The Hidden Work of Park Management Transcript

So, tell me about a unique wildlife encounter you've had.

Oh, boy. One that comes to mind right away, Melissa, is right after the Calwood Fire devastated Heil Valley Ranch and many parts of the county in that area back in 2020. It was the following spring, and I was on patrol, and it was the end of a later shift in April. I was walking to Drainage Heil Ranch, kind of along a road bed near a creek off to the left of me, and I caught some movement out of the left corner of my eye. And as I looked, I thought at first, that was just deer running away, and then the way they were moving was unlike any deer I've ever seen. And as I noticed them moving through the burnt timber, it was two mountain lions.

Two?

And they were running, and I noticed the spots on them. So then I got a little more concerned, not just that I saw lions, but that they were young lions. I said, Oh my God, where's mom? Is there a kill around?

Yeah.

So I immediately, my head's on a swivel, I'm looking around back and forth, and there in the creek right below me where I was walking was the carcass of a deer that had looked like it had just been killed. And then as I scanned a little bit off to the left of that frame of the deer, about 10 feet to the left was this crouching mountain lion. Mama.

Oh my gosh.

She had an ear tag on from previous study. We locked eyes, you know?

Oh my gosh. And the hair stand up on your neck.

Oh God. It's definitely one of those moments, right? But as soon as we locked eyes, and I didn't feel threatened, she immediately like got up and ran towards the direction where her kittens went. And I said, Oh my God, thank God. I'm getting the F out of here, right? I mean, I had to get out of here. I was like, I got to get out of here now. So I didn't feel threatened because I knew they had just made a kill, right?

Yeah.

I went home that night, told my wife the unbelievable story. And the next morning I came out with a few Rangers to set up a camera just to kind of maybe catch some images. And what we came to was that carcass that had been almost completely cleaned up. Mama and her two kittens had eaten most of it over that evening.

They went back and finished.

They came back and finished.

And you survived.

And I survived. That's the more important thing.

I'm so thankful that you survived, because then I get to talk to you today.

Yeah. It's good to have another day.

Yeah. What a story. My name is Melissa Arnold, and I am the host of today's podcast. And today, I am speaking with my colleague and guest, Kevin Grady, the Heil Valley Ranch Resident Park Ranger. And today, we're going to talk about what it takes to manage our open space properties.

Quite a bit, Melissa. I mean, I've been with the department now for 26 plus years now. 23 of those years, I've been living and residing, residing at Heil Valley Ranch as the caretaker and the resident ranger. Very lucky to have that job. I started in that role right after the major trails at Heil started opening up. So go back to the year 2000 when the Lichen Loop Trail first opened. I had helped build that trail as my first job with Boulder County.

And we're talking about Heil Valley Ranch Open Space.

It's our largest open space property that Boulder County manages at about 6,000 acres in size. It is unique in that we try to balance resource protection with recreational opportunities.

So tell me a little bit about your role there as the caretaker.

Good question. I'm one of five different resident rangers across the county system. At all our big major parks, we need the eyes and the ears to be on the park. So the original thought of this position was to have that, have someone be the eyes and the ears on these larger size properties to help manage them better. Then it evolved. We started with just two caretakers. And then in 2005, we re-looked at the program and evolved it kind of piggybacking off of Jefferson County's Open Space program where they had resident rangers in place. We decided, let's go that route where we can have kind of two positions for the price of one. Myself and the other person at the time went to the police academy to get our post certifications so that we then could become law enforcement rangers as part of our jobs. And it's evolved over the years to today where we have five resident rangers on our parks like Heil Valley Ranch, Hall Ranch, Betasso Preserve, Walker Ranch and Caribou Ranch.

And you have other rangers as well that you work with who aren't necessarily residents somewhere.

Correct. I am one of 11 staff members, full time staff rangers. We have six seasonal positions that are hired throughout the warmer months of the year, our busy season. And we also have four parks deputies that assist us with our higher risk contacts.

Like sheriff's deputies.

Sheriff's deputies, exactly. And since the rangers in Boulder County are not fully commissioned, whereas we do not carry sidearms, when we encounter higher risk contacts, such as a transient camp or a hunter on Open Space, which is not allowed, we have those deputies as our backup.

It's quite a network of people involved in helping to be rangers. And like you said, eyes and ears out on these parks. Thank you for that background and explaining a little bit about you and how long you've been working as a ranger at Parks & Open Space. Maybe you could tell us now, what does Parks & Open Space manage for properties? How many acres are we talking about?

We have almost 108,000 acres that we've purchased over the years. Now, the breakdown of that, it's not 108,000 acres of open space that's accessible to the public. We have it breaking down, so 40,000 acres of that is in conservation easement. And real quick, a conservation easement is property that we bought the building rights to. That's the short, easy way to describe it.

Yeah, but they're still owned and managed by the landowner.

But they're still owned and managed by the property landowner. We just bought the building rights, so it's protected land in that way. But it's not our management responsibility. We do have a responsibility that our CE folks do go out and monitor.

Yeah, CE being the Conservation Easement.

CE being the Conservation Easement.

So that's $40,000 from that $100,000 and almost $108,000. So that leaves us with a little over 60,000 acres.

And then of that 60,000 remaining, 26,000 acres of that is agricultural lands that we purchased to lease back to farmers for ranching and farming. There is typically no public access on any of those properties due to the agricultural production that occurs. But we have 41,411 acres of properties that are publicly accessible.

Okay, and that's really what we're focusing on with this conversation.

And that is what we're focusing on with our park managers.

Okay, thanks for breaking that down. These properties, they're located all over the county.

What's unique about Boulder County and what we manage is we manage from the plains all the way up to basically the continental divide. Not many folks know this, but really it's the shortest distance from the plains to the divide anywhere in the state of Colorado along the Rocky Mountains. And we have so many different ecosystems that are involved within those different ecotones throughout the elevations in the county. And we have properties that pretty much encompass every single one of those.

Wow, which means a lot of different kinds of management for different properties across different ecosystems, which we'll get into today. It'll be really interesting to hear. Maybe you could start us out with a big picture. What is our mission? What are we trying to accomplish here?

