of alpine wildlife, including ptarmigan, bighorn sheep, elk, and rosy finches. Rare butterflies and crane flies also live here.
Today, the park often serves as visitors’ first or only experience in alpine tundra. Studies show connecting with natural areas like Summit Lake Park provides many benefits. These include positive mood, self-acceptance, improved ability to concentrate, and more. Likewise, the feeling of connection has benefits for the land. “It has huge use – tons of visitors! At the same time, it’s a unique, fragile ecosystem,” says Jarret Roberts, former WRV staffer and central figure in Summit Lake’s restoration.
“If you can get those things to work in harmony, you can get people interested in the alpine without degrading it. People protect what they understand, and one way to get people to understand is to get them to experience it.”
WRV and partners had a choice: prevent visitors from hiking to the overlook, or build a better trail. They chose to build a wider, better-supported trail in a more sustainable alignment. In fact, they chose to make it ADA-accessible.The new trail alignment avoids the rare plant community. Volunteers built buck & rail fencing to show visitors where they can walk – and areas they need to avoid.
Reciprocity between humans and nature is a central reason WRV exists. It also motivated the restoration of Summit Lake Park.
Slow-growing tundra plants at Summit Lake must complete their entire life cycle in a few short weeks. That is the same window available for restorationists who want to make a difference here! “Spring” arrives in early July, with “fall” in mid-August. In September, the road to Mt. Evans closes.
Bob Finch, Director of Natural Resources with the City of Denver, is Summit Lake’s chief steward. He reflects, “having groups of volunteers come up to work is efficient. We could never do it with staff given the drive-time, since the season is so short. Putting 50 people to work at the same time makes a big difference.”
Jarret conducted studies with WRV as part of concurrent coursework at CU Boulder. He and volunteers gained new understanding – rock cover helps transplated alpine grasses survive and thrive.
According to volunteer Liz Kellogg, “it took years to figure out how to plant them so they wouldn’t get squeezed out. That’s exactly what would happen. You’d come back up the following year and see the whole plug was out of the ground and desiccated. We lost a lot of them that way. We’re not having near the mortality now that we did in the early years. It boils down to little rocks, and lots of them, to build a little wind break and weigh down the plants.”
In 2013, Colorado Native Plant Society member, Mo Ewing, posed the question, “why aren’t we using ecotypic (locally adapted) plants?”
The question inspired an effort headed up by seed collectors such as Liz.
“We started out working on those beautiful moss campions (a tundra plant) with tweezers in a 40-mph wind! The seeds are like an insect wing. You had to be crawling! They are only ½ inch tall,” says Liz. Volunteers gathered seeds in paper bags. Liz cleaned the seeds using kitchen strainers at her home.
Volunteers cast some of the seed on the ground in trampled areas. City of Denver greenhouses propagated the rest. The same volunteers cared for the seedlings, and later returned to transplant them.
Other volunteers measured the effectiveness of the project by choosing transects and taking baseline photos. In some cases, an alpine plant might take 200 years to grow six inches. As Bob Finch put it, “[the change] is noticeable once you get on your hands and knees. We’re seeing seeding and recruitment, and signs that things are better.” Monitoring can also identify new sources of disturbance, or errant behavior by visitors.
Bob concludes the decade’s efforts a success. “We caught it at a real tipping point. It made the park more resilient to human use. We restored habitat and aesthetics.”
To all the volunteers who hauled rocks up the saddle, and all the donors who dug deep to support WRV: It was worth it! You are saving this spectacular place for all the people who will enjoy it in the future!
WRV hired seasonal staff for the Summit Lake Trail project, as well as Youth Corps, for the first time in its history. It was the first of many larger, longer-term, complex projects that WRV took on. These set WRV up to help after the 2012 fire and 2013 floods. Those capacities will be needed after the mega wildfires of 2020.
In March of 2020, the botanist who dreamed up Summit Lake Park died peacefully in his sleep. Bill Weber lived to be 101 years old. His vision helped inspire hundreds of restorationists, and his memory lives on.
