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they’d typically congregate. So in
December 2017, when Eagle County
Open Space acquired neighboring
1,540-acre Hardscrabble Ranch,
Wescoatt urged locals to consider
the property’s value to wintering elk.
Parts of the citizenry, however, were
eager to build trails there that would
connect to ones within the adjacent
Hardscrabble Special Recreation
Management Area administered by
the Bureau of Land Management
(BLM). Plus, agricultural operations
would continue on Brush Creek Val-
ley Ranch and Open Space (as it’s
now called).
Management proposals for that
parcel could’ve become a downward
spiral of warring priorities—like
many of the adversarial land-use
negotiations in which Wescoatt has
participated over the years. Instead,
Phil Kirkman and Diane Mauri-
ello, of Eagle County Open Space,
launched a comprehensive outreach
campaign and recruited Wescoatt
to the cause. They hosted stake-
holder meetings to discuss how the
land should be used. The Vail Val-
ley Mountain Trails Alliance also
founded the Trail Ambassador
program in April 2018 to discour-
age trail users from poaching closed
trails. Volunteers positioned them-
selves at trailheads to educate people
about why they couldn’t use the trails
(cameras documented 190 infractions
over nine days in spring 2017 but just
44 over two months in 2018). “I don’t
think there’s any better way of get-
ting compliance than peer pressure,”
Wescoatt says.
Eagle’s county commissioners
integrated CPW’s recommend-
ations into the management plan
for Brush Creek Valley Ranch and
Open Space, and the plan autho-
rizes Eagle County Open Space to
alter recreational policies should the
trails’ impacts turn out to be greater
than anticipated. The parcel’s trails
will remain closed from one hour
after sunset till one hour before
sunrise in order to return the land
to wildlife at night. Sensitive areas
for wildlife are also closed from
December 15 through June 30,
although that summer date can be
extended or abbreviated based on
wildlife managers’ field observations
of elk calving.Knight envisions. Both roads led me
to the Eagle Valley.
Over the past 20 years, biologists
with CPW have noticed signifi-
cantly fewer calves among Eagle’s
elk population, which is unpoetically
named E16 and extends from Vail
to Glenwood Canyon. The agency
expected dropping numbers because
it had issued more hunting licenses
in an attempt to shrink the herd
from 10,000 animals (in the early
2000s) to within 5,500 to 8,500, the
target set for E16 by CPW’s man-
agement plan. It’s currently at 6,055,
but district wildlife manager Craig
Wescoatt started noticing that in
July, when he’d expect to see calvestrailing seven out of every 10 cow elk,
he counted just three calves for every
10 mothers.
“Either they’re not hitting the
ground, or they’re not living very
long once they do,” says Wescoatt,
who’s lived and worked in the Eagle
Valley for 35 years but has never
seen a decline in reproduction rates
like the one he’s witnessing now. He
believes trail use is partly to blame.
Of course, Eagle’s elk also expe-
rience habitat loss courtesy of
expanding housing development
and increased pressure from preda-
tor species (bear and mountain lion
populations appear to be growing in
numbers). “I do think that it’s death
by a thousand cuts,” Wescoatt says.
“But outdoor recreation is definitely a
factor. We’re seeing a lot more people
out in the habitat that wildlife used
to have to themselves.”
He’s also seen firsthand how elk
vanish when people arrive: In 2013,
when trails were built on Eagle’s
Haymeadow parcel of open space, elk
stopped wintering on the land, whereare most vulnerable. Knight advo-
cates closing climbing routes near
nesting areas during nesting seasons,
in addition to prohibiting access to
trails through critical winter habi-
tat. Boulder, Larimer, and Jefferson
counties have adopted seasonal
closures to protect nesting raptors
and provide winter refuge to elk
and mule deer through the snowiest
months of the year.
Studies on dogs’ impacts have
mixed conclusions. One suggests that
dogs amplify human disturbance but
also found little impact to wildlife
when dogs are leashed. Despite that
uncertainty, some land managers
have prohibited all dogs on high-usetrails—which Knight thinks is smart,
given the current evidence.
But we all still have a lot to learn,
Knight says. “We’ve got to empower
the human imagination to think cre-
atively about our use of space and our
use of time so wildlife has a chance,”
he says, before adding: “People aren’t
the problem. People represent our
only solution.”
Knight trains his binoculars at
the ash-gray sky. We’ve spotted no
golden eagles. It’s quiet: Only a pair
of ravens emerges for an extravagant
flight full of dramatic dives and spi-
rals beside Steamboat Rock. “Just for
the joy of it!” exclaims Knight. Then
he lowers his lenses for a panoramic
view of the scrubby hills rising to
sandstone turrets, and he sighs. “I
love this land.”THROUGHOUT MY RESEARCH for this
article, I asked sources to identify
places within Colorado that exempli-
fied the worst effects of rampant trail
use. I also asked for examples of the
kinds of progressive trail management“WE’RE SEEING A LOT
MORE PEOPLE OUT
IN THE HABITAT THAT
WILDLIFE USED TO
HAVE TO THEMSELVES.”