Red Mountain, Soapstone balancing act begins

By Dan MacArthur
North Forty News

Hundreds of committed people have offered many more hundreds of heartfelt suggestions about balancing recreation and preservation at the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area and Red Mountain Open Space.

The intensity of public sentiment was apparent from the more than 200 participants who turned out to emphatically express themselves at a Jan. 24 meeting. It was the first chance for citizens to have their say in developing a management plan that will make portions of the vast properties open for recreation by mid 2009.

The challenge is accommodating the apparent preponderance of those wanting to hike, bike, camp and ride horses while protecting the rich natural and cultural resources. Both properties are refuges for threatened creatures and plants, and Soapstone contains a select National Historic Landmark--the Lindenmeier site, occupied by the ancient Folsom people and others continuously for the last 13,000 years.

Larimer County purchased the 13,500-acre Red Mountain Ranch for $9.7 million with Great Outdoors Colorado providing $7.85 million and the county's open space sales tax the remainder. Fort Collins purchased the 18,764-acre Soapstone property for $11.8 million with funds from its natural areas sales tax.

Acquisition of the properties is part of the ambitious Laramie Foothills-Mountain to Plains project - a collaborative effort among willing landowners, the county Open Lands Program, the Fort Collins Natural Areas Program, The Nature Conservancy, Legacy Land Trust and Great Outdoors Colorado. So far the partners are not quite halfway toward their goal of preserving a 200-square-mile swath in northern Colorado between Interstate 25 and U.S. Highway 287.

"There's not much along the Front Range that's intact, but Soapstone and Red Mountain are," Renee Rondeau, program director and chief scientist for the Colorado Natural Heritage Program, told the crowd. She said staff of the heritage program, sponsored by the Colorado State University College of Natural Sciences, has already identified the second-greatest concentration of the threatened butterfly plant at Soapstone, as well as a dozen species of concern among the 113 bird species present.

"The more we look, the more we're going to find," she said.

Daylan Figgs, Fort Collins senior environmental planner, stressed that the management plan's primary goal is protecting the ecological and cultural resources at Red Mountain and Soapstone. He said reasonable compromises will be required to accomplish the second goal "to really get people up there to enjoy it." But in some cases, there will be no middle ground.

For example, Figgs said, it is known that single-track trails disturb bird-nesting areas for nearly 100 yards on either side of the trail. "While we are willing to give up the nesting area of some birds, we draw the line at the piping plover," he said.

Similarly, he said, there are places on the properties suitable for building trails and parking lots while other management zones will remain off limits.

Figgs said the respective staffs currently regard hiking, biking and horseback riding on designated trails as compatible uses with the possibility of limited hunting and backcountry camping. Motorized vehicles and dogs almost certainly would be prohibited, the latter eliciting widespread howls of protest based on a cursory review of comments.

Next, a draft plan will be prepared by March for review and refinement by city and county staff, technical advisers and public advisory boards. That draft plan will be presented at a second public meeting in July in concert with open houses. Public review will continue through September, when the draft plan will be revised and again submitted for review in October. The plan is then scheduled for adoption in November.