With all of our park management, we really look to our mission to help guide us. And our mission states that we are to conserve natural, cultural and agricultural resources and provide public uses that reflect sound resource management and community values. So this is what we take into consideration. This is a big part. This is our guiding mission of how we're going to manage our lands. We use this when we manage our parks. We balance the recreation part of it with the resource protection values. That's kind of the gist of it. And our agricultural resources and historic or cultural resources that are worth preserving. When we looked back when Open Space was first voted and approved by our voters of Boulder County as a tax, the top two things that voters wanted to see the Open Space used for was wildlife habitat protection and recreation. Those were the number one and number two interests from the public with what they wanted us to do with the lands.

So tell us a little more about the public and the park user. Who do we see out there and what are they doing?

In our Boulder County Parks, we manage for just passive recreational uses. Passive recreation means non-motorized uses. Hiking, mountain biking, running, horseback riding, fishing, wildlife viewing, bird watching, those are just among the very few. There's some limited belly boating and stuff like that. But those are our main five or six uses of our lands.

So managing for these different users to ensure that everyone's having a positive visitor experience, what does that entail?

Well, that's tough. It's not easy, right? But what we try to do, our Education and Outreach Division, they put out these surveys every so often to try to gauge the interests in the public. This gives us information that we use in our planning process to develop these management plans on what the public wants out of a particular park or open space property. We are learning what people want and what their desires are, and where there's always pressure to provide more. So we can try to make as many people happy as we can, but we know we're not going to make everybody happy all the time. It's really just a big compromise. And there's a lot of players involved that get to the compromise.

And do you have any examples of where we've had to adjust management within our park systems to hit a compromise between different users?

When we first had Pataso Preserve, which is one of our earlier properties that we bought, we started to see a lot of conflict on the trail, particularly with mountain bikes and hikers and sharing the space. So we developed some unique adaptive management, I guess you could say, where we created an opportunity for hikers to use the park on Wednesdays and Sundays without the conflict of mountain bikes sharing the trail. Of course, with everything that's new and brought to the table, it's met with a bit of caution. It was baby steps getting to the point now where all the public out there at Potasso Preserve really supports that change because it reduces conflict, it reduces congestion on the trails, and we have a lot more happy visitors out at Potasso Preserve. And our visitor surveys have shown that over the years with their satisfaction.

So you've mentioned the planning process that goes into deciding how we're going to manage different parks. Tell us a little bit about that. How do we make determinations on how we're going to manage our parks and the planning that goes into that?

Boy.

That's a big question. We'll just break it down.

Making determinations, right? How do we make these determinations? Well, we have an extensive process that takes months or years in some cases to get to this management plan final outcome where we open the park up to the public.

Oh, so sometimes they might not even be open to the public until that process has been complete.

And sometimes certain properties will not be open to the public, but most of our management plans are for properties that have going to have public opening in some fashion. Understood, yeah. So we bring all the public to the table, the special interest groups, just the interested public, and we gauge at public meetings early on in the stage. We have public meetings, we talk about the property, the size of it, the history of it, and then we allow comment from the public as to what they'd like to see the uses of the property. And then we involve all of our staff, like your wildlife biologists, your plant ecologists and on and on. And we have a resource planner that basically leads this group through the whole process over the time it takes. And we try to hear all the voices of all the user groups. So whether it's the mountain biking community or the equestrian community, they all get a fair share and a fair say. After we get all those comments, we take that into consideration moving forward.

And rules and regulations are outcomes of this process sometimes. Tell us a little bit about what the overall rules and regulations are that you can find on Parks & Open Space. I know that sometimes they can be specific to each property.

On all of our open properties that are open to the public, our main ones are going to be that the park is open sunrise to sunset. We don't allow firearms or hunting, no fires or camping. Those are our big main ones that we want people to know on all of our parks that are open to the public. Some parks have more restricted uses that come from our management process. Parks like Heil Valley Ranch, Hall Ranch and Caribou Ranch, those are three parks in particular that I think of that have a lot of wildlife value and sensitive plant value to them and therefore have permanent closures within those parks and also seasonal wildlife closures for let's say nesting raptors. And so there's a lot of restrictions within certain parks, but most of our parks have the general rules and most of our parks do have dogs that must be on a leash. I know a lot of people ask about that. Whereas the city of Boulder tends to be a little bit more dog friendly and have the voice and sight control, but we're a little more bike friendly. And that's kind of in the history of things. People always ask, are you willing to change your management strategy? No, we kind of like our management strategy. People are used to it.

You've mentioned closures a few times and that we've, as a staff, have had to adapt and make adjustments. And I can imagine that there are times when we can't always do a long, involved planning process and nature surprises us. We have unexpected changes, disasters, as we sometimes, some other word maybe than disaster, natural occurring events that are not what we expected. What happens in these situations?

That's pretty much adaptive management. And this day and age, or at least an hour time, Melissa, since we've been in this department, we've seen a lot of natural disasters.

Yes, we have.

I mean, three come to mind in my time here, the Overland Fire, the 2013 flood, and most recently, the Calwood Fire, not to mention the real big one that happened even more recently out there, and the Marshall Fire. And any time one of those types of natural disasters comes to play, and they seem to be happening a little bit more often these days, wouldn't you say? We are obligated to go in and help heal the land. I mean, that's part of our mission statement. That's part of what is our guiding values.

I like your wording, adaptive management, and then we have to quickly pivot and address some of the impacts that have happened from these events. But what do we do for fires in particular leading up to that to try to mitigate any possible future fires and the impacts on the landscape?

