Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists captured the wolf on Aug. 30 and it died on Sept. 3, the agency announced Monday. Biologists had found the wolf, identified as 2309-OR, in poor condition, with several injuries to a hind leg and severely underweight, according to CPW.

“CPW staff believes that it was unlikely the wolf would have survived for very long in the wild,” the agency said in a news release.

State wildlife officials decided in August to capture the Copper Creek pack after the male wolf killed and maimed multiple cattle and sheep in the Middle Park area. The removal of the wolves from the wild was a setback for the voter-mandated effort to reintroduce the apex predator to the state’s landscape, beginning with the release of 10 wolves in the state in December.

Another of the reintroduced wolves died this spring. The state’s known wolf population now stands at 14: eight survivors among the reintroduced adults, plus the four pups from the Copper Creek pack and two adult wolves remaining from a pack established earlier by wolves that migrated from Wyoming.

The decision to recapture the pack came with risk and uncertainty, CPW Director Jeff Davis said in an interview. Wildlife officials did not want to remove the male wolf while the pups and the female wolf relied on his hunting for survival.

“We’re trying to balance the fact that we have so few animals on the landscape, and (we have) our mandate to restore a sustainable population of wolves while avoiding and minimizing impacts to the ranching industry,” he said. “There was an opportunity to remove the animals from the area of conflict, kind of reassess what the next steps are.”

An outside agency will investigate the cause of death of the male wolf and release a report, Davis said. He expected the investigation to take between 45 and 60 days.

The rest of the recaptured Copper Creek pack — a female wolf and four pups, one more than previously known — were captured and will be held in a facility for eventual rerelease.

The pups were underweight but otherwise healthy and taken with their mother to a “large, secure enclosure with limited human interaction,” according to CPW.

Citing a concern for the safety of the wolves, Davis declined to provide more details about the facility — including whether the facility is public or private and whether it is in Colorado.

Rerelease planned later in fall

The agency plans to release the remaining pack together between mid-November and December, once the pups have reached adult size, Davis said. Biologists will collar the pups before release, he said.

The pack will be released within the same broad area where the wolves were set loose in December, Davis said. The zone stretches north to south between Kremmling and Aspen, and east to west between Loveland Pass and Rifle.

CPW officials will speak with local elected officials and landowners in possible release areas before it occurs, according to the agency.

Davis and other CPW officials began discussing the possibility of removing and relocating the Copper Creek pack in early August, he said. The agency announced its decision to capture the pack five days after the operation was underway.

CPW began attempts to capture the pack on Aug. 22. Its biologists captured the wolves using leg-hold traps over the next two weeks, in this order:

• Aug. 24: adult female, 2312-OR
• Aug. 30: adult male, 2309-OR
• Tuesday: male pup, 2401
• Wednesday: male pups, 2403 and 2405
• Thursday: female pup, 2402

Wildlife officials continued to work in the area until Sunday to ensure all pups were captured.

“After three more days of operations, CPW felt confident there were no additional pups on the landscape,” according to the agency’s news release.

CPW veterinarians do not believe the leg-hold trap caused the injury to the now-deceased male wolf’s leg, Davis said.

The leg had puncture wounds high on the inside of the back right leg, which a leg-hold trap could not inflict on an adult wolf, Davis said. That leg was atrophied and the hair on the paw had grown long, indicating that the foot had not been used regularly for a long time, Davis said. Veterinarians administered antibiotics to the captured wolf to treat infection from the wound.

State deviated from its own plan

CPW’s wolf management plan states that relocating wolves to halt depredations “has little technical merit,” since the wolves could return to their previous territory or simply start killing livestock in their new area.

Davis acknowledged that the relocation decision strayed from the plan, but he said it was a necessary choice when trying to balance the mandate to restore wolves and also “take a little bit of steam or temperature out of the ranching community by removing the conflict.”

The majority of the 24 cattle and sheep killed and maimed by wolves since reintroduction were attacked by the paired wolves that formed the Copper Creek pack, CPW officials previously said.

“This isn’t necessarily exactly what our plan says, but this is a little bit of a perfect storm event, so it requires some flexibility and unique solutions going forward,” Davis said.

The four pups had not been involved with the livestock but were approaching the age when they would begin hunting with the adults, Davis said. It’s unclear whether the female wolf has killed or injured any cattle or sheep, he said.

Had the male wolf survived, he would have been held in captivity permanently, CPW officials said at news conference Monday afternoon.

While it is difficult to digest the death of the male wolf, the relocation was the best option for CPW at the time, said Rob Edward, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, which supported reintroduction. Now that the pack has been relocated, CPW can pivot to focusing more on preventing depredation by coordinating earlier with ranches that have a wolf presence nearby.

CPW also can make sure ranchers have easy access to nonlethal deterrents, he said.

“Now we can turn our attention to why CPW had to relocate these wolves — and what they can do better as they implement the will of the voters,” Edward said.

Despite the death of two of the 10 animals released in December, CPW officials remain optimistic that the reintroduction program will succeed.

“I’m not concerned about the overall success of the program,” Eric Odell, CPW’s wolf conservation program manager, said during the news conference.

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While a new era of river revitalization projects and riverside development plans is taking hold, water quality often remains below state standards. Some sections of the South Platte still stink. And despite a promise by former Denver Mayor Michael Hancock to make the river swimmable, city health officials still warn against going in the water — especially during the summer months.

“If you want to go swimming, go to a swimming pool — you’re much safer there,” said Jon Novick, the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment’s water quality program administrator.

