Wolves are at the gate. Get ready Pitkin and Summit counties.
Margin of votes in Pitkin and Summit counties that supported wolf reintroduction in 2020
Hey Pitkin and Summit counties, get ready for wolves.
With 16,569 voters in those two Western Slope counties approving the 2020 ballot question that supported the reintroduction of gray wolves in Colorado – versus 12,366 opposed – they will be the first to host the 10 to 15 predators.
Beginning next week Colorado Parks and Wildlife will begin capturing Oregon wolves, with plans for releasing them somewhere between Glenwood Springs, Vail and Aspen. A second potential release location would be farther south of Aspen, in a region bordered by Creede, Gunnison and Ridgway.
The state’s plan calls for releases at least 60 miles from borders of other states or tribal land, and not on federal land. That leaves private or state land. And Colorado Parks and Wildlife has centered its releases on counties where voters approved wolf reintroduction. Only five Western Slope counties approved wolves in 2020 and three — La Plata, San Juan and San Miguel — are not in the mix for releases.
But wolves, being wolves, roam. And they certainly don’t pay attention to county lines.
“It is entirely expected that wolves will move to within the 60-mile buffer of neighboring states as well as to the east of the Continental Divide,” Travis Duncan with CPW told Colorado Sun reporter Tracy Ross.
Every year CPW issues brochures detailing how Colorado residents can avoid conflicts with wildlife. This year’s conflict literature includes wolves. Among the advice for close encounters with a wolf: make noise, never run, keep eye contact, stand your ground, honk an air horn and blast bear spray. The brochure even includes a stick figure making a daunting thrust with a leafy limb. (“In the very unlikely event that a wolf attacks you, fight back …”)
Don Gittleson is perhaps the most wolf-impacted rancher in Colorado. The North Park cattleman has already lost livestock to a pack that wandered down from the Northern Rockies. He’s spent some long nights unsuccessfully defending his herd.
“The hardest part about living with wolves around is the stress,” he told Tracy. “You start dreaming about them. You wake up and you think you’ve heard them. You have to go check. It gets hard like that.”
>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read Tracy’s story
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Mountain lion chess
The effort to ban mountain lion hunting in Colorado is turning into a game of chess.
Animal conservation groups supporting a ballot measure to ban all hunting of mountain lions have crafted a second possible question for the 2024 ballot that would allow a two-week hunting season. Hunting advocacy groups are asking the Supreme Court to reject the ballot measure saying it was improperly vetted by the Secretary of State’s Title Board.
The second proposed ballot question, like the original, would prevent the use of traps, dogs and electronic calls that mimic the sound of an injured animal in hunting wildcats. It also prevents so-called “trophy hunting,” requiring hunters to turn over every carcass — excluding usable meat — to prevent the mounting, display or preservation of wildcats as “souvenirs of their hunts,” reads the new ballot proposal.
But the new proposed measure includes a two-week season for hunting mountain lions and bobcats at the end of December. (The proposed ballot initiatives ask voters to ban hunting of Canada lynx, but hunting lynx is not permitted in the state and the cat is protected nationally as an endangered species.)
The new ballot question “still honors the intent of the original initiative by calling out trophy hunting as a problem,” said Samantha Bruegger, the manager of the Cats Aren’t Trophies campaign. “Both initiatives really get at banning trophy hunting of mountain lions and bobcats.”
Two years ago animal conservation groups supported legislation that would have prohibited killing of mountain lions, bobcats and Canada lynx in Colorado, but that proposal failed. The trophy hunting vote would land on ballots four years after Colorado voters narrowly approved the reintroduction of wolves on the Western Slope.
Hunting groups opposed the wolf ballot measure and often oppose hunting bans, arguing that wildlife commissioners, not voters or politicians, are best suited to manage wildlife populations using the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. That model has guided state and federal wildlife managers for more than a century, with license and excise taxes paid by hunters and anglers funding a majority of wildlife conservation budgets in all states.
“There 350 certified biologists and scientists who are in their position at Colorado Parks and Wildlife to create science-based wildlife decisions that benefit wildlife, species and the people as well,” said Dan Gates, a hunting policy consultant who serves as executive director for Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management. “Most people agree that they don’t want the pool boy doing brain surgery just because he has an opinion.”
>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story
Indictments for two women accused of stealing $4.5 million from Argo Mill escrow deposit
Amount two women stole from 10 investors through a crooked title company, according to the Colorado U.S. Attorney’s Office
“You just can’t make this stuff up,” says Mary Jane Loevlie.
Her story does sound a bit theatrical.The lifelong entrepreneur spent years gathering more than 20 investors to build a resort village around the Idaho Springs’ iconic Argo Mill. They lined up a lender and in 2020 sent $4.5 million to an escrow company in Virginia.
Loevlie called the escrow company for weeks, asking if the money had been forwarded to the lender. The owners of First Title Inc. — Chrisheena McGee and Sandra Bacon — told Loevlie that COVID was delaying the process.
Actually, authorities now say, the two women stole the Argo investors money. The investors filed a lawsuit and a Colorado judge awarded them $8.7 million, ruling the two women “purposely defrauded the plaintiff out of millions of dollars” and “took numerous steps to cover up their fraud.” So far McGee and Bacon have returned $37,000.
