CPW working with rural county commissioners to find next location for wolf releases

Sneak Peek of the Week

CPW looking at locations in Eagle, Garfield and Pitkin counties — and not Rio Blanco County — for next wolf releases

Colorado Parks and Wildlife recently met with Western Slope county commissioners to discuss locations for the next round of wolf releases next month. The meeting was part of an overhauled approach by CPW to communicate with local residents before releasing the predators, following criticism from rural officials after the first round of releases in December last year.

That Rio Blanco County was listed as a possible location for wolf release “turned my stomach, because other states have had their deer and elk herds cut in half by wolves,” county Commissioner Doug Overton told Sun reporter Tracy Ross. “This is one of the greatest elk herds in North America. We have a lot of hunting and recreation around here because of that. And they’re just throwing it away because somebody wants to go out in the woods and see a wolf that they’re never going to see anyway.”

CPW on Wednesday night announced Rio Blanco County had been removed from the list of possible release locations, citing, in part, the number of livestock in the county and severe winter impacts on elk herds. The agency is now looking at locations in Eagle, Garfield and Pitkin counties. A majority of voters in Eagle and Pitkin counties approved wolf reintroduction in 2020. Garfield County voters overwhelmingly rejected the wolf plan.

Marcia Gilles, director of open space and natural resources for Eagle County, attended the meeting and told Tracy there is not enough state land for a sustainable wolf release in her county. The state wolf management plan requires that wolves are released on state-managed land or private land with permission from landowners.

“And not a lot of folks are probably going to raise their hand and say, ‘I’ll let you drop wolves off right here,’” Gilles said.

Pitkin County Commissioner Francie Jacober, whose family runs cattle in the Crystal River Valley, said her county will work with CPW to find a location site.

Jacober said that county commissioners can disapprove of CPW’s plan to release wolves on state land in their county, “But it doesn’t mean they won’t be released there, right?”

“They’re only enacting the law as they’re required to do,” said Jacober, whose son was appointed to the CPW commission in August. “And, you know, cooperation is a lot more helpful than adversity.”

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read Tracy’s story

In Their Words

Colorado regulators finalize licensing programs for psychedelic-assisted therapy healing centers and facilitators

Next week Colorado regulators will adjust the final rules for how licensed facilitators and manufacturers can begin offering psychedelic-assisted therapies next year.

Following the voter-approved Proposition 122 in 2022 and dozens of public meetings over nearly two years, the regulations around the groundbreaking program land as the federal government backs away from supporting anything connected to psychedelics. (As evidenced by the Federal Drug Administration’s recent rejection of a nearly 40-year effort to use MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.)

Colorado’s Natural Medicine Division next month will begin taking license applications from people trained to administer psilocybin. There are already eight programs providing training in the state. A recent state survey showed146 Coloradans interested in opening a healing center, 96 wanting to open a facility to grow psilocybin mushrooms and 66 wanting to open a facility that manufactures psilocybin products.

“Overall they have been really thoughtful about the rules and I think we have ended up in a really good place,” said Tasia Poinsatte, the Colorado director of the Healing Advocacy Fund, a nonprofit that formed in 2020 to help Oregon rollout its voter-approved psilocybin therapy program in 2023. “They definitely took their time to bring in the right expertise across a whole spectrum of people in Colorado.”

The 22-month planning process has divided the state’s oversight of psilocybin-assisted therapies between the Department of Regulatory Agencies — or DORA — and the Department of Revenue.

Colorado’s rules — coming out two years after Oregon opened its first psilocybin service center — allow for two different facilitator licensing tracks compared to only one in Oregon. In the first year of the program in Oregon, there are 21 licensed service centers, 10 manufacturing facilities and 329 licensed facilitators.

DORA will oversee the training and licensing program for psychedelic facilitators and the Department of Revenue will license healing centers and businesses involved in the cultivation, manufacture and testing of psychedelic medicines, including psilocybin mushrooms. By June 2026, the Colorado natural medicine program could expand to include other natural psychedelics, including dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, ibogaine, and mescaline.

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

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Breaking Trail

JeffCo commissioners reject lift-served bike proposed near Conifer

The Jefferson County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday denied a proposed lift-served mountain bike park atop Shadow Mountain Drive near Conifer, agreeing with dozens of vocal residents who opposed the project.

The county’s planning commission last month recommended that the commissioners deny the permit application for the Shadow Mountain Bike Park, which would have been the first lift-served mountain bike park in Colorado that is not part of a ski resort.

A well-organized group of local residents — many of them neighbors of the would-be park — voiced vehement opposition to the project, showing up by the dozens to testify at the planning and county commissioner meetings. They collected more than 5,800 signatures and 700 letters from residents and groups opposed to the plan. They urged county leaders to consider impacts to wildlife, habitat, water, potential wildfire, strains on local emergency services and traffic on the two-lane, home-lined Shadow Mountain Drive.

Ultimately, county officials decided the project was not compatible with the agricultural and residential zoning around the property and rejected the developers’ request for a special permit. The agricultural zoning allows one home for every 10 acres in the area so the 230-acre parcel could accommodate 23 homes.