The recent swell of attention on the South Platte — by developers, community leaders and city officials working to improve conditions — has highlighted the many environmental challenges still present.

Wastewater plants discharge effluent into the river, and companies such as Suncor Energy release a range of substances into the South Platte and the streams that flow into it. Among them: inorganic nitrogen, arsenic and the class of PFAS compounds known as “forever chemicals.”

Denver’s health department for decades has tracked a swath of contaminants as well as river conditions. The department monitors water temperature, acidity, nutrients and metals.

But the department’s biggest concern is E. coli bacteria, which can cause infections or sicken people if ingested, Novick said. E. coli can enter the water through animal or human waste. Denver’s aging infrastructure means that sometimes wastewater pipes leak sewage, which eventually reaches the river, he said. All of the city’s stormwater flushes to the South Platte.

The bacteria spreads faster in the warmer waters of summer, which is when people are most likely to want to take a dip. E. coli concentrations increase as the river flows downstream to the north.

In its most recent water quality report, published last October, the DDPHE ranked South Platte water quality as “fair” — above “marginal” and “poor,” but below “good.” E. coli levels exceeded the Colorado Water Quality Control Commission’s standard year-round in 2022. The river also exceeded standards for arsenic, which is naturally occurring in the bedrock under the city.

The river also suffers from the byproducts of the millions of people who live nearby. Anything on Denver’s streets and sidewalks not blown away or picked up eventually makes its way to the river: trash, lawn fertilizers, runoff from roads, pet waste, oil and grease from vehicles.

Part of the Mile High Flood District’s work is to help local governments better clean stormwater before it reaches the river.

The district — founded in the wake of Denver’s catastrophic 1965 flood — has tracked some positive trends in the river’s health. Nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen have generally declined, said Holly Piza, the district’s research and development director. The nutrients from products like fertilizers can cause algae blooms and hurt aquatic ecosystems.

But other water quality issues are worsening, she said, including salinity — which hurts aquatic life and can damage infrastructure.

Attempts to mitigate the problem across Denver include a set of bioretention ponds outside the Carla Madison Recreation Center on Colfax Avenue. Those help retain water after rainfall and filter it through the dirt, instead of allowing all the water to flow immediately toward the river.

Novick and Piza urge Denverites to be more thoughtful: Don’t use fertilizers with phosphorus or nitrogen. Don’t litter. Wash your car at a car wash. Make sure sprinklers are watering grass, not pavement.

“There’s a ton the city is doing to improve water quality,” Novick said, “but we can’t be everywhere and we can’t do it all.”

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Voters in November will decide whether to ban the practice, along with the trapping of bobcats. That prospect has set off a deluge of competing claims about what will happen if big-cat hunting ceases.

People supporting the ban say that mountain lion populations are self-regulating and will stabilize at a level supported by their available habitat and food resources. Those opposed to Initiative 91, meanwhile, say a hunting ban would induce a rapid increase in the number of big cats, which in turn would pose a significant threat to deer and elk herds.

The truth is likely a mix of the two, according to studies and experts.

But beyond biology, the statewide ballot measure is asking Coloradans to consider deeper questions about the future of Colorado’s wildlife, both opponents and supporters said.

State wildlife managers now set hunting limits on the number of mountain lions that can be killed while still maintaining a lion population, said Samantha Miller, the manager of the Cats Aren’t Trophies campaign. The ballot initiative’s proponents want wildlife managers to focus instead on how to foster the best and healthiest population possible for the intrinsic value of having the animal roam the landscape.

“I think it’s a fundamentally different question that we’re asking,” Miller said.

Mountain lion hunters represent about 1% of the more than 200,000 big-game hunting licenses the state sells every year. But hunters opposed to the measure fear it’s the first step in a slippery slope toward banning all hunting.

“You start taking out pieces of the puzzle and soon you don’t have a puzzle,” said Dan Gates, executive director and co-founder of the Colorado Trappers and Predator Hunters Association. He’s a leader in a number of groups opposing the ban, including Colorado Wildlife Deserves Better, Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project and Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management.

Self-regulation or out-of-control growth?

The number of mountain lions in Colorado is difficult to determine because of their elusive and solitary nature. Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists estimate between 3,800 and 4,400 adult lions live in the state and say the population has grown since the species was classified as a big game species in 1965.

State biologists do not have an estimate for how many bobcats live in Colorado, but they believe the population is healthy and may be increasing in some areas.

Neither mountain lions nor bobcats are listed as federally threatened or endangered species. An estimated 20,000 to 40,000 mountain lions live in the U.S., as do more than 1.4 million bobcats.

“Both informal and recently collected empirical data suggest Colorado’s lion population is strong and lions are abundant in appropriate habitat,” states a Colorado Parks and Wildlife pamphlet on the species.

In the 2022-2023 hunting season — the most recent for which CPW data is publicly available — 2,599 people bought mountain lion hunting licenses and hunters killed 502 lions, making for a 19% success rate.

Those with opposing views of the ballot initiative posit different futures should mountain lion hunting be banned. But the truth is likely a mix of the two, said Jerry Apker, a retired CPW wildlife biologist who worked as the statewide carnivore biologist for 17 years before his 2017 retirement.

Populations would likely spike in the first years after hunting ends before increased mortality rates temper that growth, Apker said. Eventually, mountain lion populations tend to reach a stasis and fluctuate based on what food and habitat is available.

The felines have larger litters with higher survival rates when more resources are available, but in times of stress, they have smaller litters and more mortalities.

A cessation in hunting would also likely increase human interactions and conflicts with lions, he said. The most hunted lions are typically subadults and young adults — the same lions still working to establish home ranges. More young lions on the landscape means they will eventually be pushed to subprime habitats as well as more populated areas.

