Water gurgled softly through a beaver dam on Bear Creek near Morrison as Katie Gill reflected on a six-year campaign to save her happy place in Bear Creek Lake Park from destruction. Cottonwoods towered over the intricately constructed four-foot-high dam. Mallard ducks paddled in formation on the pond it created upstream.
Every time she visits, she wonders if the creek she calls “the heart and lungs” of the park is doomed because of a proposed water storage project that has been under study for years.
“People have used words like refuge and sanctuary to describe this,” Gill said this week, enjoying a cooling spring breeze on the creek. “People come to natural places to get away from the stresses and toxicities of their daily lives. When you’re in a place like this, it’s a multi-sensory experience. All I can hear is the water falling through the beaver dam, rippling over the boulders, with the smell of budding trees and damp soil. It’s very powerful.”
For years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been conducting a feasibility study on whether to go forward with a water storage project that would have the potential to inundate much of the park. But the corps and its partner, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, have had little to say since 2021, when they outlined the options they were considering at the time for public comment.
“Last year, they were saying – jokingly, although it’s accurate – that they were five years into a three-year study,” said Gill, a Morrison resident who began organizing opposition to the project in 2019 and founded Save Bear Creek Lake Park officially as a non-profit in 2022. “So now, I would say we’re about six years into a three-year study.”
Gill is frustrated by the delays, especially since people tend to forget the longer they wait. So, earlier this month, she gathered a group of people at a Lakewood craft brewery to make sure the public knows that the park is still threatened.
“One of our concerns is that people are coming to some incorrect conclusions based on the silence, the fact that we have been waiting for so long to get more information,” Gill said.
“Among the general public and the park-using population, some people have assumed that they’re just not going to do (the project) because they haven’t heard anything in a long time, therefore there’s no threat to the park,” she continued. “The other problem is that some people feel like they’re going to do this and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”
She also drew a parallel to a similar project that took place two years ago at Chatfield Reservoir, which killed or damaged thousands of trees, requiring the removal of many.
The Corps of Engineers did not reply to an email seeking comment for this story.
Gill said she believes there may be news on the project soon. Last year, the corps told her it planned to hold a new public hearing that summer or fall. It didn’t happen. Gill hopes it will this year, and she plans to be ready when it does.
Significant impacts
Half a mile downstream from the beaver dam, the creek flows into Bear Creek Lake, a reservoir created by a dam the Corps of Engineers completed in 1982 for the purpose of flood control.
The corps has been studying options for “reallocating” the reservoir’s purpose to include water storage for Front Range needs. That could mean raising water levels dozens of feet, wiping out much of the creek and riparian habitat upstream.
The land between the 1982 dam on the east and C-470 on the west is owned by the Corps of Engineers and managed as a park by the city of Lakewood. The Lakewood City Council unanimously approved a proclamation in 2022 supporting Save Bear Creek Lake Park, calling on project planners to consider less destructive alternatives.
In 2021, the corps said it was considering alternatives that ranged from no change in water levels to an increase of up to 20,000 acre feet that could raise the water level 64 feet and flood nearly a third of the park. Save Bear Creek Lake Park retained the legal services of water expert James Eklund, who was director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board from 2013-17.
“Adding a water storage component to this facility as contemplated by this project — especially the proposed 5,000- to 20,000-acre feet of additional storage capacity and the resultant water level fluctuations thereby — will pose significant impacts to the lake and park,” Eklund wrote in a letter to the project study team that was shared with Colorado’s senators and Lakewood congresswoman Brittany Pettersen.
“This is especially so due to the shallow topography of the park land around the lake and the limited acreage of the park,” Eklund added. “Thus, any alternative that considers additional storage above 2,500 (acre feet) without including dredging to deepen the lake’s vertical volume will eradicate much of the wetlands, wildlife habitat, and recreational features along Bear and Turkey creeks and along the lake’s shoreline.”
Katie Weeman, a spokeswoman for the water conservation board, is aware of the concerns, but she didn’t want to “speculate” or “mislead” people when it comes to the timing of a possible plan.
“Frustration over the long study period is understandable,” she said in an email. “However, given the valid concerns of people that enjoy the park, we want to ensure the study is as thorough as possible.”
Pricelessness can’t be quantified
Save Bear Creek Lake Park partisans are alarmed by what happened at Chatfield Reservoir, which underwent a water storage project similar to what is being considered for Bear Creek Lake. That one increased the reservoir’s storage capacity by 20,600 acre feet, raising the water level by 12 feet in 2023. About 2,700 dead or dying trees were marked for removal this past winter, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and another 2,300 could be removed next winter.
With a similar 20,000-acre-foot capacity increase under consideration for Bear Creek Lake, flooding opponents point out that Chatfield State Park is nearly three times larger than Bear Creek Lake Park, and the surface area of Chatfield Reservoir before the reallocation was nearly 14 times larger than Bear Creek Lake.
Most of Bear Creek Lake Park above the creek corridor is grassland with few trees and scant shade. In contrast, the creek corridor is dense with cottonwood trees and undergrowth that is habitat for all sorts of wildlife. Near where the creek enters the lake, a cottonwood near a picnic area contains a nest that is currently home to a family of great horned owls.
Gill likes to share a quote sometimes erroneously attributed to Albert Einstein that apparently originated with author William Bruce Cameron in the 1960s: “Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.”
Whatever its provenance, Gill feels it applies to Bear Creek.
“We can count how many feet of additional storage we might get by inundating this beautiful habitat, but there is a pricelessness that can’t be quantified,” she said. “That’s why we have to save it. It’s community health, it’s mental health, it’s physical health, it’s recreation, it’s habitat.
“Beaver dams widen the habitat and environmental value of this area,” Gill added. “When you look at the way all these channels have braided out, they are transporting and deepening moisture in the soil. All these trees and plants are sinking carbon. That’s a value added to this park that I hope the Army Corps of Engineers will take into consideration.”