Our forestry and fire division team is on board with that and understands whether you want to call it climate change or a warming environment that we have for us also that have been unmanaged since European settlement here in Boulder County and across the front range of Colorado. Every time a fire starts, what happens, we put it out right away. What people don't understand is that in these areas, in these urban interface areas where we have people living within, right adjacent to the wildlands, is these lands have adapted to having fires burning them at an interval. So, Heil Ranch, for instance, I'm going to talk about Heil a lot because that's where I'm from and it's got a lot of adaptive management on it. 8 to 22 years was the fire interval for most of the elevations at Heil Ranch of when a fire would occur regularly. And so, since we've come and habituated the area, we've kind of removed fire from the natural cycles, right, of the landscape. And so, now when we do have fires, because of that fuel loading build up and the forest being thicker than they historically would have been, we're dealing with more catastrophic fires that are causing a lot more damage, not just to the resources, but to our homes and our property values as well. We take very special care and consideration into planning in all of our parks for that type of mitigation work. And Heil Ranch and Hall Ranch and some of our other properties, like Reynolds Ranch up in Mud Lake and higher elevations all have had several different types of forest management techniques to help improve forest health and also to prevent those catastrophic wildfires or at least minimize the impacts. We've had a lot of thinning projects over the years. I remember when I first started, we were doing a lot of contracted work and in-house thinning on the Wapiti Trail and the Ponderosa Loop Trail. Those I know folks can remember seeing the changes in the forest structure and wondering why we were doing all of that work. But when you look at those areas today, especially after the Calwood Fire, you will notice walking through them that the areas where we did the mitigation work actually held up and have some living trees and were able to stand up to that fire. Even though it was such a wind driven event and so catastrophic, we have patches of landscape that benefited from our management actions and provided a livable forest in some of those areas that otherwise would not have happened.

Kevin, tell us about your experience with the Calwood Fire. And this, we're looking at the fall of 2020. I'm your neighbor as well. I work at Parks & Open Space like you, but I'm also a park user, and I live just down the road. I know we were both impacted by this fire, but you were in the middle of it, literally.

I can remember vividly that day, you know, we had that worst fire season going on with the Cameron Peak Fire and the East Troublesome Fire burning, and then other places in Colorado that were burning. Exactly, these other large scale fires. And that fall, we were smelling a lot of the smoke. We were seeing the haze in the air. It was my day off, and my wife and I were cleaning out our storage shed. And she pointed to me at a plume coming up over the ridgeline to the west of our house. And she said, that doesn't look like that's something that is from one of the other fires. That looks like that's close. So I immediately turned on my radio and there was a fire unfolding up near the Calwood property and it was heading east because the winds were sustained at 45 miles an hour that day and it was hot. I like to call it the perfect storm conditions, you know, similarly to the Marshall fire where you have this hot dry weather for a long period of time and you have these winds. All it takes is a bad mistake and that fire is still undetermined as to what it caused it, whether it was human or natural. But we do not know the investigation, not really come to a conclusion on that.

And neither here nor there, that fire moved incredibly fast toward you.

Yes.

Toward me, toward a lot of us.

Yeah. I remember when we first saw the plume of smoke and I was listening to the radio, we immediately, Christie said, should we be evacuating? And I said, yes, like absolutely. So all the rangers that were working that day came up to clear the park of the visitors wHeil Christie and I tried to evacuate as much stuff as we could down to where the Greenbrier Inn is. We only had about an hour and a half from when we saw that plume of smoke to when we saw the fire coming halfway down the ridge at such a high rate of speed. Texted my neighbors that live, they have an easement through Heil Ranch to get to their private land just west of where I live, and they weren't home at the time and I texted them and they have horses on their property. And I said, guys, we got a fire. It's bad. You need to get back here as soon as you can. And they came back and when we left, they were still up there on the property. We were down at the Greenbrier Inn watching it burn, but they were dealing with trying to get their six horses out safely. They had to walk down the hill with flames burning on both sides of the hillsides along the road and got to the main trailhead there at Heil, now the Whoppedee Trailhead. There were some horse trailers waiting. They had a donkey and a draft horse. Okay, Innis and Adam. This is a great story, right? They had these four other normal sized horses that they loaded in the trailers and this draft horse named Adam and this little donkey named Innis, who were best friends, the draft horse would not fit in the horse trailer. Travis had to make a difficult decision as everyone was telling him to hurry up to let both the draft horse and the donkey go into the smoke. They disappeared into the smoke and the next day, when we were coming out, we had no idea what was going to happen. I guess Travis's thoughts, he said, were if he's going to die, at least they'll die as friends together and maybe the donkey will be smart enough to lead him to a safe place. The miracle was that my house, for whatever reason, the fire burned around and it was standing. And so myself and another ranger went up to check on the private property, the landowner's property. They lost some structures, but their two modern homes were saved. They miraculously stood. And out of the smoke and fog that early that morning, it was a surreal scene of this come the donkey and the horse, innocent Adam, not a scratch on him.

There was a great write up, a very heartwarming picture of this moment of reunion with the Rangers. It's in the Longmont Times call that we'll make available in the show notes so everybody can read a little more and see that wonderful picture of these two horse and donkey coming out of that smoke.

Yeah, that'll help really paint the picture of what was going on.

That was, I remember that story. That was powerful. You mentioned that your house survived, and I know a couple of the Oaks houses survived as well. And we didn't have structure loss at Heil Valley Ranch.

In terms of our facilities at the Open Space Park, we didn't lose anything. All the corral structures at the lower trailhead were saved. Of course, that was kind of the southern edge of the fire. Ground zero of that fire where the main flame front went through was at the main trailhead, which is now the Wapeete Trailhead. And for whatever reason, even though it burnt the bridges, we lost two bridges and we lost a few culverts. But we didn't lose the shelter or the bathroom, and a lot of the other structures stood. Sometimes there's just no rhyme or reason as to what doesn't burn and what does burn.

Yeah, well said. Heil Valley Ranch had to close for quite a wHeil. And this is something that we expect often after these naturally occurring disasters. How long was it closed for? And what was happening in the meantime to restore the park to where it could be open to the public again?

Once the fire stopped burning and we could get out as staff and it was safe for us to get out and monitor and really record the damage, we knew that it was going to be a long closure. And I'm going to get into why. We had a lot to mitigate. A lot of people think, okay, the fire goes through, it's over. Let's get back in there and recreate. Well, it's not that simple. A lot of our fires are severe fires. This one was a severe fire that burned kind of outside a normal range of variability, so to speak. And what that means is it burned a lot hotter and more intense than it would have. It had been a natural fire under more natural conditions. This fire scorched the earth in many spots and some of the forests that we had acres and acres, as far as the eye could see with not a living tree. The ground scorched so hot that in many places, water was imperiable to the surface of the soils. We knew that if there was going to be heavy rain events after the fire, we're going to be dealing with some flood risk. Not to mention all the safety risk with all these dead trees around all our trees and structures.