There’s no way of knowing how many mountain lions would live in Colorado should hunting stop — there’s never been a statewide research study done on the question, Apker said.

“I think the statements of doom and gloom that they’re going to take over are a convenient argument, but that’s not true,” he said.

Apker opposes the effort to ban mountain lion hunting, but he said other opponents’ argument that the ban would decimate elk and deer herds is far fetched. While predation might increase, the largest impacts to deer and elk populations would come from human alteration of the landscape. Less habitat, the degradation of existing habitat and brutal winters are significantly larger factors that determine population change.

California comparison

Colorado and other western states have enacted various levels of restrictions on mountain lion hunting.

The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission earlier this year ended the state’s spring mountain lion season, instead restricting legal hunting to a single season that runs from November through March. The commission also banned hunters from using electronic recordings of other lions or distressed prey to lure mountain lions to an area.

The Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission in July voted in favor of stricter limits and shorter seasons for cougar hunting. It acted on a petition filed by a number of local and national conservation and animal rights groups.

California voters in 1990 chose to ban mountain lion hunting in the state permanently, though hunting of the felines had not been permitted since 1972 — when then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a moratorium. California is the only state with a full ban on hunting pumas, and it officially states that its aim is to instead conserve the species “for their ecological and intrinsic values,” according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

A study published in 2020 compared California’s lion population with those in 10 western states where hunting is legal, including Colorado. The authors found that California had similar cougar population densities and similar average deer densities as the other states.

California also had the third-lowest rate of cougar-human conflicts per capita, similar rates of cattle depredation and lower rates of sheep depredations.

“In sum, our analysis of the records obtained from state and federal wildlife agencies found no evidence that sport hunting of pumas has produced the management outcomes sought by wildlife managers aside from providing a sport hunting opportunity,” the authors wrote.

Charges of “ballot-box biology”

Proponents of the hunting ban say it is a way to address unethical hunting methods, like the use of dogs, and whether hunting is necessary to manage lion populations. Opponents say it is another example of “ballot-box biology” that lets the majority make decisions often left to wildlife managers.

Apker disagrees the initiative is “ballot-box biology” — he doesn’t think it’s about biology at all. Instead, the question is a broader referendum on hunting as a whole, he said.

“The bottom line is that there are people who think hunting is wrong,” said Apker, who has voiced his opposition to the ballot measure publicly.

Proponents of the ban say hunting for mountain lions is trophy hunting because hunters are allegedly seeking the thrill of the hunt as well as the skins and heads of lions — not the meat. The ballot measure, if passed, would ban trophy hunting, defined as hunting “practiced primarily for the display of an animal’s head, fur, or other body parts, rather than for utilization of the meat.”

Cougar hunters have said repeatedly that while they do often pose with their kill — just like elk and deer hunters — they also eat the meat and are not hunting solely for a trophy. Colorado law requires that mountain lion meat be prepared for consumption by hunters. Gates, from the hunters association, has made steaks, tacos and burritos from lion meat.

“Not only do people eat mountain lion, but they also cherish mountain lion,” he said.

But ballot initiative supporters express doubt — Miller, for one, says there’s no way to know whether meat is eaten. The campaign is not against hunting, she said, but opposes unethical hunting.

“There are plenty of other species to hunt that aren’t so problematic under hunting ethics,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Project and a lifelong hunter, during a news conference last month in support of the ban.

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Even now, after decades of revitalization and efforts to stabilize flows, sections of the urban South Platte still smell of decay and waste, and city officials discourage swimming. But cyclists also pedal along miles of paved trails on the riverfront. Kayakers and surfers play in the whitewater. Carp and trout lurk under bridges, while families of ducks paddle along the calmer waters. And strips of green parks border long stretches of the river where, in previous decades, factories spewed sludge and landfills leached pollutants.

After a long era of neglect and abuse, city officials, nonprofit leaders and developers hope to build on that progress as they pose a question for the future: How can we turn the city toward the river — the waterway that made Denver’s existence on the High Plains possible — instead of putting it at our backs and ignoring it?

More than a quarter of a billion federal dollars are flowing into ecosystem restoration and flood management along the South Platte. For the first time, the Denver City Council recently created a committee dedicated to issues on and development near the river.

Developers plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars along the river in coming years, building as much as 15 million square feet of combined new residential and commercial space on the land where Elitch Gardens Theme and Water Park sits today. If completed, that square footage will be nearly five times larger than Denver International Airport’s terminal building.

Should that and other ambitious projects reach their full potential, the Platte would serve as a focal point of brand new high-rise urban neighborhoods that expand the city’s skyline in a new direction.

“The South Platte River is the birthright of Denver,” said Jeff Shoemaker, who for 40 years led a nonprofit group created to advocate for the river. “We took that birthright and made it a toilet. Fifty years later, it can once again be celebrated as its birthright.”

Property owners ranging from the Denver Housing Authority to Stan Kroenke, the billionaire owner of the Colorado Avalanche and Denver Nuggets, to the city itself will all play roles in determining how new construction capitalizes on a restored South Platte.

The impending turnover of underutilized and unappreciated land has generated buzz and a glut of glossy renderings. At the same time, it’s inducing heartburn in some corners of the city that have seen new investment like that drive gentrification in nearby low-income and minority neighborhoods.

Still, establishing the river as an asset rather than a barrier to urban growth is a sea change that veteran Denver city-builders like architect Chris Shears have hoped for decades would come.

