The drive into Boulder County along Colorado 93 in the winter sometimes has a cinematic quality. The Flatirons are draped in snow, clouds weave in and out of trees, and brisk morning air quickly softens in the midday sun.

But for people who live farther to the west, the mountainous charm can quickly give way to conditions that are unforgiving, shifting from routine to emergency within minutes. Communities behind the Flatirons, like Gold Hill, find themselves at the mercy of severe weather and failing emergency communication systems. 

This fragility was on display last month, when hurricane-force winds battered western Boulder County. From midmorning on Dec. 17 through late Dec. 21, the power had been shut off by Xcel Energy in response to warnings of critical fire danger. That risk quickly shifted from precaution to reality: When power was restored, two fires ignited in the area, prompting the need for emergency response. While the fires were extinguished quickly, it was another scary moment for people living in an area increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather. 

Worried about the incoming wind storm, disaster managers in Boulder County had asked Lumen Technologies, which provides 911 access in the western half of the county, to prepare for what was forecast and replace the battery backup systems that keep phone service running during power outages — but the company committed no resources. 

For Gold Hill, this was not a new problem.

Help was not on the way

Late one night last winter, after a four-day snowstorm, Michael Wollard trudged out of his house in Gold Hill to check on his car. As he pushed through chest-deep snow, cold seeping through the seams of his clothing, he heard a faint meowing — a cat, he thought to himself, was stuck in the street.

The noise quickly shifted from a cat’s meow to a clear human cry: “Help.” In the middle of Main Street, he saw his 85-year-old neighbor trying to navigate the deep snow. The phones were out and her husband was critically ill, so she was left to shuffle through the streets at midnight, relying on her voice to call for help.

At the time, the power was out in Gold Hill. An outdated battery backup system that is supposed to keep residents connected during events like this had failed. Gold Hill was buried, frozen, and cut off from the outside world.

The Finn family are legacy residents of Gold Hill and were volunteer firefighters.

Wollard rushed to the Finn’s house to get help for their neighbors. Unable to move the fire trucks, Leslie Finn and her husband brought out a truck they keep tire chains on at all times. They put the man, who was bleeding internally, in the back of the truck and crept toward Sunshine Canyon, where an ambulance was waiting to take him to the hospital in Boulder.

“It was until 3 a.m. dealing with the craziness,” Finn said. “The whole thing started because we couldn’t call 911.”

In cases of internal bleeding, minutes can mean the difference between life and death. Medical care in these situations is critical, with severe cases leading to death within 5 to 30 minutes on average. The risks are even higher for people in rural communities because of the distance to hospitals.

Residents of Gold Hill are already at a disadvantage in emergency situations — without reliable internet service to begin with, inclement weather such as high winds, fires or floods that result in power outages leave Gold Hill cut off from calling for help or receiving emergency notifications, such as orders to evacuate.

In the event of a power outage, the batteries are supposed to kick on, keeping Gold Hill connected for about two hours. Connecting to cellular service is nearly impossible in the town, so landlines and Wi-Fi are the only option. But the batteries have not been replaced for more than 20 years, meaning that they have significantly reduced capacity, according to Gold Hill Fire Protection District Chief Rich Caudill. In the event of a power outage, they fail to keep the communication networks up for more than a few seconds. Gold Hill has no way to contact emergency responders in times of crisis. The blame falls on Lumen, Caudill says.

Lumen Technologies is the sole telecommunications provider in western Boulder County. Formerly known as CenturyLink, the company bought Level 3 Communications in 2017, expanding its network and shifting its focus to wholesale and commercial consumers. Shortly after, the company rebranded as Lumen.

In cars, phones and computers, a two-decade old battery would warrant replacement.

The lifecycle of lithium-ion batteries, like the ones in Gold Hill, has been top of mind in recent years, primarily because discussions of range decrease in electric vehicles. Studies show that modern, highly efficient batteries will decline by 18% by 450 cycles.

While scholarship on older batteries is limited, Gold Hill has proved in nonlaboratory conditions, and over the course of thousands of battery cycles, that Lumen’s batteries are mostly useless holding a connection for maybe 20 seconds after the power goes out, Finn said.

Caudill has been taking Lumen to task for years, urging them to upgrade the batteries, the mounting frustrations of his neighbors and friends fueling his fight to hold the corporation accountable for providing crucial service.

“Over the last six months, I have tried reaching them over 15 separate times, with almost no response,” Caudill said in October.

“The town’s interactions with Lumen are minimal,” Caudill said, in most cases met with lukewarm responses like, “We are not able to commit resources at this time,” or are ignored altogether. When the town requests access to the infrastructure to install new batteries using its own tax dollars, that access is denied, he said.

Lumen declined to comment for this story. 

However, in documents including communications between Lumen reps and stakeholders, the company has said it would not approve requests for access claiming that using outside equipment or generators could present safety risks. The battery boxes are built only for Lumen’s use, and union workers are the only personnel authorized to handle them.

“They don’t think about the population of Gold Hill … I don’t know … deserves it. This community is not just 100 people, it’s several hundred people, and we all deserve access to 911,” said Maggie Simms, lifelong Gold Hill resident.

Most of Gold Hill’s residents are 60 and older, including most members of the volunteer fire department. There are at least seven original founding families still in Gold Hill, according to Boyd Brown, volunteer historian for the Gold Hill Museum and a sixth-generation Gold Hill resident. 

“Residents feel responsible for maintaining the town’s history and mining identity and thus want to stay in the homes that have often belonged to their families for generations,” Brown said. Despite that, they want to be able to rely on the systems in place without putting themselves in danger.

Residents agree that the situation is dangerous, but many are torn on what to do about it. Starlink, the satellite communications system, presents a reasonable alternative, but one that many residents struggle with because of Elon Musk’s work for the Trump administration. Some see it as a necessity in order to remain connected in a potentially dangerous situation, others are unwilling to make the political compromise.

Starlink may end up being the broadband service Gold Hill and other rural Colorado communities get.

In 2021, Colorado was awarded $826.5 million by the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program in the federal infrastructure bill to help make sure every unserved or underserved household in the state has access to fast internet. This fall, the that sum was cut in half and the state was forced to reapply for funding intended to reach more than 96,000 residents in rural areas. Most of the funding was awarded to satellite broadband proposals, including Starlink and the still unlaunched Amazon Leo, previously known as Project Kuiper. 

Most Gold Hill residents don’t expect excellent internet service. Being a bit disconnected, they say, is part of the charm of mountain living, “Our needs are few and simple,” longtime resident Robert Mason said, “Certainly runs everything we need to run, video and blah blah blah.” Mason’s daughter Rebecca Gretz confirmed the feeling, saying that they never had any major problems with their internet.

Emergency communication service is a different matter and it’s hard to argue that the failing battery backups are not an enormous risk to Gold Hill and several other rural mountain communities in Boulder County.

“We’re fighting the law of averages,” said Caudill, the Gold Hill fire chief.

It’s not just a Gold Hill problem

Officials in Gold Hill and neighboring towns are losing patience. The mayor of Jamestown has signed on to partner with Gold Hill’s fire department to pressure Lumen to resolve the battery problem.

Jamestown faces almost identical issues during extreme weather events. In 2013, a flood ripped through the valley, destroying parks, town buildings, including the fire department and 10% of homes in the community. The damage not only prevented residents from physically leaving, but also from getting access to emergency services.

There are day-to-day threats as well. Planned power outages for maintenance or as a precaution during high winds, are common in the region.

In the Fourmile Canyon community, where one of the worst wildfires on record occurred in 2010, Lefthand Fire Protection District Chief Chris O’Brien has been working with county commissioner Steve Silbermann to pressure Lumen to replace the failing backup batteries in all of western Boulder County.

“Although we are making a valiant effort to convince CenturyLink to replace their battery backup power, we don’t have any regulatory backing,” Silbermann said, referring to the company by its former name.

The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office and Boulder County Communications work closely with Lumen, the state-designated Basic Emergency Service Provider, in order to improve 911 reliability. After multiple incidents and discussions, the county requested permission for public safety staff to deploy generators, detailed remote-terminal mapping, critical battery replacements and a battery maintenance plan. Lumen approved only the mapping and battery replacements in crisis situations, according to documents obtained by CU News Corps.

O’Brien said Lumen “has a monopoly” on western Boulder County. “Once they were deregulated it gave them the ability to act with impunity.”

The deregulation O’Brien is referencing is a set of five Colorado laws approved in 2014 that intended to encourage higher broadband internet speeds. At the time of introduction, the bills received criticism from the AARP, who said that the deregulation would hurt landline users. In 2025, it has.

The acquisition of Level 3 Communications that expanded CenturyLink also made Lumen slower to respond, O’Brien said. “When it was CenturyLink, conditions were better … the service technicians really knew the area. It’s hard for us, because we don’t have that, we don’t have a head technician that we can reach out to in case of emergency.”

Allenspark and Raymond on the northern edge of Boulder County have also confirmed that the area is facing similar problems because of Lumen’s failing backups.

“It’s life or death. If we have a retiree, or even a healthy young person, take a fall, have a cardiac event … and they’re not able to reach 911 for emergency services, we don’t know that they need help,” Jamestown Fire Chief Seth Strickland said.

Until the infrastructure improves, residents are left to their own devices. When outages occur in Gold Hill, this often means driving to the far eastern corner of town for spotty cellphone coverage at best. In some cases, the town congregates around the schoolhouse to use its backup resources — it’s one of the only buildings in town with a built-in generator. The town relies upon methods like this to support itself. In theory, they shouldn’t have to.

“What we’re looking for is safety, we want the best standard of living for our town residents, we are not going to stop working on it until we have the issue solved,” Jamestown Mayor Michael Box said.

Lumen is expected to sell the entirety of its mass-market business to AT&T this year. This means that customers in Boulder County mountain towns may have a fresh chance at connectivity under new management. But Gold Hill and the rest of western Boulder County want the systems already in place must be maintained.

“If I were able to snap my fingers today? I would love to have those batteries replaced and maintained,” Caudill said.

Colorado will receive a little more than $200 million in federal funding next year to improve health care in rural areas, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Monday.

The money comes from a fund created in this year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the spending and tax bill supported by Republicans and signed by President Donald Trump. The bill set up a competition among states for a share of $50 billion to be distributed over five years to boost rural health care.

“This new funding will help us strengthen our rural health care system by supporting providers and increasing access to care for everyone in our rural communities,” Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement.

Added Kim Bimestefer, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing: “Our shared efforts will drive game-changing improvements across rural care access, innovation, affordability and health outcomes across rural Colorado for generations to come.”

The money announced Monday is just for 2026, and Colorado expects to receive additional funding through 2030.Colorado’s award for 2026 places it middle of the pack nationally, but it is also higher than what Colorado officials had been daring to hope for.

“That would be — wow,” Bimestefer said in a webinar this month, talking about the possibility of Colorado receiving $200 million from the fund. “We should all do cartwheels.”

Wide range of projects to be funded

The state plans to use the money for a wide range of projects, including bolstering the rural health care workforce, helping rural health providers with technology upgrades, tackling chronic disease and other initiatives. Information on how rural health care providers can apply for the funding will be rolled out next year.

While the money will help, it is not expected to outweigh the negative impact of Medicaid cuts that were also part of the GOP bill.

All 50 states will receive money from the program next year, HHS announced Monday. But how much money each state will receive was determined partly by a competitive process that has been half-jokingly described as the rural health “Hunger Games.”

These are the rules of the game: Half the money each year — so, $5 billion — is distributed evenly across all states with a qualifying application. Every state applied, and all those applications met minimum standards, so this means Colorado was guaranteed at least $100 million per year.

The second half of the money is distributed based on a competition among states in two areas: first, how much of a rural health crisis the state is facing and, second, how innovative the state’s proposals are to address it.

Federal authorities did not release a breakdown of how they arrived at each state’s funding amount.

Colorado’s award of $200,105,604 for the 2026 fiscal year ranks 26th nationally. Texas is set to receive the most funding, more than $280 million, followed by Alaska and California. New Jersey will receive the lowest amount, about $147 million, just below Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Concerns from hospitals

HHS notes that Colorado’s application focused on “overcoming geographic and systematic barriers to rural health care.”