Turns out the Argo investors are not the only people whose escrow money went missing at First Title. Earlier this month the Colorado U.S. Attorney’s Office indicted the two women on 12 charges alleging they stole $14.8 million in escrow deposits from 10 different individuals and businesses in 2019 and 2020. The indictment says the women spent the money on real estate and cars and used some of the Argo cash to pay back previous customers whose escrow deposits disappeared.
Each of the 12 charges in the indictment carries a possible sentence of 20 years in prison.
“If they are faced with jail, maybe they can find the money now,” Loevlie said.
The Argo plan is still underway as the group works to secure new lenders for a 1.2-mile scenic gondola climbing from the Argo Mill site on the banks of Clear Creek in Idaho Springs up to the 450-acre Virginia Canyon Mountain Park. The group plans to develop a hotel, homes and commercial village around the Argo Mill, which processed $2.6 trillion worth of gold between1893 and 1943.
The Argo investors hope to have news on their delayed project soon. The indictment of McGee and Bacon doesn’t really matter much anymore, Loevlie said, but it helps to show outsiders how the group was swindled.
“I want them in jail so badly, I can’t even tell you,” Loevlie said.
>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story
Fur is flying over Mad Rabbit plan
Proposed new trails in the Mad Rabbit project on Rabbit Ears Pass
It’s been six years of planning and study up on Rabbit Ears. And as the Forest Service nears a final decision on creating new trails and shutting down rogue trails atop the Routt County pass, fur is flying.
“There are plenty of people involved in this one, with plenty of viewpoints,” said Forest Service recreation program manager Brendan Kelly. “Being a recreational project, a lot of people are excited for different reasons.”
Voters in Steamboat in 2013 approved a ballot measure that directed lodging tax toward a $5 million pool to build trails in the next decade. The community’s Emerald Mountain trails – part of a land swap with the Colorado State Land Board in 2007 — are a gem. The new trails up Buffalo Pass are wildly popular. Add in Steamboat ski area’s massive expansion this season — 655 acres that makes Steamboat the state’s second largest ski area — and recreation reigns in the Yampa Valley.
The Rabbit Ears Pass trails plan — it’s called Mad Rabbit because it connects trails on the pass with the area around Mad Creek — could be a step too far down the recreation path and reflects a growing concern over how best to balance the growing number of folks exploring the outdoors with protecting wildlife habitat.
Since 2017, the Forest Service has studied the plan to add 49 miles of new trails spinning off the west side of Rabbit Ears Pass and closing about 36 miles of “user-created” — that means rogue and built without Forest Service permission — trails. Most of the new trails will be within a mile of U.S. 40, which the Forest Service is not the best wildlife habitat.
The agency unveiled a draft of its final plan in August and it’s riled groups wanting more petition for wildlife. Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Routt County commissioner have objected. So has the Keep Colorado Wild group. Trail groups like Routt County Riders and the Steamboat Springs Running Series support the plan, which has been scaled back by 60% in the last six years of study.
The opponents want the Forest Service to conduct a more intensive environmental review. The Forest Service is arguing that the last six years of study is enough.
“People are very engaged because they’re passionate about recreation, whether it’s hunting, fishing, skiing, trails, what have you,” Kelly told Colorado Sun freelancer Eugene Buchanan. “But we always welcome public input. The more people get involved the more we can understand their concerns.”
>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read Eug’s story
Even with the Uinta Basin Railway plan derailed, Colorado opposition remains robust
Four years ago, as the Surface Transportation Board studied plans for an 88-mile railroad in rural central Utah, only Eagle County stepped forward with a formal objection.
Now that the Uinta Basin Railway shuffles forward with plans to connect with the national rail network and route more than a billion gallons of Utah’s waxy crude along the Colorado River, Colorado communities are united in opposition. The chorus from Colorado — elevating concerns about water quality, wildfires and community impacts of 2-mile-long trains of oil tankers trundling along the Colorado River for 100 miles — helped sway a federal court in August to overturn the Surface Transportation Board’s 2021 approval of the new railroad.
Even with that trail-derailing win, Colorado opposition remains robust. So much so, that 47 local governments on the Western Slope this week sent a letter to the Bureau of Land Management urging the agency to pursue the highest level of environmental review for a proposed expansion of an oil transport facility on federal land near Price, Utah.
That just about every government on Colorado’s Western Slope is getting involved in an oil facility expansion plan on 12.5 acres of rural Utah reveals the still fiery intensity of the opposition to the Uinta Basin Railway.
“The proposed expansion would have significant short- and long-term regional effects throughout Colorado,” reads the letter from the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments Water Quality/Quantity Committee, which represents all the local governments in the headwaters of the Colorado, Yampa and Gunnison rivers.
The BLM in August indicated it would conduct a less-intensive Environmental Assessment of an energy company’s plan to increase the 30,000-barrel-a-day capacity at the Wildcats Loadout Facility to 100,000 barrels a day to better handle more tankers from the Uinta Basin. Colorado is hoping the BLM will ramp up its review to an Environmental Impact Statement.
Nothing is happening quietly around the Uinta Basin Railway plan anymore.
“If the Surface Transportation Board had done some outreach on the railway project in Colorado three or four years ago, and actually disclosed the downline impacts, I’m sure they would have heard an earful,” said Ted Zukoski, senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity that has led the ongoing fight to derail the Uinta Basin Railway plan. “Glad folks are paying attention now.”
— j
