Click the link to read the article on the Vail Daily website (Ali Longwell). Here’s an excerpt:
Since 2012, the Colorado Department of Health and the Environment has listed Gore Creek as an impaired waterway due to low aquatic life. In the ensuing years, the town of Vail and the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District have been working to get the waterway off the list. Restore the Gore activities have included education efforts around pesticides and landscaping as well as the recent installations of gutter bins to reduce pollution flowing through its its stormwater drains. One of the main metrics the two entities use to track the progress of such efforts is the health of macroinvertebrate species in Gore Creek, Black Gore Creek, Red Sandstone Creek and Booth Creek. To track the abundance and diversity of these species, the water district conducts sampling at several sampling locations each September. This data has been collected since 2009 and includes eight sites on Gore Creek…
Pete Wadden, the town’s watershed health specialist, recently presented the full data from Eagle River Water and Sanitation District’s 2021 sampling as well as gave some insight into the 2022 results to the Town Council. Overall, samples from the last two years showed that the creek is “moving in the right direction, albeit at a modest pace,” Wadden said, later adding that the data shows an “upward trend over time, but it’s very gradual and still in most cases, in most years, pretty far from reaching what CDPHE defines as attainment.”