But, after the application was submitted, the Colorado Hospital Association wrote a letter to state lawmakers expressing concerns about how the state plans to tackle those issues.

“Not only were Colorado’s rural hospitals’ recommendations disregarded, but proposals were advanced that they actively oppose and believe will harm the communities they serve,” Jeff Tieman, the association’s president and CEO, wrote in the letter, dated Dec. 16.

Tieman specifically cited plans to promote regional collaboratives among rural hospitals to create greater efficiency and sustainability. Tieman said that could require some rural hospitals “to discontinue key service lines and direct patients to a single designated facility within the region.”

Colorado’s application also ties into an existing initiative called the Colorado Hospital Transformation Program that seeks to pay hospitals more for providing higher-quality care. Tieman called the program flawed.

Tieman told lawmakers they must intervene “to restore transparency, uphold accountability, and ensure that rural stakeholders have a formal and substantive role in shaping how these significant public dollars are deployed.”

Other health care providers expressed more support for the state’s approach. A news release from the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing included a statement from Kay Whitley, the president and CEO of Spanish Peaks Regional Health Center in Walsenburg, alongside comments from Polis and Bimestefer.

“These funds will allow us to strengthen the care we provide to our rural community by sustaining essential services and expanding access where it’s needed most,” Whitley said. “This investment helps us continue to meet the evolving needs of our neighbors and improve health outcomes for the communities we serve.”

More than 200,000 Coloradans on Thursday moved a step closer to seeing their health insurance costs skyrocket for next year, after the U.S. Senate failed to agree on a deal to extend expiring subsidies that make the coverage more affordable.

The Senate deadlocked on two proposals — one backed by Democrats that would have extended the subsidies for three years, the other backed by Republicans that would not have extended the subsidies but instead would have created government-funded health savings accounts. Both proposals received 51 votes, short of the 60 needed to advance the plans.

Colorado’s senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, who are both Democrats, voted in favor of Democrats’ plan and against Republicans’ plan.

The deadlock means the subsidies — which go to people who buy health insurance solo, without help from an employer — will almost certainly expire at the end of the year. Folks have until Monday to buy plans that kick in Jan. 1. Open enrollment for 2026 plans continues through Jan. 15.

225,000 impacted

The expiration of the subsidies will impact roughly 225,000 people in Colorado.

The state Division of Insurance earlier this year estimated that as many as 75,000 may drop coverage due to rising costs related to the subsidy expiration, but so far enrollment on the state’s health insurance exchange is down about 5% from the same period in 2024. A record 282,000 people enrolled through the exchange last year.

The subsidies — also known as enhanced premium tax credits — were first put in place during the COVID pandemic. They work in conjunction with the original Affordable Care Act subsidies to lower what people pay in premiums, the monthly costs that people pay just to purchase an insurance plan.

Over time, as inflation pushed health care costs higher and higher, the enhanced subsidies helped keep coverage within reach.

People who don’t receive any subsidies will still see their prices for 2026 increase significantly — about 23% on average. Others who are eligible to continue receiving the original Affordable Care Act subsidies will see bigger increases. Those who were only receiving the enhanced subsidies will see the biggest increase of all because they will now have to shoulder the full price of their coverage.

The state estimates that, on average, people shopping on their own for insurance will see a 101% increase in what they pay just to buy insurance. But, because of the way the subsidies are calculated combined with high underlying costs for insurance, people in rural Colorado will see even bigger average increases.

Bennet, Hickenlooper blast vote

Both of Colorado’s U.S. senators criticized Republicans for not supporting a subsidy extension.

“What most Coloradans want, they’re trying to find a way to lower the costs, and yet this is just the opposite,” Hickenlooper said in an interview Wednesday, looking ahead to the vote. “This is going to dramatically increase the cost for a large percentage of Coloradans.”

Congress could still extend the subsidies for 2026 — in fact, it could even do so after the start of the new year. But Bennet said Republicans have not presented a united plan, and he criticized President Donald Trump and Republican leaders for not addressing the issue sooner.

“This is insane,” Bennet said Thursday on a call with reporters. “People were supposed to be making their decisions a month ago about what insurance they were going to buy. So every day that goes by, it just becomes harder and harder and harder to address.”

In remarks prior to Thursday’s vote, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, criticized Democrats for wanting to extend the subsidies without tying it to deeper reforms to the health care system.

“I hope that after today, they’ll feel like they’ve checked the messaging box and will get serious about actually doing something about the spiraling health care costs under Obamacare,” Thune said.

Hickenlooper and Bennet bristled at that idea — both said they think the current system is broken and needs to be fixed, with each saying they believe health care is a right and the United States should have a system that ensures universal coverage.

Bennet accused Trump and other Republicans of indifference to the hardship that not extending the subsidies will cause.

“They think they’re going to get away with blaming other people for the problems that he (Trump) is now creating,” Bennet said.

Hickenlooper said the subsidy expiration will also impact small businesses. The availability of the subsidies caused many small employers to forgo offering insurance and to instead allow their workers to shop for coverage on the open market, where they could often find a better deal. Roughly half of the people shopping for coverage on their own either work for a small business or are unemployed.

“It creates a level of anxiety for your workers,” Hickenlooper said of the rising insurance costs. “How your employees feel about their lives has a lot to do with your success.”

Was the shutdown worth it?

The expiring subsidies were at the center of the fight that shut down the federal government for a record 43 days in October and November.

Democrats in the Senate had refused to support a measure to keep the government funded unless it contained a provision to extend the enhanced insurance subsidies. The shutdown ended when a handful of Democrats, not including Bennet or Hickenlooper, agreed to a deal to reopen the government in conjunction with a promise for a vote on subsidy extension — the vote that failed Thursday.

Despite that meek ending, Hickenlooper said the shutdown fight was worth it, even though he also said, “I hate shutdowns, and I am distressed that it was necessary.”

He cited the increased awareness around the issue. A poll released last week found that more than 80% of people who buy health insurance on their own wanted to see the subsidies extended, and this included more than 70% of conservatives who identified as MAGA supporters.

If the subsidies do expire, 76% of people buying coverage on their own said they would blame Trump or Congressional Republicans — though 58% of Republicans in that group said they would blame Democrats.

“That kind of awareness is what moves a democracy to make good decisions that benefit everybody,” Hickenlooper said.

He also pointed to new discussions among Republicans about reforms to the health care system. This includes the idea for federally funded health savings accounts, as well as other reforms.

“None of that would have been happening if we hadn’t locked down and said we’re not going to vote for this, we’re willing to let the government shut down,” Hickenlooper said. “None of that would have ever happened.”

Editor’s note: Due to the sensitivity of this article, student sources were kept anonymous. 

Latino and white communities are intertwined in the Roaring Fork Valley, yet young immigrants, or children thereof, have felt threatened under President Donald Trump’s administration in the wake of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity across the country.

Though Mexican restaurants are local favorites and the Día De Los Muertos procession is a popular tradition in Carbondale, members of the immigrant community are facing a daunting reality. The Roaring Fork School District was 56.6% Latino during the 2024-2025 school year, according to the Colorado Department of Education’s demographic data. To be exact, 3,311 of the 5,842 students identified as Latino.

Interviews with local Latino students revealed the underlying fear surrounding ICE operations and other multi-cultural challenges that immigrants and first-generation Americans face.

“I consider myself American,” an 18 year old from Roaring Fork High School said. “But it can be hard to be prideful in that.”

She said her dual identity — a balance between her Mexican heritage and American citizenship — is beautiful, but can also be challenging. She is the first person in her family to be born in the United States and have experienced growing up here. She’s grateful to have access to so many new opportunities, yet humbled by some of her family members’ comparable disadvantages.

She not only has to guide her younger siblings, but her parents as well. She said that she has had to navigate school events, federal student aid and college applications alone.

“As the oldest, I’ve been forced to grow up faster than everyone else,” she said.

Growing up in the Valley, she often felt left out. She, along with other interviewees, described a social divide between Anglo and Latino students that can exist, and that friend groups are often composed of either or.

On a national scale, she feels like she has fallen victim to generalizations. “They [immigrants] are being categorized as criminals, but we’re not. It’s such a small group of people who are,” she stated.

She felt like Carbondale had always been safe, but under the Trump administration, she and her family have been afraid to travel, or even at times leave the house. Her parents, who have lived and worked in the Valley for over 20 years, began the process of switching bank accounts into her name due to the looming threat of deportation. She sometimes fears “the worst case scenarios.”

“What if they are not at my graduation?” she wondered.

Another student at Roaring Fork, 17, described how she often doesn’t feel like she is considered American, despite being born here. She feels like some only consider Americans as “white,” and, because that does not apply to her, she feels foreign.

She described the fear that surrounded Trump’s first election and the possibility of her parents being deported. In his second term, those fears have felt even more real as she’s watched the impact ICE has had on immigrant communities.

She’s also experienced an increase in discrimination directed towards her and other Latinos. She wondered if it was still there when she was little, but naivety blinded her. In January 2025, she visited North Carolina where a man yelled at her and her family, “Go back to your country.”

“We can’t even travel out of the fear of ICE,” she said.

Although she is a citizen, she said she felt relief when the school district enacted a policy promising that ICE would be unable to enter the schools without a warrant.

Voces Unidas de las Montañas, an organization based in Glenwood Springs that advocates for Latinos’ rights and well-being regionally, is helping pave a path through the uncertainty.

“Our larger mission is to make the Western Slope, and therefore Colorado, more equitable for all,” said Alex Sánchez, the president and CEO of Voces Unidas.

The organization has a 24/7 emergency hotline that acts as a tool to report and/or request information regarding missing family members, or to report ICE or supposed ICE activity. Voces Unidas investigates and verifies such reports.

“It’s critical for the times we live in. It’s important that we also confirm when it isn’t ICE, when it isn’t immigration control,” Sánchez said. “Because the people impacted by ICE are traumatized by any rumor, any insinuation that ICE is in their communities. We don’t want schools half empty, and we don’t want people to stop being able to go to work or use public transportation. We don’t want people to stop enjoying their lives out of fear.”

“It’s also critical, obviously, to confirm and report when there is, in fact, ICE activity, and when there is an operation in our community,” he continued. “Because people are literally being picked up off the streets and families are being separated.”

A third high school senior said that her parents, and most immigrants, come to the United States to try and create a better life for their family and themselves. She said that the same people who fly Trump flags may be kind to her face, but ultimately supported a government that wished her family had not come to the United States.

She described how scared she was before her mother had officially attained citizenship.

“I was terrified. ‘What if my mom doesn’t come home? What if my dad isn’t there?’” she said. “No child should have to experience that.”

“ICE is tearing families apart. What we need is to bring people together,” she added.

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VALLECITO — Jim Patton walked across sand, gravel and splintered limbs in his backyard in southwestern Colorado. Four weeks prior, it was a lush grassland with a beach along a creek. Then the floods came.

“It’s like ground zero,” said Patton, who lives part time in a house in La Plata County north of Vallecito Reservoir. “This is where the majority of the water came across.”

The water was the remnants of Hurricane Priscilla and tropical storm Raymond, which dropped 10 to 12 inches of rain on parts of southwestern Colorado. The storms saturated dry soils, sending water into high-country creeks from Vallecito to Pagosa Springs and South Fork and turning them into raging rivers. 

Across southwestern Colorado, the floods caused $13.8 million in damage to public bridges, riverwalks, water systems and roads. In La Plata County, the damage totaled over $7.5 million for residential and public property.

Vallecito was one of the most impacted communities in the area, officials said. First responders did 11 high-water rescues and evacuated about 390 houses — some primary dwellings, some vacation homes or cabins — from Oct. 11 to Oct. 16. 

One month after the floods, emergency responders were going house to house to assess damage or talking with residents about resources. Vallecito community members said they were frustrated, overwhelmed, still in shock. Many were battling insurance companies and bureaucratic rules, while a few, whose properties were heavily damaged, weren’t even back in their homes.

