Trail Stewards

CENTRAL COLORADO HAS BECOME a mecca for outdoor enthusiasts and is known for being welcoming and accommodating — a necessity of embracing a tourist economy. The Upper Arkansas Valley has a reputation for being home to some of the most beautiful, unsullied landscapes in the state. Arriving at trailheads, visitors and locals tuck their vehicles …

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The Natural World: The Greenback Cutthroat

By Tina Mitchell

As the Hayden Pass fire exploded in July,  people and their beloved animals had to evacuate. Another group of local residents faced relocation as well. A rare subspecies of cutthroat trout protected by the Endangered Species Act lives in a three-mile stretch of the south prong of Hayden Creek – and even as humans were fleeing, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) staff were scrambling to create a plan to protect these fish.greenback_cutthroat_web
Named for the slash of red below its jaw, the cutthroat trout’s historical distribution covered the broadest range of any stream-dwelling trout in the Western Hemisphere. The rugged topography of the species’ range isolated groups of cutthroats from each other, allowing the evolution of a whopping 14 distinct subspecies. Four closely related subspecies are native to Colorado: the Colorado River cutthroat, on the Western Slope; the Rio Grande cutthroat, in the San Luis Valley; the now-extinct yellowfin cutthroat; and the greenback cutthroat, the easternmost subspecies, found east of the Continental Divide.

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The View From Home

By Steph Brady

On Sunday, July 10 around 3:30 p.m., I noticed we suddenly needed lights on in the house. I looked outside and thought, “there is a fire.” Usually you can see straight up the mountains. My husband Joe walked in and said “there’s a fire,” then the phone rang and it was my son-in-law saying “fire!” It was pretty surreal, yet very beautiful.
I believed it was Mother Nature’s way of culling the dead and the beetle kill. Joe and I hike up around Hayden Pass almost every day and had been seeing the brown trees for nearly three years. I had told him back in October we were going to have a forest fire.

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Photo of the fire plume taken on July 10 at 7:20 p.m. looking east from Salida. Photo by P.T. Wood.
Photo of the fire plume taken on July 10 at 7:20 p.m. looking east from Salida. Photo by P.T. Wood.

By Mike Rosso

It was first reported by a San Luis Valley resident on Friday, July 8. Apparently a fierce lightning storm had been swirling around the Hayden Pass area, high in the Sangre De Cristo mountains. The witness observed a strike and then a plume of smoke rising from atop the pass.

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