From The Pueblo Chieftain (Chris Woodka):
The meeting attracted about 40 people, even a few children and teens, to discuss how recreational opportunities could be expanded. Under a $75,000 Great Outdoors Colorado grant, Pueblo and numerous other partners are developing the plan with the guidance of the Fountain Creek Foundation and THK Associates, consultants for the project.
Here’s an article celebrating four Colorado Springs area waterfalls, from R. Scott Rappold writing for The Colorado Springs Gazette. From the article:
“Small, straight, new, treeless,” [writer Helen Hunt Jackson] said of the young city in 1878, after coming here in search of a healthier climate than 19th-century big-city life offered.
“One might die of such a place alone,” she remarked bitterly. “Death by disease would be more natural.”
But she came to love Colorado Springs, in large part because of her frequent visits to rugged Cheyenne Cañon, beyond the jagged pinnacles of rock, to where glistening waterfalls rush down like gifts from the mountains. The falls today bear her name, and have been a popular spot since the canyon became a city park 125 years ago.
More Arkansas Basin coverage here.
From the Fort Collins Coloradoan (Bobby Magill):
…after the settlement of a years-long federal lawsuit against the ditch company, Fort Collins-based Water Storage and Supply Co., and plenty of study, the Park Service is beginning a two-year process of creating a plan to restore the area damaged by the breach. The plan, which will be outlined in an environmental impact study of possible ways to restore the area, will take two years to complete. The project itself will continue for up to three years after that. Park officials are looking for the public’s ideas for how to restore the area, keeping in mind that the project might use heavy equipment and helicopters inside a federally designated wilderness area where motorized equipment is otherwise prohibited. The point of the project is to balance ecosystem restoration against the project’s short-term impact from the possible use of earthmoving equipment in a wilderness area, said Paul McLaughlin, Grand Ditch Breach restoration coordinator for Rocky Mountain National Park.
From The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Gary Harmon):
The reaction was harsh enough that a representative of Denver Water, one of the agencies that sought the study, said it seemed instead to undermine the main point the Front Range Water Council sought to illustrate: the interdependence of various regions in Colorado. The interdependence was “diluted” in the report, Greg Fisher, Denver Water’s manager of demand planning, said at the meeting of the Mesa County Water Association, which drew about 60 people.
Mesa County rancher Carlyle Currier said it was inflammatory, and Club 20 Executive Director Reeves Brown called the conclusion that the Front Range generates $132,000 from an acre of water compared to $7,200 on the West Slope “unnecessarily provocative.” “It exacerbates existing feelings” of distrust of the Front Range, Jim Spehar, a former Grand Junction mayor and Mesa County commissioner, said of the report. “What was your point? I think you shot yourself in the foot.”
The idea, [Greg Fisher, Denver Water’s manager of demand planning] said, was to show a different perspective than the way water issues are usually framed by suggesting that Colorado’s other regions — the eastern plains, San Luis Valley and central mountains, as well as the Front Range — benefit from a thriving Front Range economy…
Economist Paul Rochette of Summit Economics and the Adams Group, said the study was limited by the characterizations of available data, such as the economic value of feedlots in Greeley and wine sales in Denver that depend on Western Slope agriculture. “It can be very easy for one area to get credit for the foundational value of something made in another region,” Rochette said.
Here’s the Coyote Gulch coverage of the report.