As residents rush to clear debris and prepare for the coming winter snowfall, one question still looms: What will happen in the spring when all that snow would melt and rush down the creek again — this time toward homes sitting in a drastically changed, much more shallow flood plain?

“If you talk to most people, I think they’re worried about the future. They’re worried about spring runoff,” Kelly Patton, Jim’s wife, said. “Now the level of the base of the river is so high; it’s 2 feet higher.”

The flooding was severe enough to warrant multiple emergency declarations as officials rushed to get more boots on the ground. 

La Plata County issued its first emergency declaration for a flood to call in state resources. It was also the first since the 416 fire in 2018. Colorado issued its own verbal declaration Oct. 12, allocating up to $1 million for the emergency response and recovery effort. The state increased its funding maximum to $6 million Monday.

Colorado is calling for help from the federal level — but those resources might be slow to come.

Gov. Jared Polis requested a major disaster declaration Wednesday from President Donald Trump. It would unlock funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for work like removing debris, repairing public roads and bridges, and helping communities protect against future events.

The White House will decide whether to approve the request based on the level of damage, but the timeline is unknown, and some requests take years to approve. The state is also looking at other federal aid programs, said Micki Trost, spokesperson for the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

If the state’s request is approved, the relief could be small: Those without flood insurance receive about $3,000 on average in federal assistance. 

The long road to recovery is just getting started. Trost expects state staff to be working on flood recovery for at least six months. Some projects end 10 years after the incident, she said.

“There’s going to be a lot of work that’s going to have to be done in the spring,” Trost said.

The first 24 hours in one community: Vallecito

Rain was falling in spurts Oct. 11 as Vallecito residents trickled through the Red Cross shelter at Bayfield High School to check in with emergency managers. Volunteers prepped cots and food, but only a few evacuees decided to stay the night. 

Warnings started to come in earlier that week as the National Weather Service told La Plata County staff that churning Pacific storms were heading their way.

Early in the morning Oct. 11, the Upper Pine River Fire Protection District Fire Chief Bruce Evans heard an alert go off on his phone: Creeks upstream of Vallecito were rising, quickly. 

Within hours, the fire district told the county that nearly 400 houses needed to be evacuated. 

The county’s year-round emergency team has two workers and a budget of less than $300,000.  But during an emergency, the pair calls in reinforcements. Within an hour, the county launched its incident management team. At its peak in the first week, the responders totaled over 135 people from nearly 40 local, state and federal agencies. 

The responders turned on Zoom and radios. They headed to the emergency operations center to plan for immediate needs: Where did evacuees need to go? For how long? And what can they do with their pets? 

It’s something the team trains for during the year, even doing annual mock-emergency training, Legarza said.

“We’re a lean, mean fighting machine,” Legarza said.

One homeowner, Barney Miller, said the water on his road seemed to jump 8 inches in about 10 minutes. His friend came over and had to carry Miller’s mother, who is 91, out of the house.

“Water was getting into my boots. I’m in water halfway up to my knee,” he said. “I’m now starting to realize that this is much more than I’ve seen in the river before.”

The Pattons were at their home in Arizona getting videos and photos of the floodwaters from Vallecito friends. The dirt road on either side of a concrete bridge — the only way to their vacation home in Vallecito — was eroded. The water also carved a deep rut in the main drive up to their house, which they co-maintain with neighbors. 

Chuck Freeman, who lives in Vallecito all year, was at his house, watching Grimes Creek rise and start to cut into his lawn before flooding a lower level of his neighborhood. Rick McCune, another year-round resident, was away from home when he got the notice to evacuate. He rushed home to gather some belongings — and roust his neighbor, who was sitting in bed playing Wordle and didn’t realize it was raining, he said.

Leaving, he said, “turned into a whole other nightmare.” His home was almost destroyed — it is right next to two others that were torn down — and he had not been able to return as of early November because of the damage.

His advice to future evacuees? 

“Bring more underwear,” McCune said — plus the basics, like important paperwork, medicine, devices and chargers.

The first weeks

In the first week, officials were focused on gathering information and assessing damage to try to make the area safe and secure.

Officials launched daily meetings at 10 a.m and 4 p.m., which Legarza called their “battle rhythm” as they worked 80 to 120 hours in a week. They organized guided tours for residents to check out their properties or gather important items, and by Oct. 16, they lifted evacuations. 

Other agencies started arriving in the first days after the flood: Staff arrived from the state public health and homeland security. Staffers from Mile High United Way’s 211 help line arrived to assist with coordinating volunteers, assessing community needs and connecting people with resources. Volunteers with Samaritan’s Purse, an international Christian disaster relief organization, landed and started removing debris. 

There are 15 emergency support functions for how disasters are organized, each with its own area of focus, Legarza said.

“Each agency can do a few different things that maybe the other agencies can’t do,” she said. 

Residents were staying with friends or family, in hotels or at shelters. Some decided to stay in Vallecito to try to help. Many were anxious to get back to see if their homes were damaged and how badly. Some were frustrated by changing meeting, check-in and shelter locations. 

People in the nearby town of Bayfield helped pack sandbags to build flood barriers. Churches and nonprofits dropped off firewood for houses warmed solely by wood-burning stoves.

About 20 volunteers with Samaritan’s Purse spent two days cleaning up the Patton’s property. They brought in 48 truckloads of gravel to repair the roads up to their house, the Pattons said.

“We cleaned mud out of houses. … Anything in the homes that was contaminated, we drug out of there,” said Charlie Downs, a local resident and volunteer with the nonprofit.

The beginning of recovery

About three weeks after the floods, officials and community members gathered at the Weminuche Woodfire Grill in Vallecito for the first long-term recovery meeting. Residents listened to updates from emergency managers and rotated through question-and-answer stations with different agencies. 

The most popular station featured a huge map, spread over a billiards table under the glow of a Pabst Blue Ribbon lamp, showing the post-flood landscape. Residents peppered staff from the Natural Resources Conservation Service about their plans to remove debris from Vallecito Creek — and concerns about letting nature run its course.

The floodwaters completely reshaped the creek’s channel, making it more shallow and broad — a possible risk to homes during future storms or high spring runoff. Some residents wanted the sand, rocks, trees and boulders removed to protect their properties. Others worried nothing would be done.

Vallecito Creek reached around 7,000 cubic feet per second at its peak, fell and then started to rise again as the second storm hit. Already the change in the channel was clear, Miller said.

“At 900 (cfs), it was already running back here,” he said, pointing to part of his creek-side yard. “That gives you a gauge of how much material got into the riverbed.”

The don’t-do-anything option is not on the table, said Todd Boldt, assistant state conservationist for water resources for the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The federal agency and Upper Pine River fire district will work on the river channel to reduce the threat of future flooding. 

That could mean debris removal or helping to stabilize streambanks to protect homes, life and other infrastructure. They’re still weighing their options, he said.

If anybody goes out and works in a stream they will need a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a county floodplain permit, Boldt said. Those are required so they don’t make a change to the flow of water that will impact their neighbor or somebody downstream.

Evans was especially worried about a massive logjam upstream on the Vallecito Creek, particularly because it can ice over during the winter, he said.

“If we don’t get rid of that logjam now, in the next month, while the water is low … it’s going to be much more difficult and much more risky,” he said.

Residents are battling other complicated costs, jurisdictions, insurance policies and regulations. Homes are supposed to be 50 feet from a stream’s high-water mark in La Plata County, but the floodwaters eroded banks and ate into people’s yards. 

Freeman lost 10 to 15 feet of his lawn when water surged through Grimes Creek in Valleicto.

“That was the irrigation system for the yard,” he said, pointing at pipes sticking out of the torn up bank.

One person said her insurance provider never informed her that the policy lapsed. Flood insurance is often separate from homeowners insurance. Nationally, about 4% of homeowners have flood insurance, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The neighborhood also features a small, winding maze of dirt roads, most privately owned. If residents pay county tax dollars, some wonder, why can’t the county help take care of the roads? 

“We have about just over 650 miles of county-owned roads, and we can only spend county money on county roads,” Legarza said. “That’s just the law.”

On their property in November, Jim Patton climbed onto a wall of rocks and other debris deposited by an excavator to build a flood barrier. Before October, it was a peaceful spot for him to write, listening to the river and the birds with the smell of ponderosa pines in the air and a view of the Weminuche wilderness in his view, Patton said.

But the chairs washed away and many of the beautiful trees had fallen. The area was covered by sand and boulders.

“Those trees embedded there might help turn the water one day if it gets high,” he said. “Basically the water comes in and undermines these rocks, and it’ll all give up again.”

COLORADO SPRINGS

In the 16 years John Michael Williams has lived in a split-level house in a quiet Colorado Springs neighborhood, he has, by his conservative estimate, had 15 deer born in the modest backyard off his glassed-in sunroom. 

The does, looking fat in the spring, will jump the fence, poke around, bed down and give birth to either twins or triplets. After they do, he will close the gate for 10 to 14 days, because he doesn’t want predators sneaking in and snatching the cute, speckled fawns, or the does and fawns getting out too early. And he lets them eat whatever they want. “We really don’t have any plants back there,” he says. “We gave up growing flowers because they love them so much.” 

Several other wild animals have visited his home, including a buck bigger than any he’s seen in the wild, more deer, a red fox whose presence woke him from a nap in his hammock and a bear he found licking the inside of a Starbucks Frappuccino cup he tossed in the trash before the city banned residents from leaving their cans out except for on collection day. 

But something he’s never seen in his neighborhood — and will likely never see — is a wolf. And that’s interesting given how much of the past two years he has dedicated to studying, pondering, discussing and posting about the “magnificent animals” and “ultimate predators” that are “cool to look at” and have incredible senses of vision, smell and hearing. 

In fact, Williams became so taken with wolves and Colorado’s voter-mandated wolf reintroduction program when it kicked off in December 2023 that he created a Facebook page he envisioned as a little like the Drudge Report, before it “kind of went left,” that would educate the public through articles he shared from various media outlets. 

The people who found his page were (and are) divided into thirds, he says. “One-third is, you know, ‘kill them all,’ and the other third is ‘we love wolves, they’re the greatest thing in the world.’ And in between those two, the final third or maybe bigger, are just kind of on the fence.” 

That’s encouraging because he says he doesn’t want Colorado Wolf Tracker to be “an echo chamber” for its members. Rather, his goal is for the page to be a clearinghouse of information about wolves and a place to hold Colorado Parks and Wildlife accountable as they fulfill the voter mandate to restore the animals west of the Continental Divide, and to monitor the narratives they’re creating as they go about it. 

For a while, that’s mostly what Wolf Tracker did — with ample criticism for CPW, Gov. Jared Polis, his administration and his husband, Marlon Reis, an animal-rights activist and outspoken proponent of wolf reintroduction thrown in. 

Williams has his own critics who say he foments extremism by giving hardline wolf haters a place to spread vitriol, and that he’s clearly there to agitate. But he says he “reaches out to people on all sides of the issues to give them an opportunity to give their thoughts” and that his main motivations are keeping the public abreast of wolf news and giving people in rural communities, who he sees as having been subjected to reintroduction, a voice, because he’s “seen what unchecked growth of a wolf population can do in a state,” Wisconsin, and he doesn’t want that in Colorado, where he thinks reintroduction was rushed.  

Wolf Tracker members aren’t generally as welcoming to reintroduction supporters as Williams says he is, though. That’s evident with a quick scan through the comments on most of the posts. 

In January, their rhetoric took what many felt was a dark turn into vigilanteism. And in the 11 months since, as the page has remained a place for Williams to inform, educate and hold CPW accountable, it may also have become more powerful. 

Social media equals “National Enquirer + X + Mother Jones”

Wolf Tracker’s other purpose is to be a landing page for reports of wolf sightings and depredations in Colorado, accompanied by photos and locations. You’ll often see a map with pins showing these locations. At first, it can be alarming. What if someone who supports the ethos of  “shoot, shovel, shut up” zeros in on a wolf and tries to do just that?

