Aurora – It was run No. 8 – the eighth time Sunday that Rosella Cox and family pulled into Del Mar Park with a red 1998 GMC pickup, its bed brimming with the crunched remains of aspen, weeping willow and pine.
By midafternoon, the family knew the drill well: Pull up to the landfill of branches. Don’t hit one of the front- end loaders keeping the pile neat. Back up. Dump.
“Hey, it’s a good way to make a small living,” said Cox’s grandson, Matthew Metcalf, 19.
Most folks should be raking leaves this time of year instead of picking up downed limbs.
But such is the cost when a snowstorm comes early to the Front Range.
Because trees are still thick with leaves, damage to limbs and branches is often greater under the weight of a wet, heavy snow.
The city of Aurora, like other municipalities in metro Denver, invited residents to haul downed limbs to appointed sites for free.
Large grinders will churn the debris into mulch to be made available to the public.
City workers also will begin street-by-street collection of downed limbs starting today, a chore officials believe will stretch into mid-November.
The damage was widespread in Aurora, which saw 10 to 20 inches of snow.
“It’s always disheartening to wake up on an early morning and look out the window and see all the branches bowing, then to step outside and hear the branches snapping around you,” said Rick Bowser, Aurora city forester.
Bowser said it’s too early to estimate how much debris had been collected.
But he said it probably will compare to the blizzard of March 2003, after which the city collected more than 20,000 cubic yards of limbs.
That’s enough to cover a football field with 9 feet of debris.
By 5 p.m. Sunday, the pile at Del Mar Park was 612 feet around and about 25 feet high with honey locust, silver maple and others.
Cox did not lose anything of sentimental value when the tops of her aspen, willow and pine trees fell last week.
None were trees her children played on.
But Cox, 73, hates to see it happen all the same.
“When you get a trunk like this,” she said, stretching wide her index fingers and thumbs to make a circle, “it takes a long time to grow something like that.”
Cox plans to borrow the pickup again to retrieve mulch from the storm.
So in a few months, a piece of her downed willow branch might end up back in her backyard, conserving water and helping another tree grow.