“This is a tremendous project. There is no question about it. There is no question about the positive economic impact it would have on Conifer. However, there are so many other factors that really lift up this question of compatibility,” Jefferson County Commissioner Lesley Dahlkemper said.

The project’s backers, Jason Evans and Phil Bouchard, spent four years working on the bike park plan. The 230-acre property is owned by the Colorado State Land Board, which is tasked with generating money for schools from leases on its land. The pair of mountain bikers had inked a tentative, revenue-based longterm lease with the board that would have delivered annual rent payments of $241,000 to $572,000. The developers said the lift-served bike park could host as many as 70,000 visitors on about 16 miles of trails, generating up to $12 million a year in revenue when fully built.

After several public meetings to vet their plan, Evans and Bouchard had agreed on a five-month seasonal closure of the park to protect wildlife. They had developed a parking reservation system to encourage carpooling and limit traffic near the park. They planned to have their own emergency services — like a ski patrol. They said they would limit the width of trails and cap the total mileage of singletrack.

“We have been incorporating community input for four years,” Evans told the commissioners Tuesday. “We are trying to build something that is really awesome for our community.”

Bouchard and Evans said their plan would address trail crowding and meet a growing demand for mountain bikers who like to ride fast downhill, which has raised issues in recent years on crowded Jefferson County bike trails.

“The Front Range of Colorado absolutely needs not just one but several of these bike parks. Absolutely,” said Commissioner Andy Kerr, who serves on the board of Bicycle Colorado but cited wildlife and residents’ concerns in his vote against the development on Shadow Mountain Drive.

For a second there, as Kerr spoke Tuesday, Bouchard thought he might support the bike park. (The vote was 2-1, with commissioner Tracy Kraft-Tharp voting to approve the special-use permit and a rezoning that would allow the chairlift-anchored park in a zone that does not allow mechanized recreation.)

Bouchard on Wednesday expressed frustration with the approval process. He and Evans spent four years working with a team of consultants and county planning staff to build a 436-page application that addressed wildlife, emergency services, water, traffic and community concerns. The Stop The Bike Park’s presentation opposing the project spanned 380 pages.

“I think there were things going on behind the scenes,” Bouchard said Wednesday. “We built an application that was as close as possible to perfect and was really only nonconforming because of a land use recommendation that is 10, maybe 15 years old. And it’s supposed to be a guiding document, a recommendation. I don’t know if it was a threat of litigation against the county or people’s political future that ultimately kept it out of the approval category.”

Bouchard said county leaders say they want to expand recreation in Jefferson County but “if you look at a map of the county, of all the places that would allow any type of recreation and that are zoned for recreation, you will get nothing because there is nothing left. It’s all already developed or conserved as open space,” he said. “If you want to expand recreation in Jefferson County, you need to update land use code or treat land use recommendations for what they are: recommendations.”

What’s coming for the Western Slope, open spaces and the outdoor recreation economy under a second Trump presidency?

The Colorado Sun is planning a series of stories in the next few days taking a look at how a second term for President-elect Donald Trump could impact Colorado.

Here’s what we are watching on the Western Slope and potential issues for the state’s outdoor recreation industry.

If the 922-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” presidential transition proposal crafted by leaders of the conservative movement provides any insight, there will be some big shifts coming to Colorado.

The lead author on the Project 2025 plan for the Interior Department was William Perry Pendley, a conservative Evergreen-based lawyer who briefly led the Bureau of Land Management under Trump in 2020. The public lands energy policy recommendations in the Project 2025 plan are credited to Kathleen Sgamma, the Denver-based president of the Western Energy Alliance.

In calling for increased mining and energy exploration on public lands, Pendley suggests a new president should repeal President Joe Biden’s withdrawal of mineral and energy leases on 221,000 acres in the Thompson Divide.

And could Trump also scale back Biden’s 2022 designation of the 53,804-acre Camp Hale – Continental Divide National Monument as part of a Project 2025 critique of the 1906 Antiquities Act that 18 of 21 presidents have used to create or expand 163 national monuments? Trump did that in 2019, reducing the size of two national monuments created by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama by more than 2.2 million acres. A Trump presidency certainly does not bode well for the controversial campaign to persuade Biden to designate some 400,000 around the Dolores River in western Colorado as a national monument.

Another one: Could Trump reverse Biden’s return of the Bureau of Land Management headquarters to D.C. after Trump moved it to Grand Junction in 2020?

What about those J-1 visa workers that mountain towns and resort companies have grown to rely on in the ongoing labor crunch? Trump’s ban on worker visas in 2020 challenged resort economies and he’s promising a new direction on immigration policy that could spill into visas.

But there are signs that Trump could champion outdoor recreation, one of the few industries with support across both the ever-dueling political parties. Remember that he signed the Great American Outdoors Act in 2020, delivering full funding of $900 million a year to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, saying the legislation supported rural communities. Could that same rural economic development argument persuade Trump to establish a federal outdoor recreation office?

Lots to watch. Stay tuned to The Colorado Sun and please, if you think we are missing something, email me at jason@coloradosun.com.

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— j

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