His firm, Shears Adkins Rockmore, has its hands in nearly every landscape-shifting project being contemplated near the South Platte today. The plans include transforming the vast parking lots around Empower Field and Ball Arena into new mixed-use neighborhoods.

Another project to the south would turn the long-vacant field once occupied by the Gates Rubber Co., just south of the Regional Transportation District’s Broadway Station, into a mixed-use community. Plans call for more than 550,000 square feet of office and retail space and nearly 900 apartments.

He compares the opportunities in front of the city today to the 1980s, when then-Mayor Federico Peña set an ambitious agenda that would lead to Denver’s evolution from a stagnant plains town to a modern metropolis.

“This is the time to plan for the future and be optimistic,” Shears said. “The river is going to be much, much more important.”

The South Platte has served as a geographic divide between east and west Denver for nearly all of the city’s existence. Generations of city residents compounded that division by adding man-made barriers, including Interstate 25 and the consolidated freight rail lines, that follow the river’s path.

For Denver city planner David Gaspers, the public and private investment in the river’s restoration and the surging interest in new development near the water present a chance to overwrite some of the mistakes of the past.

“It’s an opportunity to make Denver feel whole again,” Gaspers said. “It’s not a barrier. It’s actually a place where people want to come together.”

After century of neglect, a flood changed everything

French explorers named the South Platte River for its lassitude — in French, “platte” means flat. Some called it the “upside-down river” since, in some places, one had to dig into the riverbed to find water.

Indigenous people for centuries wintered near the confluence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek, eventually joined by explorers, French trappers and Mexican gold seekers. In 1858, after prospectors found gold nearby, Denver was born on the banks of the confluence.

The South Platte’s year-round water allowed for settlement and population growth on the arid High Plains.

“The South Platte is the cradle and birthplace of the city,” said Tom Noel, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Colorado Denver who has authored numerous books and textbooks about Colorado history. “But it took quite a while for people to respect it.”

Early Denver’s industry grew along the river. Hog farms, stockyards, factories and landfills sprouted on its banks in the late 1800s because the river could carry off all the waste, Noel said.

Workers at a paint factory on the river used to stand behind the facility and watch the river turn the color of the paint being made that day as the factory’s discharge reached the water.

The river held the city’s darker secrets: bodies, cast-off burglary loot. Only the poorest of the poor lived near the water.

The waste, the chemicals and the sludge accumulated. A Rocky Mountain News reporter in 1962 toured the river as the city considered building a sanitation project and wrote that he came away with tears in his eyes.

“The tears weren’t from emotion,” the reporter wrote. “It was from the stench. The foul odors were enough to lift the hat from your head.”

The neglected river took its vengeance in 1965. After days of rain, its waters surged on June 16, building into a moving wall that picked up debris as it rushed toward Denver — cars, mobile homes and heavy equipment all caught in the swell.

The flood killed at least 20 people in the Denver area and caused $5.4 billion in damage in today’s dollars — one of the most devastating natural disasters in city history. It wiped out railyards, warehouses, neighborhoods and all but one of the city’s bridges spanning the water.

As the river split the city, Denver state Sen. Joe Shoemaker received a call while working on his family’s farm in Iowa during a summer break. His son, Jeff, remembered his father coming back from the house, face white as paper. He told the family the river had flooded.

“What river?” responded Jeff Shoemaker, then 11 years old.

Despite growing up in Denver, he didn’t know a river existed — an ignorance, or at least common disregard, held by many in the burgeoning city until the river tried to wash it away.

The flood — and the phone call to the Shoemaker farm — altered the future of the South Platte.

In the aftermath, Denver Mayor Bill McNichols created the Platte River Development Committee in 1974 to restore the river and mitigate future flood risk. He appointed Joe Shoemaker as chairman.

A year later, the committee opened Confluence Park — the first park on the river. Though crews could build only a quarter mile of riverside trail in either direction before being blocked, the creation of the park marked a turning point in the river’s history.

The committee in 1976 morphed into the nonprofit Greenway Foundation, which methodically transformed landfills and industrial sites along the river into parks. A landfill became Globeville Landing Park. Eleven industrial sites became Commons Park, a stretch of green behind Union Station. A city maintenance site became Gates-Crescent Park, now home to the Children’s Museum of Denver.

“My dad’s motto, which is now mine, was: ‘There’s no done, there’s only next,’ ” said Jeff Shoemaker, who took over leadership of the Greenway Foundation in 1982 and worked there until his retirement in 2022.

As green spaces prospered on the riverbanks, more Denverites came to run, bike and picnic. The Greenway Foundation looked to the future, creating a series of master plans for the river and the land around it.

But the foundation — and other advocates who hoped the river could be more than a moving sewer — needed to overcome a culture that for decades ignored or scorned the South Platte.

While most Denverites now know the river exists, there is still work to be done to overcome its negative image, said Ryan Aids, current executive director of the Greenway Foundation.

“Every great city has a river running through it: Chicago, New York,” Aids said. “And every city has done what Denver did to its river in the beginning, which is neglect it, abandon it, pollute it, turn its back on it.

“Then cities started revitalization — to turn their front door to the river. And Denver is starting to do that as well.”

“A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”

City documents recognize the potential in the land along the river.

The 2019 version of Blueprint Denver, the city’s comprehensive plan, includes a growth strategy map. It shows clusters of dense future development along the river, marking those areas as “regional centers.” Regional centers, as a category, are expected to provide 50% of the city’s job growth and 30% of its housing growth by 2040.

But with the renewed attention to long-neglected areas near the South Platte comes the specter that new money will push out longtime residents. As the city mitigates flood risk and pollution — the factors that made living near the river more of a curse than a blessing — low-income residents will be vulnerable to rising costs.