The same year, volunteers cared for Summit Lake without its usual entourage. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Denver Mountain Parks closed motorized access to the Park. “We had special access,” said Jackie Curry, WRV Projects Coordinator. “Hikers and cyclists were there but not motorized vehicles. It was unfortunate that it had to be closed. But because it was, there was a fighting chance for the new plants to establish before winter.” Volunteers enjoyed an intimate campout under a full moon. Perhaps Weber’s spirit was there, looking over his ancient, arctic, alpine splendor.
Boulder County hosts unique grassland habitat that two decades of work have restored. Your support empowered volunteers to make a difference!
The lilting song of western meadowlarks is so widespread as to be considered common. Yet, the meadowlarks’ songs and others like them are in danger of disappearing. Grassland birds have lost significant habitat to farms and development. Less than 0.1% of native prairies remain intact today. That’s despite having once blanketed a third of North America. Worldwide, birds that depend on grasslands are declining steeply.
But around Boulder, in an area where rocky soils were spared the plow, you and many volunteers stepped in. That’s why this common story of depletion has a hopeful trajectory.
City and County governments took action to preserve this landscape. Unusual soils and weather patterns provide the conditions for species that converge here from all over the Great Plains. This unique oasis attracts and shelters critters not found elsewhere–including birds.
But, designating land as Open Space is only an early step in fostering habitat for a wide array of creatures. Your help was still to come.
As you know, the loss of land to big box stores and housing developments fragments habitat. This leads to the loss of native plants that serve important roles in grassland bird habitat. But development isn’t the only culprit. By the early 2000s, many Boulder-area grasslands had been overrun by Mediterranean sage. This invasive plant is particularly destructive: it thrives and dominates because grazers can’t eat it. Each “Med sage” plant produces up to 100,000 seeds that spread far and wide as tumbleweeds. The plants form dense stands that exclude plants needed by birds and other species. Med sage is such a threat that the state designated it as a “List A” noxious weed. This is the plant-equivalent of the FBI’s most wanted list. Western meadowlarks are widespread. But their populations are declining, as are other grassland birds.
With your help, WRV rose to the Med sage challenge. We have come together to stop the plant’s devastating march across many jurisdictions. Over the course of 18 years and 37 weed pulls, your support helped over a thousand volunteers learn to recognize Med sage. They labored to mitigate the danger it poses. Some volunteers return each year as “weed warriors.” They are champions of native habitat for birds and other creatures.
“An extensive eradication effort like this doesn’t happen very often,” notes Eric Fairlee, former Integrated Pest Management Coordinator with the City of Boulder. Eric is an ecologist and one of the lead partners in the effort.
Over time, the community effort morphed from weed pulls into “search & destroy” missions. Each year there is more searching, and less finding and destroying. Yet, vigilance was and continues to be necessary.
Eric estimates the joint undertaking removes 90-95% of Med sage each year across a patchwork of 3,000 acres. But, he says: “We would lose ten years of progress if we missed even a single year.” Those words motivated staff members to persist despite difficulty in 2020. WRV had to cancel some projects due to group size restrictions to stop the spread of COVID19. But we still made sure not to allow Med sage to spread, either!
You have made possible a multi-jurisdictional effort with many landowners and managers. That’s important when infestations cross boundaries into different properties.
Removing invasive plants is only half of the equation in restoring habitat. Native seeds are also needed to replant prairies and other habitats. The success of reseeding depends on collecting seeds nearby. That’s because plants adapt to local conditions over many generations. You assisted more than 5,300 WRV volunteers to hand-collect millions of seeds since 2002. The seeds were then cleaned and multiplied to sow untold acres.
Lynn Riedel, Plant Ecologist at the City of Boulder, says seed collecting is popular among volunteers.
“Everyone’s hunter-gatherer instincts kick in… People can feel they are doing something very meaningful,” she says.
At seed collection projects, Lynn and others give educational talks. They teach volunteer seed collectors about Boulder’s unique grasslands. And, about the birds and other life they support. Over 70 people have each volunteered 10 or more times at seed-related projects out of 273 that WRV has held. Some return to sort through and clean the seed, ensuring its high quality. Some even grow plants at home to increase the number of seeds for sowing in restoration projects. They leveraged your help countless times.WRV donors, seed collectors and weed warriors have made a difference for grassland habitat. And that makes a difference for the birds and wildlife that thrive there.