Many of which are standing still.

Many of which were still standing. Most were still standing.

Okay.

Yeah. We knew we had to do restoration. That's just kind of the case with a lot of these severe fires this year. So us in Boulder County, we're lucky that we have the ability to kind of, and we have the support to go ahead and do these types of restoration events. So we put together a big team that involved our staff, public, interagency cooperators, come together with a plan on how we were going to mitigate for the flood risk, heal the landscape, right? A lot went into it. At first, we said, okay, after we monitored everything, we said, okay, this is, we needed to come up with a plan in terms of priorities. We needed to get mulching out there, aerial mulching as quickly as possible. We'd have the lightest impact on the land without putting big logging roads in, where we could take all the dead trees that burned in the fire, chip them up on site, and then redistribute them out across the landscape in the areas that we determined that were most high-risk for mudslides, landslides, debris flows.

So how do you access those steep slopes that are dangerous, and this is a really big, this is a lot of acreage you're talking about. How do you get that mulch spread?

Helicopters. And we have dabbled in this in some of our projects over the years at Pataso and Heil Ranch in particular. We knew that we were successful in doing these types of restorative projects. Mostly, we were doing it for thinning. After fires, why not do it for fires too? It worked out great. The county had $5.3 million to use for the restoration of the Calwood fire. We were able to mitigate all of those steep slopes. And then once that phase was done, we then had to worry about how we're going to mitigate the creeks that are going to be having all this high volume of water coming down and think about all those folks and special interests that are downstream of Heil Ranch, both public and water districts and stuff like that. We needed to and had great oversight from even some of these districts on to how we were going to mitigate. We brought in contractors to come in and put in these what are called beaver analog dams, rock filtration dams. Those were two of the main dams that we put in place to help slow down water volume flow, catch debris. Also did some contour felling across the creek with some larger trees with lots of branches to help collect the debris coming down and help spread out the flows. In essence, slow down the water, catch a lot of the debris, prevent clogging of our culverts, prevent worse, higher flows downstream that we would have without doing the mitigation.

That's a lot of work that maybe it's...

Mind boggling, yeah.

It took years, I should say months.

I mean, we had to close down the whole south end of Heil Valley Ranch for a year and eight months.

That's actually surprising. I know that probably for the park user who's anxious to get in there, maybe that felt like a long time, but everything you're describing, that's a lot of focused effort from not just parks staff, but as you said, interagency partners and volunteers. We had volunteers out there as well to focus on those.

Oh yeah, I mean, I've only scratched the surface. I mean, we did, we planted 4200 ponderosa pine saplings with volunteers that were our main muscle for that. We tried to pinpoint areas closer to trails with easier access so that we could water the trees so they could stand a better chance of survival. We also had a little partnership with the Nature Conservancy where they donated a bunch of ponderosa seeds, actual seeds, and we had some volunteers from the Nature Conservancy and myself, and we helped kind of pinpoint some areas where we felt that the habitat would be better for growing the trees back, higher elevation slopes. We weren't going to be able to water these areas. They were in more inaccessible areas where you couldn't get equipment. It was just all boots on the ground. Those were the two main things. We did some seeding west of the main trailhead with just some grass seed to help hold those slopes in early on so we didn't have big washouts of that main trailhead, but that was the extent of the seeding that we did. A lot of it Mother Nature does, so she's been good. We've been seeing a lot of great restoration on Mother Nature's part as well, but we're there to help.

And help open it again for people to be able to get back in the park and experience it and use those trails. I know that that was an exciting day when that park opened up again. So since we're talking about adaptive management still in the ways in which we may need to quickly pivot our management and planning on these parks, you've talked a little bit about the flooding that can occur after fire. But in general, we can see flooding in the county and it can impact our parks as well. And you had mentioned earlier that in 2013, we had a historic flood that came through the Boulder County area and nearby areas. That also impacted not just the Heil Valley Ranch but the whole county. Tell us just a little bit about that as well, so we can get a sense of the impact that can have on our parklands. And if maybe you have any stories from Heil, we'd be interested to hear them.

Yeah. I mean, it's another natural disaster, right? That we have to adaptively manage for. Many cases, we're still dealing with the flood of 2013 in terms of staff going out and doing monitoring and stuff like that on those impacted areas. But my experience, again, another interesting one, I remember the night of that fire or the night of that flood, which was September 12th. I remember waking up in the middle of the night. I mean, it was heavy raining. They were calling for some potential flash flooding events, so we knew there was that risk. But at 2.30, 2.40 in the morning, I woke up to the sound I never heard before in all the years I lived there. And it was like a freight train or a rumble. I walked out to my front porch and opened the door, and we have Gear Creek that runs right by our house. It sounded like boulders and culverts, literally washing right past our house. So I really didn't get to see what was going on until the next morning when I got out to really see the damage. And our house sits between two culverts where the creek goes under the road, one to the east, you know, and one to the west. And I found two giant gaps. So we were kind of stuck on an island. Our house, we had no way out. We were isolated on this little island with Gear Creek running more like Colorado River, it felt like.

Oh, my gosh.

You know, my wife and I at the time and our one dog that was with us, we had no electricity, the electricity went out. So we were able to survive for a little bit. But by the next day after that, oh, we were like, OK, we got to figure out how to get out of here. And of course, we realized that, you know, our cell phones were running out of juice. And I just had my radio for work. I was able to get one of my rangers to help navigate our way on this wet hillside around all these blown out culverts and in a raging creek in a raging creek. It was a wild experience, you know, survivalist type of experience in a way.

I'll say you're painting a wonderful picture of how your job doesn't have any dull moments.