That’s a reality Denver knows well after some of its long-established Black and Latino neighborhoods, themselves largely the result of racist housing policy, faced rapid demographic change as the city’s population grew over the last two decades.

In west Denver, Councilwoman Jamie Torres’ district includes some of those long-neglected areas that are now seeing a swell of interest and investment.

Sun Valley is home to both subsidized housing and the Denver Broncos’ stadium. A framework plan to build on Empower Field’s south lots could be a catalyst for a stampede of new development — though that is on hold for now and depends on the whims of the franchise’s new ownership group, which hasn’t ruled out the option of building a new stadium elsewhere.

On the east side of the river, the Auraria neighborhood is the epicenter of ambitious projects that, if fully realized, could see the city’s skyline roughly double in size.

Much of that neighborhood, once home to a largely Latino community, was already wiped away and remade in the last century. After the 1965 flood battered the economically marginalized neighborhood, voters in 1969 passed a bond measure that laid the groundwork for the multi-school college campus that anchors the area today.

All the potential development near the river “can marginalize existing communities if there isn’t any way of shepherding that dialog together — because it’s just so based on property ownership,” Torres said. “That could be a really gentrifying factor.”

But the council’s newly formed committee promises to shape the future of Denver and its river. And Torres is its chair.

The South Platte River Committee has met just twice since forming in July, but even its creation sends a message, according to council leaders. City staffer members focused on the river see it as much more than a sleepy procedural step.

“What will make any project (or) any effort great is leadership support,” said Ashlee Grace, the director of the city’s Waterway Resiliency Program, the name of the city-run river project fueled by $350 million in federal river restoration money. “This committee forming, I think, is a huge step for the city. Our elected leaders recognize the value of the South Platte River and how it can truly be a part of a vibrant future for Denver.”

The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and then-Mayor Michael Hancock signed the agreement launching the Waterway Resiliency Program in May 2023 after years of study, negotiations and wrangling for federal funding. But even that mammoth undertaking is focused only on a portion of the river, along with its Harvard Gulch and Weir Gulch tributaries.

Private projects such as the long-awaited River Mile development — slated to eventually replace Elitch Gardens — are also aimed at improving the health of the river, while adding recreational opportunities and housing for thousands of people.

Council president Amanda Sandoval highlighted other projects with the potential to transform the city, all within half a mile of the river, including the still-progressing National Western Center campus overhaul north of downtown and the 60-acre blank slate of state-owned land at the former Burnham Yard railyards, south of the city center.

The river “is literally running through all of the catalytic projects that are all coming to fruition at the same time,” Sandoval said in an interview. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If we don’t prioritize it, it will be done piecemeal.”

Smaller projects have tested the waters

The megaprojects on the horizon follow smaller redevelopments on the South Platte.

Developer Susan Powers remembers when she first came across the abandoned warehouse and barrel-roofed building that she and her partners eventually would turn into the $65 million mixed-used development dubbed Steam on the Platte.

She was riding her bike along the river when she came upon an unexpected detour that routed her onto Zuni Street near Old West Colfax Avenue. There she spotted the cluster of buildings on the river’s eastern bank. That former warehouse has been transformed into an office building that appeals to techie tenants, while the barrel-roofed building is occupied by Raices Brewing Company and its often-bustling taproom.

As far as Powers knows, Raices is the only bar or restaurant in the city that offers outdoor seating along the South Platte — for now, at least.

“When you go there, it has its own little ecosystem,” Powers said. “Rabbits are still running around. There are lots of birds, and you can really get away from what really, only a couple of blocks away, is more urban life.”

Powers has sold her stake in the office building and plans to sell Raices’ owners their building. She also hopes to sell a vacant chunk of land that could see a new condo development, with the building facing the river.

Steam on the Platte may gain much more company along those banks in the decades to come.

On the east side of the river, the potential vertical development would come on the seas of asphalt parking along Speer Boulevard and Auraria Parkway, turning them into lively mixed-use neighborhoods. The River Mile and Ball Arena projects are siblings divided mainly by the consolidated rail tracks that run between the arena and the amusement park.

The South Platte River Committee on Aug. 14 received a briefing from city planning and finance staff regarding plans to rezone 70 acres of land around Ball Arena.

Details shared in that briefing included 6,000 units of apartments and other new housing, more than 1,000 of which would be reserved for low-income residents. There would be no limit on building heights on the land if the property owner — billionaire developer and sports mogul Stan Kroenke’s company, Kroenke Sports and Entertainment — were to live up to city-brokered affordable housing conditions.

The arena district wouldn’t directly touch the river, but a network of walking and biking trails would help weave it into the city’s multimodal transportation network, providing easy access to the river for future residents and visitors. In fact, plans call for eight bike and pedestrian bridges that either carry users to the South Platte or Cherry Creek or take them over those two waterways, said Greg Dorolek a landscape architect working on that project.

Dorolek is co-president of Wenk Associates, which is among the many cooks in the kitchen for the Ball Arena area redevelopment. It’s also involved in the neighboring River Mile project.

“You can live on this river and restore it at the same time, and I think it’s going to be exciting,” Dorolek said, adding that Denver is on the verge of becoming “a river city.”

The River Mile made a big splash when its ambitious plan was unveiled in early 2018. It’s a joint endeavor between Kroenke’s KSE and boutique developer Revesco Properties, and the development’s leaders seek to fill in what Revesco president and CEO Rhys Duggan has referred to as “the doughnut hole” between downtown and the rest of the city.