WRV weed and seed programs have partnered with some of the most forward-thinking agencies in the country. These groups take leadership when it comes to habitat health. Boulder County Parks & Open Space, City of Boulder Open Space & Mountain Parks, NOAA – U.S. Department of Commerce, Colorado Department of Agriculture, City of Longmont, Jefferson County, Lory State Park, U.S. Forest Service, Denver Mountain Parks, REI, National Forest Foundation, USDA – Natural Resource Conservation Service, and National Fish & Wildlife Foundation.
Dex has been WRV’s primary story teller via film since 2015 and has worked on several projects highlighting the work our Volunteers do! Dex was awarded the Business Partner of the Year Award in 2016 for his continued support of our mission!
In his own words, “Growing up as a military brat I moved constantly. One of the only places I frequented with my family was my grandparent’s farm. The significance of that place is great for me – it was a virtually infinite shrine for animals, plants, and water to thrive and support life and community as our environment is designed to do. Being there was magical. I developed a deep love for being outside and appreciating nature as my family had done for hundreds of years as farmers, ranchers, and caretakers of our land. When I moved to Boulder in 2006 I was still a kid. I was lucky to find and become a part of this community— and have grown in my love for it and desire to protect it amidst modern threats to our environment. Still, as a nomad and person, my love for nature and environmental protection is global. Finding WRV and helping them grow and thrive as an organization has been the most rewarding work in my portfolio to date. They protect and nourish a very important global movement, all in what I am proud to call the protection of “my backyard” on a regular basis.”
“My favorite memory with WRV was my first shoot—filming a project with Knights of Heroes restoring a trail near Brainard Lake in Indian Peaks Wilderness. Everything about it was beautiful and fulfilling. The people, the day, the place… the impact we made on the trail in such a short time… seeing people heal the land
while healing one another all with a very basic application of hard work and organization. People putting themselves out there. Being a part of it really opened my eyes and had a direct impact on my growth as a person. ”
We got curious, so we asked Dex: If you could inspire the next generation of land stewards to volunteer with WRV or any environmental organization, what would you say to them? “There is nothing more important you could do with your time than to learn and get involved with protecting our environment. Actually doing that is a mindset as much as it is action on all our parts. Like anything, it requires practice—and surrounding yourself with wonderful examples who share your mindset, your spirit, and are experts at putting practice into action. WRV embodies these cornerstones. We need people like you to help make the difference. And trust me, you will make a difference if you join this movement. Surrounding yourself
with teams like WRV, with hard work, and a sense of dedication and respect to nature – will enrich you as person far beyond any other investment you can make.”
Click here to view Dex’s most recent project with WRV!
In the summer of 2016, longtime volunteer Yan Chun Su took on her first assignment as a crew leader, a role extremely important to the success of WRV in fulfilling its goal to the heal the land and build community. Here is Yan’s account of that first project:
“Shortly after I ‘graduated’ a.k.a got my pink hat from WRV’s crew leader training program, this greenhorn Crew Leader got a casual email from Jarret asking me if I would lead a trail restoration project up Georgia Pass. ‘Easy, everyone will be together,’ according to Jarret. High peaks are magnets to me and so, the fun of my first crew leading began.
True to the spirit of adventure, the Continental Divide welcomed us with a thunderstorm at night and misty rain in the morning. I was nervous and excited when after breakfast, my crew of two men and two women, all strong looking, joined me. My first crew! We jumped on the super bumpy 4wd road to our work site and, more adventure awaited us. The heavy supplies, tools, wattles, erosion matting, etc. that were supposed to be carried up by llamas earlier hadn’t quite make it up the trail, instead, they were scattered along the steep slope shrouded in rain/fog.