It certainly doesn't. But we were able to get rescued out and dealt with, you know, not living at the property for a few weeks, but then came back in. We had to hike long distances before a little sketch road could get put in for us to get in. But it took that that event took six months before we got a road back in. And I believe eight months before the park opened back up on that south end. And with both events, like just to your point before how it affects the park and the management of it, we only needed to close the park where the impacts occurred. So in both instances, like the 2013 flood and the 2020 Calwood fire, where we had to close the south end of the park in those heavy impacted areas, the north part of the park was able to open shortly after those events back to the public. So the picture rock trail and trailhead and our loops up top, we were able to at least give the public back the recreation without any conflict in our management and restoration of the areas.

Really excellent point, because I know that it wasn't just parts of Heil Valley Ranch, there were many other parks in Boulder County that were closed for some time.

The longest closed park was Anu White and Pella Crossing also was pretty heavily impacted. And those three parks were the most impacted of our system. When these events happen, staff has to drop what they're doing, what they're working on, particularly the staff that's associated with the management of these parks. And they need to put the other projects they have aside and focus on adaptive management, this restoration of the park to heal it. And then they can get back to their other projects. And a perfect example of that would be like Rabbit Mountain Open Space. We were getting ready to kind of sit down with the management team to go over Rabbit Mountain again, talk about what we could do, any changes that need to be made. And that's when the flood happened.

Had to hang that up for a wHeil.

We haven't gone back to making that a main focus due to all the things that have sidetracked us over the years.

Let's now talk about that some more. So we've talked about this, what has to happen with these disasters and unexpected natural events that occur. What about the broader picture of how we manage our parks and the resource management? There's a lot of components to that and a lot of people that are involved in all those pieces. Can you break it down for us and start with just one of those pieces and we'll just walk our way through of what it takes to manage our parks and come up with these management plans?

Whether it's adaptive management, disaster management or just regular park management.

Yeah, regular park management.

Okay, yeah, we'll go over that. So we talked a lot about disaster management, right?

That was exciting.

And that was great. But there's a lot that goes into that, even more so than you could argue our regular park management. Internally, when we're talking about park management, which we haven't really covered, we have all the disciplines that come to the table. One of the big ones is wildlife. How do we manage our wildlife resources on these parks? It's our number one thing that the public wants us to preserve open space for, is habitat protection. So our wildlife resources are very important. So we have a staff that identifies and monitors all the critical wildlife habitats on county land. Biodiverse sites are outlined in the Boulder County Comprehensive Plan from 1977, 78. We look at that and use that as kind of a guiding outline for us when we're trying to acquire lands that are going to have certain values. Wildlife helps us to kind of figure out a lot of those values once we attain these parks and knows where the critical wildlife areas are going to be. We manage wildlife across the board, threaten and endangered species like the Preble's Meadow jumping mouse, which we have to work with the US. Fish and Wildlife Service on, Interagency and the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Division as well on these types of things. These are all managing for specific animals.

And Boulder County has started a pretty unique elk management program, hasn't it?

Yes, it has. As a matter of fact, we've been, we're almost like 10 years into this management program.

Has it been that long already?

It has been. I mean, I think this would be year nine, to be honest with you, so nine years officially. But we started noticing, so a little history about elk, what is elk management, right? So elk management is basically allowing the public through a special program to come on to certain properties where we deem to have an elk problem. And what I mean by elk problem is they're negatively affecting the other resources on these properties in a way that is causing negative impacts to the other plants and animals that live there. So it's affecting the whole ecosystem with their overuse of the area.

What's led to them having an overuse?

In both cases, we have two programs, one that just ended at Rabbit Mountain and the other one called the Red Hill Elk Management Area. I'll talk first about the Rabbit Mountain one. That's the one that kind of got us started into elk management. When I first started with Boulder County, it was rare to see an elk at Rabbit Mountain.

Really?

Yeah. And then over the years, they started to see some elk, and there was maybe a group of about 30, 35. And it kind of stayed that way for a little bit. And then within a very short period of time, all of a sudden, their numbers started to explode. So Colorado Parks and Wildlife, who owns and manages the wildlife in our state, we helped them. They came to us and said, you guys, and we knew it too, our wildlife biologists were monitoring this as well. And we noticed that our numbers went from 35 all the way to 360 individual elk using the Rabbit Mountain Open Space.

Within what span of time?

Within less than 10 years.

Wow.

It grew that quickly. The graph, if I could show you, our biologists have this neat graph that they showed the public during this whole planning process, is that the elk numbers just spiked. They were also causing some damage, not only to our parks, but to the adjacent land owners as well. So private properties that border open space, since we don't allow hunting, these animals were getting comfortable on the county land and also using the adjacent lands. A lot of these lands around Rabbit Mountain are irrigated, farmlands, grazing lands. So all the habitat requirements that might not have historically been there at Rabbit Mountain were now a lot more favorable to elk.

So they're confined and also it sounds like the predator prey balance is off because we don't have hunting and the predator has generally been removed.

We see very little removal of elk from bears or mountain lines. The wolves are their main predators. We do not have them at Rabbit Mountain or in Boulder County yet. We knew there were a lot of factors leading up to this. The elk were getting, you know, fat and happy and lazy and comfortable, and we needed to get them to act like wild elk again. They needed just a little push. So, by putting a little hunting pressure on them, and we used other techniques too. We did hazing. Our wildlife staff would go out and try to haze the elk. That had some limited success. The hunting or the elk management through hunting was going to be the key. And the way we were able to do that is, if you look back on when the residents of Boulder County approved the open space tax way back in the day, there's a little stipulation in the open space tax that says, we can use hunting as a management tool for our ungulate populations for the health of the ecosystem, for the health of the property. So that little stipulation gave us the go-ahead to bring this out to the public and start the public process to get this going. It wasn't easy, and we had a lot of pushback at first, but I was at the public meetings. I know you were too. There was mostly support, unanimous support.

Well, you all did a lot of education effort as well.