Don’t worry. Williams says he never pins “right where someone had found a track and said here it is. You know, latitude, longitude, that sort of thing.” And he shares the pins, he says, “because people that are livestock producers, people that are hunters, recreationists, deserve to know if there are wolves in certain areas. I think that’s something the CPW should be doing. And in the absence of that, I have, at times, posted information with general locations. But never, never the exact spot.” 

What keeps the page humming is the ongoing story of wolf reintroduction — or the saga, depending on your view. And members love a good mistake, like the one they the state made when it let voters decide to bring wolves to Colorado at all, and then again on Dec. 18, 2023, when CPW dropped the first five animals in Radium State Wildlife Area in Grand County.

Information was withheld. Key people were omitted. Members of the media watched wolves step out of their crates and lope into the aspens. But no Grand County commissioners were invited, nor any from Summit County where the second five wolves were released days later. 

More trouble followed as the wolves explored their new territory. Conway Farrell owns a ranch with sheep and cattle between where the Grand County wolves and Summit County wolves were released. And Doug Bruchez, whose ranch borders Farrell’s, said it took no time at all for some of the wolves to find both of their properties. 

When one of the Grand County wolves and one of the Summit County wolves mated, they parked themselves near Farrell’s ranch, where the male wolf, at least, started preying on livestock.

Colorado’s wolf management plan had been approved without a definition of how many sheep or cattle wolves needed to kill before they were considered “chronic depredators” and could be removed. So even though the ranchers had proof the wolves were killing their animals, the agency couldn’t kill them. Then, in April 2024, CPW Director Jeff Davis said the agency wouldn’t shoot the male wolf blamed for the kills because based on data collected from their tracking collars, the female seemed to be denning. Killing her mate, he said, would make the pups’ survival unlikely, an act contrary to the state law directing CPW to establish a viable population. 

They left the pair alone and pups were publicly confirmed in August 2024, when an outdoorsman captured video of three of the pups playing in an aspen grove.  

Wolf advocates celebrated the historic moment for wildlife conservation. But not the citizens of Wolf Tracker. The wolves kept preying on Farrell’s livestock and he had become something of a symbol of all that was wrong with reintroduction.

One of Williams’ heroes is Erin Brockovitch, an environmental and consumer activist who gained fame for her role in a major lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric over groundwater contamination in Hinkley, California. Like the people she represented, Williams says, ranchers and farmers are an underrepresented community that “at least traditionally haven’t had much of a voice. And CPW dumped wolves on them without so much as letting them know.” 

The Grand County wolves stayed near the easily accessible food source they’d found, killing 15 of Farrell’s sheep and adversely impacting at least 35 of his cattle. The state later paid him around $600,000 in compensation for the losses, but when they were happening, lots of people — ranchers and otherwise — were rattled. 

For months prior, the Middle Park Stockgrowers Association had been pressuring CPW to kill multiple wolves known to be preying on cattle in the area. As pressure mounted, and the new pups grew, CPW decided to trap the family group they’d named the Copper Creek Pack and asked for help from Bruchez and Farrell. 

Federal and state trappers posted up in Farrell’s hunting lodge during a time the property would normally have been leased to hunters, Bruchez added. The ranchers were sworn to secrecy, and they kept it. 

But Williams caught wind of the capture operation “from more than one source” and posted about it before it before CPW did, he said. He didn’t know what he’d done until much later, when someone told him he “kind of threw a monkey wrench in the operation by publishing at that time,” he added.

“Oh, well, gosh, that’s not good,” he thought. “I’ve got to be careful, being someone who tends to have a level of respect for our state agencies.” 

CPW announced completion of the operation on Aug. 27, 2024. On Sept. 4, Davis wrote in a private email to several stakeholders interested in restoration, that “despite ‘all of the experts’ and massive headwinds from the extreme end of the ranching community, CPW and our partners will be successful in restoring wolves to Colorado while avoiding and minimizing conflict with the ranching industry.”

Wolf Tracker lit up when Willams posted the letter. He says it was the kind of information members deserve.  

Moderating Wolf Tracker 

After Williams started the page on Dec. 15, 2023, Wolf Tracker “went from one person (me) to 3,000” in two weeks, he said in an email. 

By Sept. 4, 2024, the next time he could get analytics, that number had risen to 7,000. His membership is relatively low (around 13,000), he said, because when he created the page “it was important to keep it private so we didn’t have to deal with scammers, bots, spammers and fake profiles.” He thinks people come to it because they truly care about the issue, about the plight of ranchers and because “there was a real vacuum in the beginning in what was being put out by the CPW.” 

“I mean we knew the wolves were coming, and then we knew it was done covertly. And from an organizational, behavioral public health standpoint … anytime you try to introduce a change into a population or an ecosystem which involves people, information is very important.” 

Williams’ drive to hold truth to power has kept the 68-year-old doctor, writer, Navy vet and hunter busy watchdogging the Polis administration, providing commentary that makes his supporters fawn and opponents shudder, and one time, writing his own “news release” about a CPW operation to kill a chronically depredating wolf because he thought CPW’s wasn’t clear enough. 

“There’s a difference between lack of transparency and secrecy,” he said, citing times he believed CPW legitimately withheld information about the location of wolves for their safety as opposed to times they’ve “actively tried to subvert a message or keep the public in the dark … where it may serve (their) purposes, but it does not serve the purposes of the public.”

He’s a student of Enos Mills, father of Rocky Mountain National Park, who “made some very interesting observations of wolves,” including that they’ll avoid humans and livestock if they’re conditioned to do so (by members being killed). He’s a public health physician licensed in four states who says he’s concerned for Colorado ranchers because wolves are “impacting their livelihoods, stalking their children and attacking their pets.” And he’s a proponent of social media as a mode of information sharing who knows that to keep his audience engaged he has to keep it entertained. “Social media isn’t The New York Times, it isn’t The Colorado Sun. It’s sort of a mix between the National Enquirer and maybe X and throw in a pinch of the New York Post and Mother Jones,” he said.  

But about a year after he created Wolf Tracker, it took a new direction. 

“Running amok and frightening citizens” 

In November 2024, a coalition of 26 ranching, livestock and rural community organizations started pressuring CPW to pause wolf reintroduction. 

A petition they presented to the state wildlife commission contained information about Farrell losing his livestock despite trying everything CPW had told him to do to keep wolves away, including “yelling, screaming, shooting empty cracker shells,” and using Critter Gitter animal repellers, flashing fox lights, livestock protection dogs, carcass management, night patrol and range riders.  

The group said it wanted CPW to hold off on bringing any more wolves to the state until “specific wolf-livestock conflict mitigation strategies (were) fully funded, developed and implemented.”

Williams says he can sense emotional shifts on Wolf Tracker when certain things come to light. And he sensed membership spike after the repeated depredations on Farrell’s livestock. He “has his finger on the pulse” of the group “and the pulse can be fast and the body sweaty and not happy.” (“Or mellow. Breathing a sigh of relief,” he added.) 

When the petition appeared, some expressed cautious hope. But clouding it was a reminder that more wolves were coming to Colorado. “And once again, there was no information,” Williams said, even though prior to CPW bringing 15 wolves in from British Columbia, the agency did tell commissioners in Eagle, Pitkin and Garfield counties that they’d likely arrive in early January.

On Jan. 8, the state wildlife commission denied the ranchers’ petition. That could have fueled the anger starting to flare up on Wolf Tracker. But Williams was also directly responsible. He had been slowly leaking information that someone in Pitkin County had agreed to let wolves be released on their ranch. 

Then one of his “sources” figured out which plane from Colorado-based LightHawk Conservation Flying had flown to British Columbia to get wolves, and Williams shared that information on Wolf Tracker. 

The plane would land at either Aspen/Pitkin County Airport or Eagle County Regional Airport, he wrote. “Another hot tip…keep your eyes open!” 

Sure enough, on Jan. 12, the plane carrying the wolves landed at the Eagle airport, as a couple who knew it was coming awaited its arrival. After watching CPW load the wolves onto three agency trucks, they followed and videoed them driving through Glenwood Canyon. 

On Jan. 14, a second plane carrying wolves that was scheduled to land in Eagle County landed at Denver International Airport, which caused some to speculate that CPW had redirected it because of Wolf Tracker activity. But a CPW spokesperson said Davis moved the landing after learning the Eagle County airport customs desk was scheduled to be closed on the original date and the animals needed to go through customs.  

On the 14th, two men dressed in camo and carrying AR-style rifles followed hints dropped by Williams, and reported by Colorado Politics, to the ranch, claiming they were sightseers out looking for wolves.   

A screenshot of Williams’ tip about the plane had been emailed to Davis and CPW Deputy Director Reid DeWalt on Jan. 8 with a clip from an article in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail that quoted Farrell saying: “Now, we hate every wolf. My advice to everybody is start shooting and poisoning them.” 

A note included with the message said, “By itself, it isn’t much but in a certain situation it could be seen as evidence.” 

But in the end, no laws were broken – at least not on the page or at the airport. So no action was taken against Wolf Tracker members. 

Even so, Julie Marshall, an activist, longtime journalist and former communications officer for Colorado Division of Wildlife, believes Colorado leaders, including CPW and members of the wildlife commission, are “afraid of doing the right thing by standing up to bullies and bad actors.”

“We need fearless leadership to speak up for wolves and good ranchers who want to coexist instead of derail wolf reintroduction,” she said, “but instead we get silence from leadership, which implies it’s fine to run amok with weapons, trespass and frighten citizens. I think the Wolf Tracker group sounds like vigilantes and are dangerous to public safety and especially to wildlife.” 

Williams’ fans praise him, including Jerry Porter, who noted his “hard work of keeping all the misinformation and garbage out of this group!!” Lee Bruchez, Doug’s brother, highlighted the Wolf Tracker community’s “thoughtful support and discussion, particularly (by) John Michael.” 

So, is Wolf Tracker vigilante?   

In the world of vigilanteism, the most effective leaders “appeal to the disempowered. Are often anti-tax, anti-fed, anti-immigrant. And they empower people to feel like heroes by doing things like defending the Constitution,” says Betsy Gaines Quammen, a writer who covers radicalization in the West and vigilante groups like the Free Land Holders and Oath Keepers. 

None of those appear to apply to Williams, but this might: They engage people who are searching for a cause, Gaines Quammen said in an interview.

Wolf Tracker members aren’t necessarily looking for a cause, but in wolves they have one. 

And on the page they might find a group largely united in opposition of not one but two, three or four common enemies. Posts and comments show an overwhelming disdain for liberals, wolves, “wolf lovers,” Polis, Reis and the upper reaches of CPW leadership. 

Proof lies in attacks like this one, posted on the Wolf Tracker page: “I just joined this group thinking it was a wolf lovers page just to keep track of what they (people) were up to. I’m pleasantly surprised to find it just the opposite. Shoot away!” 

It’s also in more extreme ones, like this: “We are living in a State of tyranny…! I will draw this line in the sand. The day one of these pro wolf people assault a rancher over a wolf claim is the day we pick up our arms and make the Cliven Bundy standoff seem like a weekend vacation for these tyrants!”

But as Cory Gaines (no relation to Betsy), a Wolf Tracker member, physics instructor at Northeastern Junior College in Sterling and founder of the Colorado Accountability Project, wrote in an “open email” to The Colorado Sun and state Sen. Dylan Roberts after a Sun story published in February detailing the stakeout and chase from the Eagle County airport, the same vitriol found on Wolf Tracker can be found on Reis’ Facebook page. 

“Colorado Wolf Tracker was not created in a vacuum, has not grown in a vacuum,” he added. And “unmentioned in (The Sun) article are the constructive roles it takes on for many who have concerns over wolf reintroduction. It does indeed take the place of some journalism: The page functions as an information-sharing arm about wolf locations, the rather swampy connections between our governor’s office and CPW, how to advocate, among others.” 

A fair assessment. But even Williams admits the events surrounding the delivery and release of the wolves from British Columbia created “quite a bit of dustup” and he has some regrets over how they unfolded. 

