County, city seek grant for more northern trails

By JoAn Bjarko
North Forty News

This time next year hundreds of people will be enjoying the vistas and wildlife of Red Mountain Open Space and Soapstone Prairie Natural Area on nearly 45 miles of trails.

If Larimer County and Fort Collins are successful in getting up to $550,000 from Great Outdoors Colorado, usable trails will expand to even more miles in a few years.

GOCO has $3 million available for local governments to build trails. Staff member Aimee Wesley said she expects to receive about 30 applications with requests ranging from $50,000 to $750,000. Awards will be announced Oct. 2.

GOCO has already been a generous donor to the project. In 2004, the lottery-funded state organization provided $7.85 million toward purchase of the Red Mountain Open Space. Fort Collins had already purchased the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area. With a few other smaller land deals negotiated since then, the combined Red Mountain-Soapstone Prairie area is nearly 53 square miles. It will open to the public in June 2009 for hiking, biking and horseback riding. There will be no motorized travel beyond the parking lots.

To date, Larimer County and its funding partners have spent $13.7 million to acquire nearly 15,000 acres in the Red Mountain Open Space. Fort Collins has spent more than $11 million on acquiring more than 19,000 acres that make up the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area. Both the city and county have voter-approved sales taxes to preserve open spaces.

Acquisition of the properties is part of the ambitious Laramie Foothills-Mountain to Plains project - a collaborative effort among willing landowners, the Larimer County Open Lands Program, the Fort Collins Natural Areas Program, The Nature Conservancy, Legacy Land Trust and GOCO.

Together the Red Mountain-Soapstone Prairie properties sprawl across the county's northern border with Wyoming, rising 1,500 feet from the short-grass prairies to ponderosa pine ridgetops.

Soapstone, on the east, provides habitat for fox, elk and pronghorn in addition to 130 bird species including eagles, owls, falcons and hawks. It also is a refuge for the federally threatened Colorado butterfly plant and other imperiled plant species.

In the human realm, Soapstone contains the Lindenmeier Archaeological Site. A national historic landmark, it is one of the most extensive and well-preserved sites of the Folsom occupation 12,000 years ago. It is also rich with remains of other occupations dating from 10,000 to 200 years ago, as well as the more recent homesteading era of the last century.

Fort Collins plans to build an ADA-compliant paved trail to an overlook at the Lindenmeier site. Archaeological finds will be recreated for visitors to see and touch, but the real artifacts are on display at the Fort Collins Museum.

This northern access point will have a parking lot for 50 vehicles, two nearby shelter areas and a more isolated shelter. Soapstone's south parking lot, accessed by North County Road 15, will have space for 25 vehicles and 15 horse trailers.

Red Mountain Open Space on the west includes a large regional mule deer migration and winter concentration area that extends from Wyoming to Boulder County. It is also home to numerous raptors including peregrine falcon, Cooper's hawk, nesting barn owls, great-horned owl, bald eagle and three golden eagle nest sites. Sand Creek and Boxelder Creek flow through the open space and support riparian vegetation.

Visitors will be able to access this open space by North County Road 23. The trailhead will have a parking lot for 30 vehicles and 10 horse trailers. Four or more miles of trail should be constructed by opening day, according to Meegan Flenniken of the open lands department.

Prior to opening, the open lands department also has to improve two miles of roadway following a two-track ranch road.

Total development costs for the road, trailhead facility and trails is estimated at $1.3 million, Flenniken said. Getting a trails grant from GOCO, she said, "would be a significant partnership to help offset some of those costs."

Both the city and county are offering guided public tours of the properties this summer. The next Red Mountain Open Space tour is July 19 at 7:30 a.m. This is primarily a hiking tour and is limited to 12 people. Those interested should call Rob Novak at 679-4561 for more details and to sign up.