That was astounding. So much education, yeah. A lot of open houses, meetings. This was a long process just to get to the point of allowing boots on the ground. You know, a lot of people have a vision of a hunter, maybe in a not so nice light, right? We're building a better perception of hunters. There are good hunters out there. We make our hunters that get into this program through a lottery. They have to have a license, enter a lottery to have their name picked in order to have the opportunity to hunt one of these areas. There are certain restrictions on the types of hunting tools they can use at Rabbit Mountain. It was rifle only. And it was during a time period from October all the way to the end of January. And we were trying to move only female elk to reduce the numbers being born. So it was an antlerless hunt is what it's called. Rabbit Mountain, we did it for seven seasons. And now we're walking away. We don't need to do it at Rabbit this year because our goals and objectives of reducing the herd size and getting them to move, really getting them to move, to migrate. We got them and we hit it. And it's such a successful program. And we had so much support from the public. It took a wHeil. But as I was going to say, the hunters that got picked had to go through an orientation program. They then had to go get, do a shooting proficiency test. And if they couldn't hit the target in the middle, they were excluded from the program. So we were looking for people that were going to humanely dispatch the animal in one shot and remove the animal from the population, get the other animals to spook and maybe move more. And in the end, we're now seeing our resources healing. The public surrounding areas, the private landowners that were getting their crops eaten and stuff like that, fences damaged, states not paying out all those fees for damage. So we've seen a positive, not just for our own properties, but all the players that are adjacent to us.

That's a fantastic story.

It was a win-win.

And it sounds like a sustainable population of elk live at Rabbit Mountain still or migrate in and out of it. Now there is.

And they're still there. They're just at a number that can support the area.

You talked about the park, of course, being closed during the hunting days. You've mentioned other reasons for closures just throughout this episode. Give us a few more ideas of what might cause closures on our parks and open space lands.

Piggybacking off the elk thing, right? Caribou Ranch is an example where we have the park closed from April 1st to the end of June for elk calving season.

And this is a park that, for listeners who maybe don't know, a little higher in elevation, closer to the Continental Divine, there's calving, they go up there to have their calves.

It's a unique park right off the peak-to-peak highway, so not far from the town of Nederland. It is a unique park in that we have habitats that are very different from some of the lower foothill systems that we have. A diverse amount of plant and wildlife, moose, those unique beaver, what do they call them, those willow cars. So there's some really unique resources at Caribou Ranch and historic resources. It's unique that we're able to close that park down for the calving season for the elk. The studies have shown that the elk really love to calve at Caribou and surrounding areas.

And obviously have more success if there aren't park users coming through to disturb them and chase them out.

And since our trail at Caribou goes right through one of those main calving areas, that was the decision that was made.

Public, now I know that the staff does a lot to get that word out and educate the public. And how is that generally received when we have closures for wildlife, seasonal closures like this?

Most of the time as a ranger, we deal with those violators when they happen, those trespassing issues. It's a very small percentage. Most people support what we do. We're very fortunate that way. We have a lot of educated folks in the county that support what we do, support wildlife, habitat, preservation, conservation. So I think it might have been a little more difficult, perhaps, in another area of the world, but we do have a lot of support for what we do. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to do it.

And I will also take a moment to just shine some light on the rangers and say that it's not just about addressing violations with enforcement, but it's primarily education. You all do an astounding job, and you all work hard to talk to these park users about why this area is closed. And I've seen over the years that the public really respond to that. You know, don't we all, rather than getting slapped on the hand, we also get told why we understand it more. So I think you all do a fantastic job of that.

Thank you. Generally, we get good compliance, but we know that if we can educate the violator, we sometimes can walk away with it without a ticket and give a warning. As long as we know that, hey, is that person going to ever do this again? And you know, they got educated and they probably won't.

How about closures for muddy trails? This is something that is timely because we just finished a big rainy season. It's interesting. There's a lot of closures that come and go very quickly around precipitation for this reason. Why do we do that? Why do we close some of our trails when there's mud?

You know, we started this whole management strategy of closing trails from mud not too long after we opened Heil Valley Ranch to the public. We learned after that blizzard of 2003, we noticed that when the snow was melting after that, all our trails were running rivers of water. That wasn't going to be a good thing for people to be actually recreating on. Not only were they running with rivers, but the soils on Heil Ranch and Hall Ranch in particular, and Rabbit Mountain are considered poor. They're poor quality soils, highly erodible. They have a lot of clay in them, so they stick to you. They're just nasty when wet. Unfortunately, the north part of the county around the Lions area has a lot of soils that when they get wet, they get sloppy. And when we have a lot of use on those trails under those conditions, we see a lot of damage, not only to the resource, but to the trail tread, which costs money, tax dollar money, to fix and repair those damaged trails. So we figured, let's protect these trails by closing them and give them a little bit of time to dry out. And that way, they're preserved. The tread, everyone likes a single track trail. And when people aren't walking through the mud and around it, we're starting to see, you know, do you like walking on roadbeds? I don't. I think most people don't. I think when post people think about hiking a trail, they want to hike on a trail. That is also another reason why we close these trails, is to keep trails trails.

Let's talk about trails for a minute. This is a really important part of the user experience. You know, I think a lot of people appreciate different parts of our open space just because they're there, and we know that there's wildlife, whatnot, calving and just existing. But the user experience on trails is a really important component for many of us, and experiencing that and getting out, recreating, exercising, maybe a mental health break, it's all really important. There's a lot of effort that goes into managing those. Tell us about our trails. What does it take to manage those, Kevin?

A lot, a lot. And, you know, that's probably one of the biggest things, biggest management priorities, really, in our department, is managing good, sustainable, visitor experience, quality visitor experience trails for the public. That's hard to do, because it's hard to make everybody happy all the time. These visitor surveys that we do for visitor satisfaction on these parks, OK, that's really the gauge that we use. So we have a trail open for a little bit. We put out a visitor survey. Our education outreach group does that. They collect all the surveys, put them out for a wHeil and try to get a random number of people, not a fixed number of people, but all different types of user groups. After they're done with their hike or their horseback ride or their mountain bike ride, we ask them to fill out a survey. And those surveys help to determine how good are we doing at managing our trails. Are we giving these people, are they satisfied? How satisfied are they? Are they an 8? Are they a 10? Are they a 1? Most of our visitors to our parks are very satisfied with their trail experience. In areas where we have had issues with that, we have had to adaptively manage some of these trails, and we've got a growing population of humans on the landscape. So the more people, typically there's more conflict, especially with different user groups. So like Potasso I mentioned earlier, we'll offer Wednesdays and Saturdays as bike-free days. And that's really helped. Heil Valley Ranch and Hall Ranch and Caribou Ranch, we don't allow dogs. And that's just something that dog walkers are going to have to find a different place, but we're able to support that decision with the science that's provided, with all the unique wildlife that use those places. And that dogs are unfortunately a predator of wildlife and perceived that way. It's okay to have a few no dog properties, you know. And some properties where we have dog walkers and bikers, that's a conflict as well that we've seen from time to time.