That’s why he removed all mention of the ranch in Pitkin County, the planes carrying the wolves and the events surrounding the release. And he says he tries to filter out comments by a minority of members who think wolves “just need to be wiped out and killed and have a hunting season for them, and, you know, (shoot-shovel-shut up) and the whole thing like that. I think that’s kind of repugnant, and it’s illegal. That kind of content doesn’t get posted. And if it does, I will try to remove it.” 

Some critics of the page would like to see more effort. 

“I used to follow the page more regularly, but my blood pressure really can’t handle it,” said Rob Edward, president of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, who has been involved in wolf restoration for 30 years. “I have a general Facebook profile that I follow it with, because when I was myself there and actually dared to say something in opposition to something John Michael said, I got beat down from every side, including by John Michael.” 

Edwards says he knows the wolf restoration landscape backward and forward, including “most of the very deep arguments on both sides of the equation” as well as “the science against the science.” And he says what Williams is doing with Wolf Tracker “is not in the benefit of finding a way forward of actually separating hard data and facts from fiction, or helping people see the other point of view.” But, he added, “the same applies to ‘pro wolf’ groups where most of the nonsense is rancher and hunter bashing.”

The power of place 

In May, after the British Columbia wolves had been released in Eagle and Pitkin counties, a wolf from the Copper Creek Pack killed four calves belonging to three different ranchers over a two-week period in the Roaring Fork Valley. 

Interest on Wolf Tracker was high, because CPW had re-released the Copper Creek female and four of her five pups near the ranch the men had trespassed on (the male had died on arrival at the animal sanctuary and one pup was left behind. CPW shot it over the summer after it preyed on livestock in Rio Blanco County). By then, CPW had also adopted a definition of chronic depredation, and on May 28, the agency located and shot the depredating wolf. But the rest of the remaining Copper Creek wolves, plus new pups, remained in place, and a couple had zeroed in on calves on two ranches.  

In July, Williams invited a surprise guest onto Wolf Tracker for an informal interview. It was Gary Skiba, a career biologist and CPW commission appointee who publicly resigned when he realized the Senate wouldn’t approve him “in the face of opposition from hunting, outfitting and livestock producer groups.” Unlike Edward, he had a more congenial experience with Williams despite his pro-wolf stance. 

Williams asked Skiba a couple of hot-button questions sure to get a rise out of the Wolf Trackers. They did, but Skiba said Williams “very graciously” thanked him for taking the time to participate, and “admonished one poster who wrote a rather nasty message about me.” His “summary” of Williams, he told The Sun, is that “I don’t think his views on wolves are based solidly on facts in all cases, and we therefore disagree. That said, he was thoughtful and fair-handed towards me.”

Josh Wamboldt, a Western Slope outfitter and frequent contributor, says he believes Williams “strives to keep balance on the page” that serves as “an informational piece” allowing people “to form their own opinion on issues, because you can get both sides of the argument.” 

Wamboldt’s parents were the people staked out at the Eagle County airport, and he said the point of tracking the plane, “was to hopefully get a possible release sight and notify the people in those areas that wolves were just dropped.”

CPW’s lack of transparency has made it so “ranchers can’t even prepare before wolves are dumped at secret locations,” Wamboldt said. “I’ve heard tons of pro-wolf people state that for proper coexistence, it takes a proactive response, not reactive. This entire introduction has been reactive, ranchers don’t get notified until wolves are already knocking on the back door, they can’t get non-lethal measures until they have a depredation, and even then CPW is so short supplied they typically only give you enough to get by.” 

But Mark Harvey, a rancher in Old Snowmass, believes “with a little bit more strategy, a little bit more energy,” Colorado could create a world where wolves, ranchers and livestock could coexist. “It’s been a rough start here in Colorado, but from what I understand, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho went through a similar process at the beginning. Things are much better in those states when it comes to managing livestock.” And solutions are where he thinks Williams should place his focus. 

Howling into the future 

At the moment, the future of Colorado’s wolf reintroduction is up in the air, however, now that 10 reintroduced wolves have died, including a collared female from British Columbia on Oct. 30 in southwestern Colorado, far from where she was released in January.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also banned CPW from getting more wolves from British Columbia, saying the agency violated rules in its special Endangered Species Act permit regarding international sourcing.

They likewise banned the agency from getting wolves from Alaska, saying the 10(j) rule, that classified Colorado’s wolves as an experimental population and allows management strategies including lethal removal, also stipulates wolves must come from the “delisted Northern Rockies population area” of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, the eastern third of Oregon, the eastern third of Washington and north-central Utah.

And on Nov. 5, the Wildlife Service announced it no longer intends to issue a nationwide recovery plan for gray wolves, which the Center for Biological Diversity says is unlawful, because courts have repeatedly made it clear gray wolves have not recovered in places like the southern Rocky Mountains and West Coast. 

The reaction of Wolf Tracker members to the announcement on Friday of the latest wolf death says more about the page than any interviewer or Williams could. 

It was immediate and predictable.

“Hallelujah.” 

“Great news for a Friday.” 

“Colorado’s pathetic wolf lovers!!” 

“Unfortunately, they are reproducing faster than they’re dying off.” 

By mid-morning, Williams said he’d already deleted some “nasty comments” and took “no joy in reading that some people are happy about the death of this wolf.” But he had some words about the restoration.

“I understand why the introduction efforts must go forward, because of the voters’ approval of Prop. 114,” he wrote in a text. “But I would predict that we will see more wolf deaths and more polarization between all of the stakeholders. I’ve never enjoyed seeing animals caged in zoos, especially bears, big cats and mammals from Africa. The introduction of wolves, whether it be to Yellowstone or Colorado, makes me feel similarly — they have been removed from their natural habitat and dropped into a ‘zoo without walls’ … If there ever was a better time for a pause to reset and get both sides talking to find a better way, I can’t think of one.”

Two federal courts on Friday ordered the Trump administration to continue paying food stamp benefits during the government shut down. But even if the administration complies, it could be weeks before Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cards are replenished for the 600,000 Coloradans who receive the aid, Gov. Jared Polis said.

That’s why the state is moving forward with a $10 million allocation for local food banks, said Polis. 

But no matter what happens, rural counties will suffer more than urban ones when it comes to keeping food in people’s bellies, according to representatives from food support systems in Eagle, Pitkin and Garfield counties who gathered Wednesday to discuss how to stretch resources amid the continued government shutdown. 

The West Mountain Regional Health Alliance in Glenwood Springs says its members serve 6,000 residents across the tri-county region with SNAP benefits. 

Their recipients include 4,000 people in Garfield County with benefits totaling $750,000 to $800,000 per month, 1,400 in Eagle County with $280,000 in benefits per month and around 300 in Pitkin County to whom $66,715 in benefits were issued in the month of September. 

The emergency food assistance funding passed Thursday will go out in $3.3 million increments over six weeks from the state’s General Fund to the food bank network Feeding Colorado through the Community Food Assistance Grant Program. But some analysts say the $10 million will fall far short of making up for the $120 million per month the state currently receives from the federal government. 

It’s intended to help the low-income Coloradans who typically receive help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, sometimes called food stamps, which sends money from the federal government into debit-card accounts each month that recipients can use to purchase food at grocery stores and farmers markets. 

The average household getting SNAP benefits receives $367 per month, according to Minna Castillo, deputy executive director of community partnerships at the Department of Human Services. In addition to the funding, Polis has been urging Coloradans to donate money to food banks so they can buy more food to support those losing SNAP benefits and reminded parents to have their children eat free breakfast and lunch at school.

Cristina Gair, executive director of the West Mountain Health Alliance, said the $10 million in emergency funds will help with the loss of SNAP benefits in the tri-country region, as it is going to Food Bank of the Rockies  to purchase bulk quantities of food at significantly reduced rates for distribution across the state during November.  

But Yulisa Almaraz, sustainability coordinator for the Eagle Valley Community Foundation, which addresses food insecurity for communities of color, says organizations like hers responding to food insecurity in urban areas have built-in advantages that rural areas don’t and therefore the allocations won’t affect every place equally. 

“Urban areas often have multiple grocery stores, public transit options and larger food pantry networks that can help absorb a sudden increase in need,” she said. “In contrast, Eagle County faces unique challenges like long distances to grocery stores, limited pantry capacity, fewer retailers and seasonal employment — which means the loss of SNAP would have a deeper and longer-lasting impact on both households and our local economy.” 

Families and individuals in these areas “need to identify and make sure they can access food pantry locations,” Gair said, and “for those with transportation challenges or who don’t live near a bus stop, that adds another layer to navigate to ensure food is in the fridge and on the table.”

Other partners gathered Wednesday included The Aspen Community Foundation, which serves the Roaring Fork and Colorado River Valleys, Snowmass-based food rescue provider Harvest for Hunger, LIFT-UP, which serves communities along the Interstate 70 corridor as well as in Routt County, and Valley Meals and More, which delivers prepared, packaged food to adults 75 and older in the Roaring Fork Valley region. 

West Mountain Regional Health Alliance is a non-direct service organization and the backbone of the Mountain Coalition for Food and Nutrition, which is “able to quickly pull together the coalition food response partners to ensure the SNAP cuts crisis is elevated and understood,” Gair said. 

Several partners reported seeing upticks in use of food pantries they serve already, with Almaraz saying the Eagle Valley Community Foundation has seen a 20% increase at some of their mobile pantry locations year over year, and that they‘re at a 10-year high in terms of need “without any of these things that we’re talking about today.”

Elyse Hottel, interim director of Lift-Up, estimated only 25% of customers using their pantries presently are registered SNAP recipients, so they could see another 75% of the 4,500 people they serve “coming to our pantries in need of extra assistance.” 

And Grey Warr, board of directors executive director for Harvest for Hunger, said because Pitkin County is such a large employer throughout the Roaring Fork Valley and Garfield County, they are expecting a “significant increase” in SNAP recipients from all three counties using their services in Pitkin County. 

Other trickle-down impacts will include a shift in the use of local food pantries, Almaraz said, with organizations like The Community Market, Salvation Army, and churches potentially becoming the primary grocery source for families — not just a supplemental resource — which “would place immense strain on their operations, inventory and staffing capacity.” 

But the organizations that met were also there to talk about contingency plans, and Pitkin County has stepped up in a big way. 

On Thursday, the board of county commissioners announced it approved funding for grocery gift cards and additional support for Harvest for Hunger. Gift card amounts will be based on each household’s typical monthly SNAP benefit level, and cards will be distributed through the Pitkin County Department of Human Services as soon as Nov. 5.  

Eagle County’s government, school district, local nonprofits and individuals are also coming together to try to cover some of the deficit.

And Garfield County is encouraging its SNAP recipients to take advantage of congregate meals and other local resources. 

The West Mountain Regional Health Alliance partners are also “continuing our day jobs in regards to processing SNAP applications and taking applications,” Hottel said. “So once the federal budget is passed, those benefits will go back to the date of application, and benefits will go back to date of application.” 

The partners are also encouraging community members in each of their counties to answer the call for three f’s “reiterated over and over again,” Hottel said.

“Funds,” for things like administration, drivers, and food distribution;  “friends,” or volunteers, to pack meals, deliver them and organize food drives; and “food,” the most basic and urgent need. 

---

As Chuck Horning navigated his first year as owner of the Telluride Ski and Golf resort back in 2005, the Southern California businessman inked a community statement he called “A 20-year Vision for Telluride: Sustainability.”  

In that statement, he promised economic development for the communities of Telluride and Mountain Village alongside protection of cultural and natural resources. Other resorts struggle with “overbuilding, commercialization and traffic congestion or lack economic vitality,” wrote Horning, who is now in his 80s.  

“We all want Telluride to be different,” he said of the remote southwest Colorado community tucked in a dead-end box canyon. “We believe with a balanced, long-term approach, economic prosperity will occur and the community and its natural resources will be preserved while minimizing the problems associated with Aspen, Vail and Steamboat.”

Telluride is indeed a stand-out in the resort industry. Not only for its unrivaled skiing and vistas, its historic downtown and passionate community, but, recently, the community’s contentious relationship with Horning. Ski town locals have long harbored a certain level of angst over the owners of their local resorts. But rarely has that angst turned into an open revolt like what is happening in Telluride right now. 