Renderings released over the years have shown attention-grabbing details, from tall, spindly residential towers to grand promenades that step down to the water. Anchoring it all is the river.

The development team also has pledged to invest $100 million in reinvigorating the milelong stretch of the South Platte, including likely dredging 6 to 8 feet of sand from the riverbed to create a narrower, deeper channel that would help restore fish habitat.

For now, the ambitious project is in a holding pattern as Duggan and company keep their eyes on the ebbs and flows of another often-unpredictable force: the U.S. economy.

“Obviously, the interest rate environment has shifted dramatically in the last two years, and I think we need to come into a period of normalization before we can get to work on the river,” Duggan told The Denver Post.

The development team continues to work on designs, engineering and entitlements as well as seek local and federal approvals needed for the work.

Meanwhile, Duggan is celebrating the momentum on the river.

When he rides his bike along the banks, he sees a buildup of exciting new development, including the Hurley Place and Denargo Market projects in the River North Art District northeast of downtown.

The South Platte isn’t a barrier. It isn’t a dump. Now, Duggan said, it’s a public asset.

Finding an oasis close to home

On a recent afternoon just north of Denver, Jack Borthwick tossed his fly fishing rod off the bridge to a friend standing below on the riverbank. A giant carp thrashed on the line, bending the rod — now in Nic Hall’s hands — into a sharp U.

Car tires, a Mountain Dew bottle and an Amazon box littered the bank. A broken-down and opened-up trailer sat abandoned just off the road, and an eerie industrial siren screeched from across the river.

On one side of the bridge, a water treatment plant churned through 2.2 million peoples’ waste, its smell sitting on everything in its vicinity. On the other, the smokestacks of Suncor Energy’s oil refinery thrust toward the sun.

But this is one of Borthwick’s favorite places to fish, and the carp pulling on his rod made the scramble up and down the banks worth it.

He said the thrill of sight-casting to huge carp on unoccupied riverbanks beats fighting crowds for prime fishing spots on the more famous trout waters an hour or so outside of Denver.

Best of all, this spot — known as “The Stank” —  is 10 minutes from his house in northwest Denver.

The river and its parks are critical pieces of nature accessible to people in the city who don’t have the money, means or time to drive to the mountains, said Nic Hall, Borthwick’s fishing partner and the president of Denver Trout Unlimited. The Denver chapter of the national fishing and conservation group is the only local affiliate dedicated to a city river.

“A lot of people look at an urban river and think, ‘Gross,’ ” Hall said as he scouted for carp. “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Slowly, Denverites’ perception of the river is shifting, said Jolon Clark, the executive director of Denver Parks and Recreation.

He worked for the Greenway Foundation for 18 years and served two terms on the City Council before joining new Mayor Mike Johnston’s administration last year.

“There’s still a lot of people who don’t know what’s going on down on the river,” Clark said. “But being in the middle of the city and seeing a skyscraper — and a blue heron fishing right beneath it — that’s just a magical experience.”

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Frank Raymond on Thursday was sentenced to 29 years in prison after pleading guilty in May to first-degree sexual assault, attempted sexual assault on a child and sexual exploitation.

“This was an outrageous and horrific crime,”17th District Attorney Brian Mason said in a news release. “Sexual assault on a child is disgraceful. This defendant preyed on a young boy under the guise of a mentor and life coach. The boy entrusted this defendant and then he harmed this young child in a deep and profound way.”

Thornton police arrested Raymond — who used the alias “Arya Magi” online — in June 2022 after they found him sleeping with a naked 12-year-old boy in a car parked outside a restaurant, according to the news release. The boy said Raymond was his “life coach” and that they had met at a park a year prior. Investigators found videos on Raymond’s phone showing him sexually abusing the boy.

Police then searched Raymond’s cloud storage account, where they found thousands of files showing sexual abuse of children, according to the news release. A veteran Thornton police detective said the images were the worst she’d seen in 30 years working in law enforcement.

Raymond faced a separate criminal case in Adams County District Court in connection to those images. Online court records show he pleaded guilty to possessing videos of sexual exploitation of children and was sentenced to five years in prison.

Denver temperatures will hover near 90 through Monday with no rain or storms forecasted until Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service in Boulder.

Temperatures in the mountains are expected to max out in the mid-to high-70s. The mountains, too, should remain dry until Monday, when chances of isolated storms return.

https://x.com/NWSBoulder/status/1829487279737651315

Peavey, 57, was found dead on Saturday by a search party of his family and friends after being reported missing earlier in the week. He had last been heard from on the evening of Aug. 19, according to the sheriff’s office.

Within hours of Peavey’s body being discovered, the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office with support from the Georgetown Police Department apprehended Ferrer. He was arrested on warrant for failure to appear in court on an unrelated weapons charge in Nebraska but he had already been identified as a person of interest in Peavey’s death, according to Friday’s news release.

The sheriff’s office, state investigators and the 5th Judicial District Attorney’s Office have now collected enough evidence to charge Ferrer with first-degree murder, felony murder and aggravated robbery, according to Firday’s announcement.

Prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder and aggravated robbery in the case, the district attorney’s office announced Friday. Ferrer appeared in court Friday afternoon, where a judge set his bond at $1 million. He is being held in the Clear Creek County jail and his next court date is Sept. 18.

Peavey lived in Idaho Springs and bred Dobermans through his company Elite European Dobermans. After his body was found, the sheriff’s office announced that as many as 10 puppies were missing from his property. Anyone who has recently purchased a Doberman puppy in the last two weeks is asked to contact the sheriff’s office. Peavey’s dogs are microchipped for identification.