It's all a balance.

It's all a balance. It's just trying to balance and balancing for that user satisfaction. It's a roller coaster ride, right? It really is. You have your ups and your downs, and sometimes it's great. Sometimes it's not so good. But overall, really, we have a pretty good picture of our trail system. We have 130 trails. That's a lot to manage. We don't do it all ourselves. We got tons of volunteers that help. They help build them. They help maintain them. We couldn't do it without them.

And 130 miles of trails, right?

It's a lot.

Thanks to our volunteers. And there's a lot of opportunities to volunteer to manage, help manage our park, whether it's tree planting, post some kind of event or helping with our trails. We can also link how anybody can volunteer at Parks & Open Space on our lands. We can put that in the show notes as well, so some people can pitch in.

Help be part of the management.

Exactly.

That's why I was, yeah.

Another group that helps to manage our parks. Let's talk a little bit about plant ecology and also the group that manages invasive weeds. So native plants that belong here or should say have been here naturally and those that have been brought in from outside the region. Tell me a little bit about how our staff help to keep an eye and survey on those plants and then also just manage them with users.

Each time we acquire a new piece of property, most of our disciplines will get out to inventory what's out there. Baseline kind of data for handing it to the folks that are going to start planning what we're going to do with the property. Obviously, the vegetation analysis is important. So our plant ecologists and our invasive weed specialists go out onto these properties and identify the really special, unique plant communities. And they also pinpoint the areas where the noxious, invasive weeds are occurring. We want to make sure that those sensitive areas that have the critical plant communities aren't going to get encroached or crowded out by some of these invasive species. And some of these invasive species in particular are our list A species, which are our highly invasive species. They're put on the A list because we need to either eradicate them or really heavily manage them.

And that's a state of Colorado designation.

It is a state of Colorado designation. We work with the Department of Agriculture. So our weeds team works with them on pinpointing which weeds are the most important to eradicate and manage. Unfortunately, we're no stranger to having invasive weeds in Boulder County. We have them on every park, every property, but we do a pretty good job. I'd say a really good job with what we have in managing those species. But the more that people are aware of what's good and what's bad, that helps. But we do want to say, hey, let the staff take care of it. Don't try to do it yourself. But feel free to volunteer and help us out with some of these projects. We do have an Invasive Weed Project volunteer polls that happen every year in many areas.

Another great way to volunteer and reasoning to not just go alone and start pulling things as people sometimes mistake native thistle for invasive and pull those. And so better to go with some experts in our department and be guided in a group of volunteers if somebody really wants to help out. We'll always take help pulling these.

And don't pull the thistles if you're not sure what they are, because what you said, we used to see that at some of our parks where we'd see the native wavy leaf thistle pulled. Also the musk thistle or the... With good intentions. But yeah, in some cases, it can be bad.

Our parks have a lot of nice amenities on them as well. Many of them have trail heads, places to park, shelters, shaded picnic areas, restrooms. What a nice thing that is when you're going for a hike, and it's a long trail ahead of you or that you've come back from. Tell me about managing these structures. Who does that?

That's a great question. And we have our Trails and Facilities Division within the county, and they are responsible for managing all that stuff. Trails Division manages all the trails.

Yeah, Recreation and Facilities Division. They have a Trails Group within them.

They have a Trails Group, and they help with dealing with all the muddy trail closures and reaching out to our special outside groups such as Boulder Mountain Bike Alliance. We have a really good partnership with them, so they help a lot with that. I wanted to make sure I mentioned that. And then our Buildings and Historic Preservation and Grounds groups within that division, they're responsible for overseeing all of the structures, both the historic structures and the facilities that you see. Restrooms, cultural and historic structures from back in the day, parking lots, trail heads, access roads, fences, all of that. So when you come into a park and you see what's there, there was a lot of work that went into that. They're a part of that whole management plan process because we have to decide and they help us decide, where is the best place to put this parking lot, this trail head, this trail. They have to take into consideration all the other constraints. It's too steep of a slope. We need a flatter area if we can have one, not dig into the slope too much. You're looking at it from a landscape architect perspective. They're also taking into account all the other disciplines, the wildlife, the plant sensitivities, and trying to pinpoint where's the area we're going to have the least amount of impact putting this parking lot or trail.

Yeah, that's another example of the extensive interdisciplinary teams that come together in our management planning process to create something that might look very simple, like a trailhead. And then when you start to look at the plans and everything that went into making that happen and maintaining it is really astounding. One of my favorite highlights of the pandemic, if I can say it that way, is the attention that our staff started to get for how well we maintained these facilities. When people at a time when people couldn't get out and we saw a spike in use, there were people sent us notes saying, thank you so much for, you know, we had volunteered. We had staff out and volunteers out helping to manage the flow of traffic, staff going out in the face of this unknown pandemic to clean the restrooms and provide a very clean environment when people were afraid to go anywhere that wasn't outside. That was really wonderful to get that feedback from the public. But there was so much work that went into maintaining that infrastructure during that time when our parks got flooded with use.

Such a chaotic time. I think that what you just touched on, which I appreciate, encompasses two things. It's visitor use management and adaptive management. COVID was both. We had to manage the crowds that were oftentimes unhappy because of just the state of things, right? It was a stressful time. So we never dealt with anything like that before. So we had to adaptively manage and get all that extra help.

I heard you all talk about how it was as if fast forwarding 20 years ahead in park use and population and with the amount of visitors that the park suddenly received from the time that the pandemic shut down a lot of the things that are happening in our community.