Determined, my super bad-ass crew led the way up. High altitude, fine. Cold rain, no problem. Shoveling, McCloud-ing, we (or more precisely they) built water bars, moved rocks, moved dirt, installed wattles, rolled out matting. Sometimes the visibility was so low we felt like we were working in the cloud. Some noted highlights: Mistaking a rained soaked erosion matting for a wattle; the whole crew awkwardly but successfully carried a wattle together up a near vertical slope; being cold and wet but having a blast; the most gorgeous sunny view on the second day; and shooting mountain goats, with a camera! It’s super satisfying to see the heavily eroded trail like a deep scar on the face of the mountain now nicely tended to by all our hard work, waiting for nature to heal.”
A story by one of our terrific volunteers, Wendy, that reflects the community spirit that is so much a part of our core values:
“This has little to do with me and everything to do with true esprit de corps. August 2015. Our mission: complete a 90-foot bomb-proof boardwalk (see image), the crown jewel of the Brainard Lake–Mitchell Lake Connector Trail. This was day ten of work on the boardwalk I’d worked on all summer. We scored the Dream Team: four cadets from the Air Force Academy, outstanding young men who’d driven three hours after final exams, choosing to spend their weekend-pass volunteering. Their politeness, energy, and intelligence were amazing! We got the brains and the brawn needed to engineer and finish building this link in the trail. Mother Nature, however, had other ideas. Close to completion and on a tight timeline, lightning and rain forced us from the worksite around 4:00 pm.
En route to camp, our volunteer Technical Advisor queried by radio: “Would anyone be willing to eat a quick dinner and return to the worksite, once the storm had passed?” The vote was an immediate and unanimous YES! Dry and full of spaghetti, our team enthusiastically hiked back to the boardwalk, forgoing the evening’s festivities of relaxing by a bonfire with music and adult beverages. Word got out in camp and a few other hearty souls from other crews eagerly joined us. We worked hard into the night, figuring out the final angles, hauling rock, cutting and pinning timbers. We were graced by a beautiful Indian Peaks Wilderness sunset. I received the honor of driving the ‘Golden Stake,’ i.e. the ‘Final Timberlock.’
Hiking out in the dark, we still had to carry out a large stash of tools needed the next day. Tired but happy, we got back into camp around 10:00 pm. The work ethic and esprit de corps displayed by the cadets and the other WRV volunteers was absolutely amazing! It was an honor being part of it.”
Jean-Pierre Gets Topsy-Turvy on Georgia Pass
This story takes us up to Georgia Pass, where Jean-Pierre Georges and the rest of the volunteers faced some difficult challenges from the outset. Here is Jean-Pierre’s account of that project:
“A few days before the first Georgia Pass project this past season, which consisted in revegetating an old 4WD road (4,800 feet long and 1,100 feet in elevation change), the plan was clear. Llamas had staged the materials (erosion matting rolls and coir logs) all along the ‘road’ and all the way to the top (12,800 feet). Crews would start from the top and little by little would work their way down. And the weather would absolutely cooperate.
Well, first the llamas could not carry those loads very far (slanted terrain, loads too wide) and a few materials were scattered all over the mountain.
Second, the weather turned quite bad on Friday and the decision was made not to start from the top but much lower, in order to be less prone to lightning.
Third, Jarret and our star botanist Tim Seastadt decided that changing the sections around and establishing last minute ‘controls’ was a good idea (which it actually was).
Now, here is Jean-Pierre, the ‘official’ Technical Advisor arriving on Saturday at 6:00AM and finding out that the ‘very carefully planned’ project was all topsy-turvy.
After some hand-wringing, tear-shedding, and a lot of scrambling the whole team managed to:
1- Replace the llamas with John Peterson (a volunteer training for climbing Everest next spring) and a few others who carried all the materials where needed;
2- Reallocate the Crew Leaders to the new sections and get them up to speed as quickly as possible;
3- Keep a festive air with the volunteers and make sure that they were confident that we knew what we were doing, and;
4- Force the weather to clear up by 1:30PM and stay clear for the rest of the weekend.
All I can say is that whatever the odds, whatever the circumstances, WRV always makes it happen. Flexibility and resourcefulness are our creed.”