There’s been a high profile scrap over Horning’s unwillingness to support a 25-year concert series. A ballot measure next week could tax lift tickets to pay for the free public gondola connecting Telluride and Mountain Village. And now Mountain Village wants to more than triple the cost of water for snowmaking.

Town officials say a rate hike is overdue with no connection to the lift tax and certainly not part of a concerted effort to run Horning out of town after 21 years of troubled ownership. Horning disagrees, saying a water hike might delay resort opening dates to late December. He sees a growing animosity from municipal leaders as part of a “litany of illegal, unconstitutional and grossly inequitable burdens and obstacles on the ski company.”

Local angst has boiled over

The slow burn of irked local residents has led to the creation of a website called ChuckChuck.ski, detailing Horning’s fractious 21-year ownership of the local resort and what it describes as “a record of business malfeasance and poor stewardship that would embarrass most and emboldens only the truly narcissistic.” 

Horning has fired several of the industry’s top resort executives hired to run the ski area — like Dave Riley and Bill Jensen — leaving the 2,000-acre ski area uncaptained for long stretches. Last year he even fired his son, Chad Horning.  

The local outrage has pushed councils in Telluride and Mountain Village to ask voters Nov. 5 to impose a lift tax to force Horning’s customers to help pay for the free gondola between the two towns, the only municipal transportation network in the country that involves aerial cable cars. The Mountain Village council also tried to condemn land owned by Horning after he balked at permission for a 25-year-old summer concert series on the parcel that connects the ski slope with pedestrian village. 

And the latest volley in what appears to be a decentralized effort to drive Horning out is a proposal to spike water fees the town of Mountain Village charges Horning for snowmaking. 

In response to the no-longer-simmering insurrection, Horning has canceled discount merchant ski passes available to local businesses and town employees. He’s nixed senior passes. He’s also cut staff who handled group sales. 

“This summer we were saying at least he will turn on lifts and make snow. And now he says he’s not even going to make snow,” said Dirk de Pagter, a Telluride real estate investor and one of a handful of locals willing to talk on record while blasting Horning. Back in 2004, de Pagter was a fan of Horning, who had purchased a portion of the resort in 2003 and the rest of the ski area and surrounding property around it a year later from Hideo “Joe” Morita.

“In the beginning his noncorporate image was something we all liked. He was different and we hoped he would be good for us. That proved erroneous,” de Pagter said. 

A 350% increase in water rates, the first adjustment since 1998

The town provided the ski area with 30.52 million gallons of water for snowmaking in 2025, up from 28.29 million gallons in 2024. 

From 2020 to 2024 snowmaking accounted for 45% of the annual demand from the town’s wells. The town charges $3.53 per 1,000 gallons from snowmaking ponds and $3.84 per 1,000 gallons from town hydrants. The recent evaluation — by Glenwood Springs-based water engineering firm SGM — concluded those charges do not cover the cost of supplying water to the ski area. The water-rate review estimated the town was losing $988,000 a year in depreciation and wear and tear on 39-year-old town assets such as a water tank, pump, wells, treatment facility and delivery lines. 

The SGM review said it would cost $12 million to replace the 2 million-gallon tank and pump house, $350,000 for new wells, $2 million for the water treatment facility and nearly $9 million for delivery lines. 

The study noted that the city of Steamboat Springs sometimes provides water to a local ski area at a cost of $8.02 for every 1,000 gallons. The study did not say if it was the city-owned Howelsen Hill or Steamboat Ski Resort, owned by Alterra Mountain Company.

The town of Mountain Village report suggested that depreciation costs, maintenance costs and snowmaking costs could warrant a 350% spike in water costs, with charges of $12.91 per 1,000 gallons of pond water and $14.03 per 1,000 gallons from hydrants. The report suggests the town could phase in those costs with three years of 59% increases followed by annual 3% increases for several years. The study also suggested the town could charge a flat fee of $988,000 a year to cover depreciation of water infrastructure assets with a reduced rate for water usage. 

Horning, through his attorney, warned council members to “carefully consider a broader perspective” of the economic and environmental benefits of snowmaking that ripple across the region before spiking the cost of water. Being able to open by Thanksgiving drives early-season traffic, helps small business owners retain employees and generates tax revenue, reads a letter to the council from the resort’s lawyer, Martha Whitmore.

Whitmore said snowmaking serves as a strategy for water storage and helps fortify mountain landscapes against a warming climate. 

“Discouraging snowmaking is short-sighted and places the Town of Mountain Village at more risk for drought impacts, and the attendant environmental effects,” Whitmore wrote in an Oct. 13 letter to the town council, noting the common industry refrain that creating snow is a form water storage that helps dampen soil to withstand long, dry summers. 

Whitmore called the water study “flawed,” saying the town “can’t depreciate costs it did not incur” and noted that TSG’s high water payments in the early ski season have supported the town’s water infrastructure.

Whitmore also noted the 1998 agreement that granted the ski company’s waters right to the town. Those water rights, in a deal forged by the ski area’s previous owners Ron Allred and Jim Wells, were “an asset of immeasurable value,” the lawyer wrote. That agreement required the town to deliver snowmaking water at the lowest rate it charges any other water user or the actual cost of the water delivery. The town has not adjusted snowmaking water rates since that 1998 agreement. 

Echoing Horning’s threat to delay the resort’s opening, Whitmore said the council should weigh “the ramifications on businesses, visitors and residents.” A lack of snowmaking could also create less dependable conditions throughout the season, which could reduce tax revenues for Telluride and Mountain Village. And if snowmaking costs increase, so will the cost of $250 lift tickets and $2,100 season passes, Whitmore said. 

In an August letter to Mountain Village Town Manager Paul Wisor, Whitmore acknowledged there has not been an increase in water costs since 1998 and said the company “is willing to meet and discuss a rate that complies with the 1998 agreement.”

The timing of the water rate increase has nothing to do with the condemnation consideration or the lift tax, Wisor said. The council adopted a water rate increase for residents two years ago and it was “logical and necessary for us to go through that work for snowmaking rates,” Wisor said. 

The council and ski area representatives will meet this week to discuss the price increase.

“I think we have some palatable ideas that would be helpful for everybody and we hope those are received in the spirit of collaboration in which they are conveyed,” Wisor said. “The community can no longer be subsidizing the snowmaking operations of the company.”

Horning, who rarely responds to media requests for comment, in October sent a letter to Telluride residents — published in the Oct. 24 Telluride Daily Planet —  called the proposed 5% lift tax focusing on ski company guests “only one of many hostile and indefensible actions” by the Mountain Village town council targeting his resort company. He said town officials have leveled “slanderous accusations” against him that were “obviously intended to gratuitously denigrate me personally.” 

“A sane local government in an extraordinarily challenging and difficult remote resort area would seek to work with the ski company, the region’s economic engine,” Horning wrote in his letter. “Instead, for years now, the town has imposed a litany of illegal, unconstitutional and grossly inequitable burdens and obstacles on the ski company.”

Horning, in his letter, called the tax “inappropriate, untimely and unfair.” 

“These matters need to be studied and discussed so their ramifications are clearly understood, not rammed through in campaigns of disparagement, misinformation and misdirection,” the 81-year-old Horning said. “There’s ample time for us to get this right.”

What is a river?

It depends on your point of view. Sun reporters have fanned out along the Arkansas River, from the headwaters near Leadville to the border with Kansas, to learn what the river means to people in the places it runs through.

▶ Follow along for more from this series

Colorado’s rivers are bouncing with boats. Anglers are casting everywhere. 

“We are getting into places that have never been paddled before and the increase in demand since COVID is a huge explosion of people getting in the outdoors learning more about our state,” said Nik White, who teaches whitewater paddling skills on the Arkansas River, Clear Creek and the South Platte with nearly a third of his classes focused on packrafting, up from zero five years ago.

And White — who has been teaching paddling for 15 years and owns a company called Whitewater Workshop — has seen a recent uptick in angry landowners. He’s got stories of property owners waving guns, chasing boaters and threatening paddlers as they walk around dangerous rapids. 

“Landowners are getting more aggressive. It’s having a chilling effect that makes it difficult to go paddling in some areas,” White said. 

Conflicts between river uses and property owners date back decades in Colorado, a state that has the murkiest access laws in the country. Courts have handed down rulings in contentious lawsuits involving access on the Arkansas River and Colorado River. Attorneys general have written opinions. Lawmakers have tried twice to clear the waters around floating and wading through private lands. And now, there’s even a split in a newly formed stream access coalition with paddling groups leaving a not-quite-unified effort to craft legislation that would open all of Colorado waterways to the public. 

For years, those conflicts have been settled on a case-by-case basis, with landowners, boaters and anglers sitting at a table and finding some sort of agreement. 

But those negotiations, “often leave the recreator powerless,” said Hattie Johnson with American Whitewater, which a week ago joined other paddling groups in breaking from the new Colorado Stream Access Coalition to forge their own legislation. 

Outfitters are stressed that a landowner could shut down their business. Recreation industry advocates fret river conflicts could paint their carefully manicured, good-times portrait of Colorado in an unflattering light. Property owners point to a 1979 Supreme Court decision and a 1983 Colorado attorney general memo and say passing paddlers are trespassing if they touch a rock in the riverbed.  

“At some point, it’s all going to come to a head,” said Jenifer Freeman, a lobbyist working with paddling groups on possible legislation that would allow river users to pass through private property without trespassing, even if they touch a rock. “So it’s better to try to find a joint solution.”

The camps are forming for a renewed fight. The new Colorado Stream Access Coalition is courting lawmakers for stream access legislation that will open public access through private property. That coalition is splintering though as river users argue over whether legislation should allow floating or wading through private property. Landowners are unifying, arguing that legislation allowing the public to pass through private land will be akin to the government seizing property and they are promising lawsuits “that will bankrupt that state,” said a landowner lawyer. 

The legislation is not yet written. A new movie, “Common Waters,” is landing in Colorado theaters next month, detailing the prickly access challenges in the state’s waterways. A new study is urging advocates and lawmakers to back away from a legislative fix, arguing that the spot-fire negotiations in the last two decades is the best approach to settling river conflicts. 

“We are in this situation where we are recognizing that outdoor recreation is losing. I think that’s bad for our image and it’s bad for our economy,” Freeman said. “These are amazing places, and I get wanting to own your own little piece of it, but I don’t see how it’s in the public interest to allow private property owners to gobble it all up so no one gets to use it.”

A third try for legislation

This would mark at least the third time Colorado lawmakers have considered a law to allow boaters to pass through private property. The Colorado Stream Safety Act was scripted in 1996 to allow kayakers safe passage through private property — allowing them to scout or portage obstacles like waterfalls, barbed wire fences and downed trees. The legislation turned out to be one of the most contentious issues of the 1996 session. It passed the Colorado House but stalled in the state Senate.

The failed legislation prodded the creation of the River Surface Recreation Forum, which formed to study river access conflicts and find solutions. Boating advocates created a national database of river conflicts that showed conflicts on Colorado rivers accounted for nearly 40% of the 82 nationwide issues over 18 months from 1998 to 2000. Most of those were along the South Platte, but the list included incidents on the Taylor, the Elk, Lake Fork of the Gunnison, the Yampa, the Colorado River near Granby, the Dolores, the Roaring Fork, the Poudre, the Eagle, the Arkansas, Clear Creek, Bear Creek, South Boulder Creek and the North St. Vrain. 

The 1996 legislation would have allowed paddlers to scout or portage river obstacles, eliminated the liability of landowners should anyone be hurt paddling through their property and prevented paddlers from fishing, hunting, camping, picnicking or loitering on private property. 

“Access problems in Colorado appear worse in number and severity despite the efforts of your committee and it only seems to be a matter of time before a landowner-boater conflict results in personal injury (or) the boater is injured by running a drop which the boater would have portaged had there been no penalty for doing so,” reads a memo from Ken Ransford, an attorney from the Roaring Fork Valley who worked as American Whitewater’s access director in the 1990s and wrote a “kayaker perceptive” memo in January 2001 for the newly formed River Surface Recreation Forum. 