Yeah, it was. It was a good kind of almost like a test for like, hey, this is what's going to be like POPs possibly in the future. We managed it very well through a chaotic time, but we couldn't have done it without, wasn't just our, again, it wasn't just our staff that made that happen.

Right.

Yeah.

You have helped to show us that. So many voices, people and groups that are a part of helping to decide how to manage these parks and pulling together these management plans. Let's bring it back to the Rangers. You, your job and your colleagues, you are the faces on the ground, boots on the ground, interacting with visitors and managing these parks day to day. Tell us a little bit about, in the beginning, you introduced yourself and how you got started here, and tell us a little more about the Rangers' role in particular and what you all do.

Once the management plan is established and the park is finally opened up to the public, that's where we come in. Everything that's been decided on what the rules and the regulations are, what's closed, what's opened, what restrictions are on the trail, that's where the Rangers have to enforce those rules that are in place. So our main role is patrol and enforcement of the rules and regulations. And education. So it's a little bit of patrol and enforcement and education. Public safety is really our primary role. We're out there for search and rescue operations for the person with the broken collarbone that just fell off their bicycle. For the flood that just occurred in the burn area at Heil, where we have those flood safety routes I didn't touch on, they're in place to help people navigate when a situation like that occurs. And Rangers and other personnel from the county, whether it's the deputies, our emergency services crews, our Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, all come to those events and help assist. So, but us Rangers were first on scene, we're there to help the people during those crisis times. Fires as well, any type of a natural disaster. We help evacuate the trails, we help evacuate the public from the oncoming front, from the private houses. So we play a lot of roles, wear a lot of different hats. We help injured visitors and we find missing persons. We also manage some youth programs and do education outreach too. We work closely with the Education and Outreach Group, but we also do some on our own. Two in particular programs that we're involved in that we're very proud of are Left Hand Outdoor Challenge program, which caters to high school age teens in Boulder County and surrounding areas that are allowed to join this program for free and learn about being good land stewards and possibly become interested in an outdoor leadership role or a career. We give these kids an opportunity to learn kind of what you and I know. But at a very young age, I wish I would have had something like this as an opportunity for me growing up.

What great exposure to different kinds of careers and opportunities to get out on the ground.

It's not just being exposed to what rangers do, it's to what all the different disciplines within our department of Parks and Protected areas do. The other program is the San Lazaro Community Program, which we have a few rangers that do outreach to this community in Boulder County that's a Latino community. And we get them really excited and involved in the outdoors and do all kinds of programming, camping with them, have them feel welcome to our open spaces. That's one of the main objectives. And that's been going great too.

For rescue, you have a new angle on this now, don't you? And a friend to help you assist with this part of public safety, don't you? Tell us a little about this.

The most recent role in my job, a new role, is being a canine search and rescue handler. I was asked if I'd be interested in joining the program. You know, I always thought it might be a conflict of interest, you know, being the Heil Ranch resident park ranger, and then having a dog that's coming out with me at work. Just because we don't allow dogs at Heil, so I just want to make sure I got that. Like that was something I was interested in, but just never thought it would be, you know, I just thought it was a conflict of interest. I had some people tell me to get over myself and that I'd be good at it, and that if I'm interested, I should pursue it, and that she's going to be a working dog. So I got over myself, and I, a little over a year and a half ago, got myself a little puppy golden retriever named Dottie. She has changed my life. Helps with my stress, for one. She's not only a search dog, she's a therapy dog. She's my pet, but she's also my work dog. It's unique. I'm the newest member of this program. We have several German shepherds and a bloodhound that are in the county search and rescue program. Dottie is our first golden retriever in the program, and she is being trained in finding people that are both lost, either alive or not alive. So she's being trained in two disciplines right now, and that one is trailing, which she just got certified for type one trailing, which she is now available to go on callouts, get dispatched for missing persons. And the other one that we're working towards is human remains detection, which is exactly what it sounds. It's finding human remains that are buried or hanging in trees or hidden under rocks. But they help find closure for people. My dad's a dementia patient. He has Alzheimer's. And with the increase in those types of people wandering off from their homes or their memory care facilities these days, it happens so often. Dogs are a great use in finding them again. I think a part of me thinks that Dottie has something to prove and is going to do something like that one day. I am fortunate to have one of the awesome canine handlers, who is one of the best evaluators in the region, Jeff Hebert on staff, who's been training me. But I'm the dope on the rope, okay? Dottie's the smart. Dogs are smarter than we are when it comes to this. So you have to trust your dog. And again, I'm just the weight on the end of the line. And she's leading me.

What a fun new chapter in your time as a park ranger.

Yeah, it's been a wild experience.

And so many years and so many stories that you have experienced. And so clearly, Dottie is a good new spin on all this and a reason to enjoy your job even more. Kevin, what keeps you here all these years? Why this work? What is it that is apparently fulfilling for you?

You probably could get a feel for this, but I have a passion for protecting and improving our natural resources on our lands, not just at Heil Valley Ranch, even though I've been a part of that, but everywhere. I want future generations to be able to see and enjoy what I was able to see and enjoy in my life. And I feel like we have these jobs, we have the responsibility to ensure that, or try to ensure that. I like seeing the changes over time and hope that I, when I'm done here and I retire and I move on, I hope that I made a positive difference on the landscape when I'm gone, that it's better than it was when I started.

Kevin, thank you so much for talking with me today and sharing everything that you, your knowledge is vast. Thank you for sharing all of that and your perspectives and your stories and for your service and for what you do to help, hopefully make the park experience for most users something enjoyable. And we've certainly learned successful park management is not easy. It takes a village to pull it off, including voices and participation from the public and from those on staff, other partner agencies and groups. So much more than meets the eye when you might just look at these lands and say, oh, big old open space, that's all there is. You've certainly helped paint that picture. So thank you for speaking with us today and joining me.

Thank you for having me.

This was really fun.

It's been fun.

Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode. A big thank you to Longmont Public Media for providing the space to record. You can follow Boulder County Parks & Open Space on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube to stay connected. And don't forget to follow Voices of Open Space on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss a story.