Friday’s release noted the puppies are still unaccounted for.

Following an autopsy, the Clear Creek County Coroner’s Office determined that Peavey likely was killed around the time he was last heard from on Aug.19. The cause of death was a gunshot wound.

Anyone with more information about the ongoing investigation is urged to call the sheriff’s office at 303-670-7567 or send an email to crime_tips@clearcreeksheriff.us. Anonymous tips can be submitted online at bit.ly/CCSOCrimeTips.

A collared wolf “spent some time” inside the park in August, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s monthly update on wolf locations Wednesday.

The map released Wednesday shows a wolf traveled in watersheds near U.S. 34 in the northwestern corner of the national park. The highway — called Trail Ridge Road inside the park — spans the park from east to west and crosses the high alpine terrain of the Continental Divide.

The wolf’s movements are the first confirmed wolf presence in Rocky Mountain National Park since its establishment in 1915, park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said in an email. Rocky Mountain National Park officials expected reintroduced wolves would eventually move into the park, the land for which had been their native territory prior to the animal being wiped out.

Settlers traveling west in the late 1800s decimated elk and deer herds, reducing the amount of food available to wolves. In the early 1900s, people began hunting and poisoning wolves to protect their livestock, leading to the extirpation of the apex predator by the 1940s. A majority of Colorado voters in 2020 elected to return the species to state.

At least one wolf also traveled in a watershed along Colorado 14 in the Poudre Canyon south of Red Feather Lakes. All of the state’s known wolves remain north of Interstate 70, CPW officials said.

Eleven adult wolves are known to live in Colorado: nine released in December as part of the state’s voter-mandated reintroduction program and two remaining from a pack that formed after wolves naturally migrated from Wyoming. The state released 10 wolves in December, but one died this spring, likely killed by a mountain lion.

Two of the reintroduced wolves bred and this spring produced at least three pups, but state wildlife officials on Tuesday announced they would capture and relocate the pack following a string of livestock depredations.

It’s unclear where the pack — called the Copper Creek pack — will be moved and whether those wolves will be released into the wild or kept at a sanctuary.

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The pack of wolves, called the Copper Creek pack, will be captured from the wild in Grand County, Colorado Parks and Wildlife announced Tuesday night. The agency did not disclose where the pack will be moved to, citing the need to protect the wolves and CPW staff.

“The decision to capture and relocate the Copper Creek pack was made with the careful consideration of multiple factors and feedback from many different stakeholders,” CPW Director Jeff Davis said in a statement. ”Our options in this unique case were very limited, and this action is by no means a precedent for how CPW will resolve wolf-livestock conflict moving forward.

“The ultimate goal of the operation is to relocate the pack to another location while we assess our best options for them to continue to contribute to the successful restoration of wolves in Colorado.”

The relocation announcement comes less than 10 days after the wildlife agency announced proof of at least three pups born this spring and shared a video showing the pups playing in a puddle. The pups are the first born to wolves released in December as part of a voter-mandated reintroduction of the predator species extirpated from Colorado nearly a century ago.

Agency leaders will provide more information about the relocation after the targeted wolves are captured, according to the statement.

The agency’s statement about the relocation raises more questions than it answers, said Michael Saul, director of the Rockies and Plains Program at Defenders of Wildlife, which advocated for the reintroduction. Saul wanted to know whether CPW will keep the pack together during the capture and relocation effort, where they will be taken and where they will be released back into the wild — if at all.

“This reintroduction is in its tenuous, early stages and I just don’t understand how it makes sense to give up on the one reproducing pack we have,” he said.

The Copper Creek pack’s wolves, including the known pups, are among at least a dozen of the animals now roaming Colorado’s mountains. Eight other adults were released in December after their capture and relocation from Oregon, and a pair of Wyoming-based wolves naturally migrated into the state earlier. One of the relocated wolves was found dead in the spring.

Colorado voters in 2020 narrowly voted in favor of the reintroduction program, fueled primarily by voters along the urban Front Range. Many ranchers have opposed the effort and have said the return of wolves threatens their livelihoods and ways of life.

Colorado is the first state to reintroduce the apex predator.

Since the reintroduction, wolves have killed or injured at least nine sheep and 15 head of cattle, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s list of confirmed depredations. Most of those depredations were caused by the paired wolves in Middle Park, which formed the Copper Creek pack, said Reid DeWalt, CPW’s assistant director for the agency’s Aquatic, Terrestrial and Natural Resources branch, on Friday during a Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting.

“We have had a few other depredations from the other wolves, but nothing to the level we’ve seen in Middle Park,” he said.

Ranchers in Middle Park repeatedly have asked the agency to take action to stop the wolf depredations, but the agency until now has declined to intervene beyond providing more nonlethal deterrent resources. The Middle Park Stockgrowers in the spring requested a permit that would allow ranchers to kill depredating wolves, but the permit was denied.

DeWalt offered an update on the wolf reintroduction effort during the commission meeting but did not mention the possibility of relocating the wolves. Davis, CPW’s director, also did not mention the relocation during his update to the commission.

The agency still plans to release more wolves this winter, DeWalt said Friday. CPW has not yet found a state or government willing to supply wolves after a Washington tribe reversed its agreement to provide the canines.

But DeWalt said staff members were confident they’d be able to find another source. The agency plans to release the next batch of wolves in the same northern zone they used late last year so that they’ll increase the wolf population in the area, DeWalt said.

The agency has hired five predator damage conflict specialists. Their job is to focus primarily on wolf issues, but they will also work on predations with bears and mountain lions, DeWalt said.