That forum was unable to fully settle access disputes, so Colorado lawmakers in 2010 — spurred by renewed splashing over access on the Taylor River — again considered a law that would allow rafters to pass through private land so long as they made only “incidental contact” with the riverbed.

House Bill 1188, sponsored by a Gunnison lawmaker and called the Commercial Rafting Viability Act, protected the right of commercial rafting companies to float through private land. The bill passed the state House but stalled in the Senate. 

In 2011, then-Gov. Bill Ritter formed the River Access Dispute Resolution Task Force to help resolve access conflicts on Colorado rivers and streams. That committee, which has not met since 2015, laid out guidelines for how access issues could be solved without courts or legislation. The committee was not tasked with solving the policy quagmire over access, but created “a framework for landowners and boaters to efficiently and fairly resolve disputes over the use of rivers as they arise.”

The Taylor River hotspot

The 2010 legislation, like the 1996 proposal, followed an eruption of conflicts. In 2010 it was around the Taylor River, where developers were peddling high-dollar land with the promise of private river access. Following the death of the bill, the Taylor River flare-up was doused after developers, landowners and outfitters agreed on some limited commercial access on several miles of river below Taylor Park Reservoir. 

Owners along an upper stretch of the Taylor River have closed access to about 4 miles of the river. They’ve stretched barbed wire over the river with a sign that says “no boating” and the reach below the sign “is not passable by any watercraft.” The sign cites the 1979 Colorado Supreme Court case People v. Emmert.

Jason Hopfer, an attorney representing several owners along the Taylor River, said his clients invested in riparian habitat improvements on the river assuming their work was protected by laws that prevent float-in or wade-in access. Some of those riverside parcels sell for $2.5 million with the guarantee of private river access.

Any effort to change the law and allow public access to this private property would not only be an unconstitutional taking, Hopfer said, but could harm stream improvements paid for by landowners. 

Those investments and improvements along — and in — the Taylor River “were made in reliance on the long-settled Colorado law that protects riparian lands against trespass,” reads a memo Hopfer wrote – and shared with The Colorado Sun – for his clients who will oppose legislation that could open their properties to the public. 

“Any effort to change the law and allow public access to this private property would not only be an unconstitutional taking, but would also bring harm to the existing stream improvements and habitat benefits that extend to the Taylor River … and would disincentivize further investments towards such stewardship,” reads Hopfer’s memo.

Why are the waters so turbid?

“Lack of clarity.” “Unclear.” “Murky.” Those are three ways river users describe Colorado’s river access laws. All of that stems from a 1979 Colorado Supreme Court decision — People v. Emmert — which held that while water may be public, the public did not have the right to float on “non-navigable” water rolling through private property. That decision said that anyone who owned dirt owned everything above it. 

(Sidenote: That position is embraced by landowners seeking to block hikers from stepping over fencing separating private property from public lands arrayed like a checkerboard. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver this year ruled that landowners could not block hunters or hikers from stepping from one corner of public land to another even if they were passing through the air above privately owned land. The U.S. Supreme Court recently refused to hear a wealthy rancher’s appeal of that ruling.)

A formal legal opinion offered by the Colorado attorney general in 1983 contended that rafters and kayakers could float through private property but if they touch a rock, the bank or the river bed, they were committing criminal trespass.

So for more than 40 years, conflicts over river access have been negotiated between landowners and river users. That strategy has largely worked to settle issues on the Arkansas, the Lake Fork of the Gunnison, the Taylor, the north and south forks of the South Platte and the North Fork of the Poudre as landowners fought to block rafters and kayakers from passing through water bisecting their property. 

Navigability and the right to wade

In 2018, Colorado Springs angler Roger Hill was wading through the Arkansas River near Texas Creek when a landowner started hurling rocks. That event triggered the latest legal fight to bring some level of clarity to access.

The octogenarian’s 2018 lawsuit against the landowner argued that if a stretch of water used for commerce when Colorado became a state in 1876 — like, say, floating beaver pelts or railroad ties — then the Emmert decision did not matter because the river was navigable by federal definition. That definition, settled in the late 1800s by the U.S. Supreme Court says that a river is navigable if it was used for commerce and all navigable rivers are public property. 

Hill lost in district court. The Colorado Court of Appeals revived his case in 2022 and ultimately his case landed at the Colorado Supreme Court, which ruled in June 2023 that Hill actually had no standing to argue for what amounts to an overhaul of private property laws in Colorado.

Underlying the right to wade and right to float arguments are private property rights. If riverbeds were suddenly shifted from private ownership to public land, landowners could credibly argue the federal government was seizing their land and they are entitled to compensation in “takings” claims. 

Attorney General Phil Weiser in 2022 argued against dabbling with property rights in stream access issues. In a brief filed with the Colorado Supreme Court in the Hill case, Weiser said a court ruling that declared a river navigable and changed private land beneath a river to public land “could have monumental consequences for water rights in Colorado and could lead to significant litigation challenging existing property rights.”

Maintaining the status quo

The free-market research group Common Sense Institute in Greenwood Village last month issued a report on the right to float through private property arguing that the case-by-case approach to resolving access issues is working and trying to establish a one-size-fits-all solution through legislation or ballot initiatives “may not be the best approach.”

The report, co-authored by the one-time director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources Greg Walcher, said the occasional flare-up of access issues did not appear to be hindering the explosive growth in river recreation in Colorado. The report suggested that the current use of conflict resolution — typically agreements between rafting outfitters, paddlers and landowners that address user numbers — “is likely the best resolution for landowners and recreationists in the state.”

The Common Sense Institute report said upsetting 150 years of water law and property rights in Colorado with a decision that Colorado’s river and streams were navigable at statehood “would be devastating for Colorado” that could spur “thousands” of lawsuits and put the state on the hook for “incalculable damages” to reimburse landowners. 

The report argued that using legislation to allow “incidental contact” would challenge police tasked with interpreting trespass on rivers that have constantly changing flows. For example, if legislation allows a paddler to portage a dangerous obstacle to protect human safety, how can police differentiate between a necessary portage in high flows and trespass at lower flows when a feature is not dangerous? 

“While it would generally be preferable to resolve the issue definitively and with absolute clarity, Colorado finds itself in a situation where the current status is preferable to any legislative solution,” reads the Common Sense Institute report. “Somewhat paradoxically, a statute, initiative or referendum designed to provide clarity could result in far more ambiguity than the current situation.”

Right to float

The legislation proposed by paddling groups will not touch property rights, navigability or the right to wade, Freeman said. 

The legislation will mirror shifts in recent decades that have leaned toward access in other Western states. The New Mexico Supreme Court in 2023 upheld public access on rivers rolling through private property. The Utah Supreme Court in 2019 upheld a 2010 access law that allows floating through private property, but the court agreed that landowners could limit recreational traffic on some rivers. California and Montana allow access up to the high-water mark. Oregon owns the beds of rivers and allows public access. Idaho says any stream that can be floated is open to the public. Wyoming allows public access but does not allow river users to touch privately owned riverbeds.

In 2023, several recreational river groups filed a friend of the court brief in the Colorado Supreme Court case of angler Hill. American Whitewater, the Colorado River Outfitters Association and Backcountry Hunters and Anglers argued the status quo was “much closer to the Wild West form of dispute resolution than to civil and orderly proceedings one might expect in modern-day Colorado.”

The groups urged the state Supreme Court to give Hill his day in court and find resolution of decades of ambiguity around river access. 

American Whitewater, the American Canoe Association and Colorado Whitewater recently broke from the Colorado Stream Access Coalition as the group argued over the timing and extent of possible legislation. Some members of the group are pushing for a law that would allow anglers to walk through rivers and streams, as they are allowed to do in places like Montana.

American Whitewater, after several months of outreach, “heard in no uncertain terms that approaching stream access for any and all public uses — including walking and wading on the bed of a navigable river — was a nonstarter for the legislature,” said Johnson, American Whitewater’s stewardship director for the Southern Rockies. 

“But we think there is a way forward for floating,” she said. 

For the first 20 years of this century, boating advocates have largely supported the spot-fire approach, working with riverside landowners to negotiate limited access for passing paddlers. In the last decade or so, the number of conflicts have declined and the occasional flare-up usually was quickly and quietly doused. Boaters said repeatedly that the negotiation strategy prevented the creation of winners and losers in an argument that would be costly for losers.

But river use has soared since the pandemic. Other states have hammered out access regulations that support recreational access, leaving Colorado an outlier in the West. The time is right for “broad conversations that try not to create a winner and loser,” Johnson said. 

Allowing contact with the riverbed, protecting landowners

The legislation proposed by paddling groups for the coming year would mirror the 2010 bill that allowed “incidental contact” and would permit paddlers to get out and scout or portage dangerous obstacles — like waterfalls, diversion dams, low bridges or barbed-wire fences. It would prevent access on irrigation ditches. It would also offer landowners liability protection from lawsuits should a paddler be injured on their property.

That liability protection has momentum after a diverse group of recreation advocates last year pushed legislation that amended the Colorado Recreational Use Statute — or CRUS — to better protect mountain landowners from lawsuits. The 50-member Fix CRUS Coalition supported a law that limited lawsuits if landowners erected signs on privately owned 14ers warning of hazards on the property. Like the stream access proposal, it was the third time lawmakers tried to amend the 50-year-old law.  

“We would want that same protection for riparian owners. Our hope is that we can clarify this issue for people on all sides,” said Johnson, noting that no bill has been drafted and precise wording is still being considered. 

New legislation won’t touch property rights. It won’t wade into the prickly arguments around whether a stretch of river could be federally defined as navigable, a standard that would essentially open riverbeds that were used for commerce at statehood to all forms of public access.   

One idea that is floating about is to create a fund that would provide resources for landowners who need to contain roaming livestock with paddler-friendly barriers. That fund also could support education and signage for boaters to not be jerks when passing by private property.

Freeman, the lobbyist, said the floating access group has commitment from two senior Democrats willing to sponsor right-to-float legislation next year. 

A rift within the stream access coalition

Mark Squillace is a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado Law School who represented Hill in his push to prove the Arkansas River was navigable at statehood in 1876 and therefore public property. Squillace is not happy with a right-to-float bill. 

He wants a “recreational access” bill that would give people the right to wade or float through any Colorado waterway that is open for recreational use. His proposal mirrors access laws in New Mexico, Idaho and Montana. 

His bill suggestion stops short of deeming rivers navigable at statehood, which is determined for sections of rivers and he admits would require lengthy and contentious legal and administrative review.  

He worries that lawmakers will only want to take up the controversial stream access issue once. So a right-to-float bill could end chances for a broader bill that would allow wading through private property like other states, he said. This conflict is why boaters left the stream access coalition they originally helped create. It is unclear where the stream access coalition stands without those groups. 

Like Johnson, Squillace does not agree that stream access legislation will spur a deluge of lawsuits. That did not happen when other states like New Mexico and Montana opened riverbeds to public access. 

Read the Colorado Constitution, Squillace said. It says “the water of every natural stream” is public property “and dedicated to the use of the people of the state.”

“If it is dedicated to the use of people, that is the right to recreate not just in a boat,” Squillace said. “Our argument is the Colorado Constitution promotes recreational access to all waterways in the state.”

Rapids ahead 

A group of landowners and property rights advocates have formed the Colorado Water Conservation Alliance to block any legislation that might allow boaters or anglers to pass through rivers bisecting private land. 

“Should someone’s hobby be more important than someone’s home?” asks an Oct. 4 post on the group’s Facebook page that warned of a coming “radical proposal” that “could be one of the largest government takings of private property in U.S. history.” 

The group’s opposition to potential right-to-float legislation is more nuanced. There are many landowners who point to the Emmert decision and say they own the land and everything above it. They see floating as trespassing.

And should a bill pass that would put the right to float into state law, those landowners would likely push river access into court to prove their point, said Trey Rogers, an attorney who represents the Colorado Water Conservation Alliance. 

“If there is a bill, there are going to be people who feel they have no choice but to litigate this issue,” said Rogers, an angler and boater who owns property on the Arkansas River above Browns Canyon. “Do we really want this issue to come to a head? What is wrong with the status quo? We ought to live with it as it is. And the way to get there is no bill.”

Back in 1996 and 2010, lawmakers expressed surprise at the vehement opposition and ardent support for stream access legislation. That same passion will surely roil anew with an updated proposal. 

Johnson said she’s not sure boating advocates are ready for a deflating fight at the Capitol.

In the past, stream access conflicts and legislation have immediately divided people into opposing camps, which has prevented open dialogue or a search for common ground, Johnson said. 

“We are focusing on those conversations. We recognize this is contentious and we are not trying to do anything behind closed doors. We think both sides of this issue have an opportunity for improved clarity,” she said. “I mean every 10 years we can go to our corners and fight about this or we can sit down and talk about areas of agreement that we think are there. We think there are a lot of people in the middle who think there are reasonable changes to be made to better protect landowners and better protect recreators.”

But come January, if a bill looks like it will simply devolve into that yelling, Johnson said, “we likely will make the call to not have that fight under the golden dome.”

What is a river?

It depends on your point of view. Sun reporters have fanned out along the Arkansas River, from the headwaters near Leadville to the border with Kansas, to learn what the river means to people in the places it runs through.

▶ Follow along for more from this series

ㅤ⚲ㅤ ROCKY FORD

Conjure a Colorado sports event and what do you see? 

Giant slalom? Maybe.   

Football? Obviously.  

Bike races over three passes. Trail races winding 50 miles.  

But horses storming a river while their riders try to hang onto a watermelon? 

Sally Cope is manager of the Arkansas Valley Fair, and her dad did it. He was a contestant in the fair’s Watermelon Derby race, started in 1950. Riders had to hang on — to mane, to melon — while the horses splashed through the Arkansas River to its far bank and back. Then they had to lap the rodeo arena in front of thrilled and clapping fans.  

“Holding on wasn’t too hard when the watermelons were dry,” Cope said, “but they got real slippery when they were wet.” 

Melons, the fair and the Arkansas are why the city of Rocky Ford as we know it exists today.  

Cope can prove it with historical records. 

The Utes inhabited the area first. The Arapaho moved in next. The Comanche pushed the Arapaho out, and we know the history of white settlement after that. 

The Rocky Ford Historical Museum recounts the story of “a genial man who moved alone to the West” finding “a land full of dreams but devoid of settlers.” George W. Swink landed in Bent County in 1871, hand-dug the Rocky Ford Ditch and settled near Rocky Ford, which Kit Carson named when he tried to ford the Arkansas and found it full of rocks. Swink planted cantaloupe and watermelon seeds and officially built those into key industries in the region. 

So maybe Swink, his melon seeds and the Arkansas are why Rocky Ford exists.  

The story picks up in September 1878 when Swink produced a bumper crop of melons. He took them to the railroad depot, sliced them up and placed the juicy disks on a boxcar door laid horizontal. Around 2,530 people tasted those melons. It was such a joyous occasion, Swink decided watermelon needed its own festival. So he started the Arkansas Valley Fair, and it’s been running annually every year since. 

The longest-running fair in Colorado has given sales-tax dollars and a sense of identity to a region that has struggled economically, with a falling population, big-city buyouts of agricultural water and a belief that Colorado leaders know it’s there but don’t really care.

But a recent study showed the historically disadvantaged side of town the fairgrounds inhabit has a shortage of playgrounds for kids, and Rocky Ford leaders wanted to fix it. 

So in 2022, they started envisioning a way they could use 100 acres encompassing the fairgrounds and land around it to anchor not only a playground for the children, but a regional park for camping, fishing and hiking, a trail system along the Arkansas River for bird watching, biking and horseback riding, and a “community living room hub” for people to gather in both when the fair is on and off. The vision includes repairing crumbling parts of the rodeo arena and fairgrounds including adobe stalls.  

The projects would have obvious links to Swink, the Ark and the fairgrounds. They show a community trying to enhance its future by drawing on its history.

It also began with beets  

That ditch Swink dug? It still shares Rocky Ford’s name and runs alongside the Arkansas River. 

It’s owned by the Rocky Ford Ditch Company, which was incorporated in 1888. Water from it irrigated Swink’s melons, corn, wheat, alfalfa, cows and sugar beets that for a long time were the most profitable crop growing in the valley. 

In 1899, beets were booming and Swink wooed the American Crystal Sugar Company into building a processing plant in Rocky Ford. The Holly Sugar Corporation, founded in 1905 by Kenneth Schley, set up shop in the town 100 miles to the east and later expanded with a second large sugar beet factory in the town of, wait for it, Swink. 

Bill Hancock grew up on a small farm just outside of Rocky Ford. He likes thinking about the years sugar beets drove the economy, from the 1900s through the 1950s. “The factories were the hook and bullet of this community,” he says. 

The corporations bought beets that farmers grew in fields fanning away from the Rocky Ford Ditch. They irrigated the fields with Arkansas River water. Everything was flowing. Rocky Ford High School, home of the Meloneers, had 160 students. Locals patronized three grocery stores, four banks, two women’s clothing shops and three car dealerships. The main street buzzed with activity. “My family would go there Saturday evenings for supper and watch all the goings on,” Hancock remembers. “The shops stayed open until 10 o’clock. It was busy, busy, busy.” 

The farmers also employed workers from Mexico, who bought goods from Hancock’s uncle’s clothing and Army surplus stores. They’d pack them in footlockers his uncle sold, and when one filled up, “he’d put a padlock on and a tag on and take it down to the train station and ship it to Mexico,” he said. “It was nifty, and most of the vendors learned enough Spanish to get along.” 

But the region took a blow in 1974, when Congress allowed the Sugar Act of 1934 to expire and President Gerald Ford lifted tariffs on sugar imports, which flooded the market and killed the Lower Arkansas Valley’s largest industry. 

“When the sugar company went out of business, they leased the land to Natco Food Service, which grew hay on it that they made into dehydrated pellets” Hancock said. 

That kept the economy limping along for a little while. 

Then the water brokers came to Rocky Ford. 

Buying and drying  

Acres of land along the Rocky Ford Ditch are fallow after Aurora bought them to water the city. 

Kristie Knackord, with the Lower Arkansas Water Conservancy District, says there’s “a thought, conveyed out there publicly, that a farmer sold their water directly to the municipality. But often there’s a middle man, and how does that work?” 

It works by a water broker visiting a place like Otero County after its local industry collapses. They find landowners with rights to water, and buy the water and the land. The transfer of water from farms to cities actually began in the 1890s. “But the pace of sales quickened in the 1970s and 1980s as Aurora, Colorado Springs and Pueblo found willing sellers in farmers who were struggling because of high interest rates and low commodity prices,” according to Water Education Colorado. 

Hancock remembers when the Bowlen family, who owned the Denver Broncos from 1984 to 2022, sent brokers on behalf of the city of Aurora. Pat Bowlen was also the principal of Resources Investment Group, which purchased 4,100 acres of farmland and 424 shares of the Rocky Ford Ditch.

It all started in 1979, when Crystal Sugar shuttered its processing plant in Rocky Ford and the company gave local farmers an option to buy it. When they couldn’t raise the money, Bowlen’s group snapped it up – for the water rights. They turned around and sold them to Aurora. 

Some farmers were persuaded to sell their land and water rights, “but there was still maybe a third of the water that didn’t sell,” Hancock said. Farmers who wanted to stay held onto their rights for a number of years.  But the pressure around Rocky Ford didn’t let up and many more of his neighbors sold. 

By 2009, municipal purchasers had bought water rights attached to more than 102,000 irrigated acres in the Arkansas Basin and more than 150,000 acre-feet of water was severed from the land, according to Water Education. That was the start of the most recent “buy and dry,” as the pattern is called. 

Jack Goble, general manager of the Lower Arkansas Water Conservancy District, says his group doesn’t know how many acres have been affected in Otero County but that Aurora “dried up around 7,500 acres on the Rocky Ford Ditch.” The district is working on a project that will give them the complete number in a few months. 

Meanwhile, Hancock holds onto another set of happy memories from his childhood. 

Back when the water was flowing, the Hancock kids frequented the rodeo where Cope’s dad wrestled the watermelon. 

“We had an open arena at the fairgrounds. That was before horse trailers,” he said. “So we’d saddle up and ride to town and then rope and then ride home in the dark. The folks would follow us in their car to make sure somebody didn’t get run over. We belonged to the Mill Iron Wranglers. It was a horse drill team like the Lakewood Westernaires. We got contracted to go to a lot of the local rodeos, set flags and be the entertainment.”

Some holdouts still have rights to water in Rocky Ford Ditch, he said. “There’s the (Colorado State University Agricultural Experiment Station) and a few other little farmers and backyard people.” 

Rocky Ford has some water rights as well, says City Manager Stacey Milenski. Which brings us back to the town, melons and the revitalization project. 

Watermeloning and watering the future 

Watermelons are still so central to Rocky Ford the city is known as the Sweet Melon Capitol of the World. Since George Swink gave travelers a sugar high with his free slices, the Rocky Ford Rotary Club has given away 7 million pounds. Rocky Ford High School’s mascot is the Meloneer, described as “a muscular, anthropomorphic watermelon.” Same name for the school paper. 

So in 2021, during the city’s initial visioning process, Electra Johnson suggested they give either the new entrance to the fairgrounds a watermelon theme or make the new playground melon-themed. Johnson’s firm, EJD+P, specializes in regenerative, community-driven solutions to restore landscapes, empower people and build resilient futures for Colorado’s communities. 

When the city thought about how they could give the community more access to nature and recreation, they zeroed in an area called Crystal Lake, a parcel of land between the fairgrounds and the Crystal Sugar Factory property that has the dry depressions of three holding ponds once used by the plant. 

Some community members thought cleaning and revegetating the Crystal Lake area and piping Rocky Ford Ditch water into one of the holding ponds would give kids who live on the north side of town somewhere to run, hike, splash and connect with nature during the summer, Johnson added.  

And Johnson imagined connecting the Crystal Lake recreation zone to the Arkansas River, “the lifeblood of this area, but with no public access to it,” she said. “So the master plan included 33 acres of Crystal Lake, 33 acres of fairground and 33 acres next to it, which is a wetlands.” 

It all sounded so grand, so doable with enough community buy-in, belief and funding. Johnson said the various pieces would help solve some racial disparity in Rocky Ford. “I mean the fair is a place where everyone comes together,” she said. And if a trail could link the fair to Crystal Lake, and Crystal Lake to the Arkansas River, even more equity could come out of the city’s plan. 

Then the reality set in. Completing any part of this project was going to be wildly expensive, Milenski told The Colorado Sun. 

“If you just do, you know, red slides and one of those standard playgrounds, it’s still $300,000,” Johnson said. 

Since the city started dreaming, they’ve received three grants including two from Great Outdoors Colorado for $50,000 and $400,000, and one from the Colorado Health Foundation for $50,000 Johnson said. 

But even receiving money has been a struggle, said Milenski. “We announced we got these planning dollars and the community thinks, ‘They got $400,000? I don’t see any change. What are you doing? You’re not fixing the streets with that money,’ There’s that misconception anytime you get a grant, but what you can do with it and what you can’t is very specific.” 

The city is also looking at a “tough year in 2026, because people aren’t spending money,” she said. “Sales tax isn’t going to be what was projected. And property taxes remain flat.” 

But Johnson calls the project an answer to “a dream from the community and the town that would be a wonderful way of transforming the region.”  

And she calls creating access to the Arkansas River specifically, “a dream and vision that would have to be managed by a land trust or someone like The Nature Conservancy, because the land is super fragile from being over grazed for years. The city of Aurora owns the land and water, but the group we’ve been working with would like to see the land bought back and turned into a state park or managed as a grassland wildlife corridor.” 

It would have to have some political firepower behind it, she said. “Gov. Jared Polis has been interested in the region, but a governor has not come to the (Wake Up Breakfast) that kicks off the Arkansas Valley Fair since Roy Romer.”