The five specialists and other CPW staff attended a two-week training in Oregon and Idaho to learn about wolf management and how to deter depredations, he said.

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As temperatures reaching triple digits become less unusual, the same oppressive heat that wilts gardens and sends hordes to local pools can pose a serious risk to people’s health. The frequent headlines noting record-breaking heat are unlikely to stop as climate change shifts weather patterns and makes Denver’s summers hotter.

“We’ve had hot days in Denver, but these long stretches of extreme heat aren’t something that everyone is used to,” said Lis Cohen, climate adaptation and resiliency manager at the city’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency.

Before a much-anticipated cooldown Thursday, Denver’s temperatures broke a series of records. The high of 102 recorded on Aug. 4 was the highest for that date, greatly exceeding the previous record of 98 degrees. Similar records were broken on July 12, 14 and 29, according to the National Weather Service.

As global temperatures continue to rise, Denver is not the only city working to adapt to rising temperatures while contending with infrastructure that wasn’t built for extended periods of heat. NASA on July 21 announced that that day was the hottest in Earth’s recorded history.

The record was promptly broken the next day — and July 22 remains the hottest day ever recorded on Earth, according to NASA.

Average summer temperatures in Denver have risen 3 degrees since 1970 and are expected to continue rising as the climate changes, according to Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization that reports on climate science.

Even when Denver’s heat isn’t record breaking, it’s persistent. Twenty days in July exceeded 90 degrees. Data from the National Weather Service show that 100-degree days are becoming more frequent, as are streaks of consecutive 100-degree days.

So far this summer, Denver has recorded six days with temperatures above 100 — the third-highest number of 100-degree days on record, behind 2005 and 2012, according to the weather service.

Those sweltering days can be dangerous.

“It’s important for us to understand that extreme heat is a risk for everyone and everybody,” said Lisa Romero, a senior community health specialist for Kaiser Permanente Colorado.

“Becoming a more significant risk”

Heat illnesses range from dehydration to heat stroke, which can be deadly and cause permanent disability. Heat illnesses occur when the body becomes so hot it cannot properly cool itself through sweating.

Heat can also exacerbate other health conditions, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, because it increases the amount of ground-level ozone, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Those most at risk of heat illness include older people, children, people with certain preexisting medical conditions, outdoor workers and people without adequate cooling in their homes, Romero said.

“In places where heat is emerging and becoming a more significant risk, there is that work to do,” she said.

On a broader scale, the rate of medical visits for heat-related illnesses has reached the highest level since the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment started collecting data in 2019. The data is collected between May and September in 13 counties, mostly on the Front Range. The others are Mesa and La Plata counties.

In 2019, the state recorded 258 visits for heat illnesses in those counties. That is a rate of 5.6 visits per 10,000 residents. So far in 2024, the state has documented 653 visits for heat illnesses — a rate of 10.5 visits per 10,000 and the highest number recorded in any year.

“We know heat is already a risk — it’s already the deadliest weather phenomenon — and we know that heat is going to increase with climate change,” Romero said. “So thinking about how we can mitigate that risk and those vulnerabilities is really important. We need to have an overlapping comprehensive approach to addressing that risk.”

Same city, different heat

Cohen, the city’s climate adaptation manager, sometimes watches the temperature reading on her car dashboard as she drives around the city. It can swing up to 12 degrees, depending on where she is, from the hot concrete of downtown to the greener spaces along City Park.

“It’s getting hotter,” she said. “The heat waves are happening more often. And people are not experiencing the same heat in different parts of the city.”

It’s part of her job to help city residents find solutions for heat risks. Those solutions vary widely, but Cohen and her team are focusing first on the neighborhoods most affected by rising temperatures.

To know where to go, Denver’s climate action office uses a map that shows how vulnerable each neighborhood is to heat. The analysis crunched a wide swath of data on neighborhoods: tree coverage, access to vehicles, surfaces that increase heat, race and ethnicity, education levels, household incomes, age distribution, age of the housing stock, health indicators.

Many of the poorest and most racially diverse neighborhoods are also the most at-risk to heat, the map shows.

People with lower incomes are more impacted by heat in myriad ways, Cohen said. Those who don’t own a car must walk or bike outside and wait in the sun for buses. They are less likely to be able to afford a newer home with air conditioning or portable cooling units, not to mention the higher energy bills associated with hot days.

Areas with many buildings, lots of pavement and few trees can be several degrees hotter than greener spaces — a phenomenon known as an urban heat island. An analysis released last month by Climate Central showed that Denver’s downtown core can be more than 12 degrees hotter than other areas of the city.

Those areas also stay warmer longer into the night, as asphalt, concrete and tall buildings retain heat, Cohen said.

Part of the city’s long-term plan is to plant more trees in neighborhoods without much tree coverage. Not only do trees provide shade, they also improve air quality and mental health, Cohen said. So far, the city has worked with local nonprofits to plant more than 1,300 trees on private property.

That work will continue in coming years, as part of the climate office’s $5 million allocation from the federal Inflation Reduction Act.

The city is also providing rebates for residents to install heat pumps and, for a more immediate impact, working with nonprofits to distribute air conditioning units.

To generate additional solutions, the climate office hosted a series of four summits to hear concerns and potential fixes from other city agencies, nonprofits, businesses, health care providers and more. Denver’s climate officials will decide which ideas to prioritize in the next few weeks, Cohen said.

Heat and its impacts are an “all-hands-on-deck” issue, she said.

“It’s not something that traditionally has been a huge issue here,” she said, “but it is now — and will continue to be.”

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