Cañon City – The artist Christo, as you likely know, wants to stretch sheets of brightly colored fabric across the Arkansas River. The planning for the project is now in its ninth year. By way of comparison, it took only five years to build the Hoover Dam, four years to build the Golden Gate Bridge and just a few months for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie to create an entire family.
Today, the plan by Christo and fellow artist Jeanne- Claude to stretch the sheets across the river and send shimmering shafts of light dancing onto the water is well on its way to a scheduled unveiling in the summer of 2009.
There are only a few remaining roadblocks. And frankly, those obstacles are so minor they’re hardly worth mentioning. Approval from the Bureau of Land Management, for example. And approval from the Colorado State Parks department, the state Department of Transportation, State Patrol, Division of Wildlife, officials in Fremont and Chaffee counties, officials in Cañon City and Salida to the west. Oh, and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Thumbs up or down
All of that approval hinges on the ongoing assessment by those government folks of the impact the bright, flapping sheets might have on a few things.
Traffic is one.
And, of course, river rafting, fishing, stress levels of bighorn sheep, movement of dirt and rock, non-native weed infestation, things that might fall into the river and thus require a special permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, bald eagles crashing into the cables, rattlesnakes biting the tourists, the cannon that shot Hunter S.
Thompson’s ashes into the air near Aspen, cement blocks to anchor the cables, whether the fabric goes down the river and clogs Cañon City’s water plant, the wind, vandalism and, last but not least, trucks crashing and splashing startled art lovers with uranium.
Which leads to the obvious question: What the heck does the ash cannon that blasted Thompson’s remains into the forest have to do with this?
“We’d like to get FAA air restriction on planes and helicopters flying above the river,” said the man who has been up to his ears in the Christo plan for all of its nine years, BLM environmental coordinator Pete Zwaneveld.
“When they shot that Hunter Thompson guy into the air, they had an FAA permit. We’d like to get something like that.”
Zwaneveld, 57, a jeans and plaid-shirt kind of guy, is paid for his work on the Christo project not with tax money but with a seemingly bottomless fund set up by the wealthy artist.
He sits in his BLM cubicle in Cañon City these days, wrestling with 1,100 letters and e-mails he has received from the public. His summary of the notes will be part of his BLM report due out in September – a huge factor in whether Christo gets the thumbs up or just the thumb. The public comment period officially closed about two weeks ago.
“I’d say the notes are about 60-40 against it,” Zwaneveld said Thursday. “I’m neutral, but I’d say there’s certainly a chance the project will happen. Maybe not in 2009, but maybe in 2010.”
Which will give everyone a little more time to deal with the issues. Such as the rattlesnakes.
“People will get out of their cars to take pictures,” he said. “They’ll want to get up high on the rocks along the river canyon. There are lots, and I mean lots, of rattlesnakes in those rocks.”
Potential hazards
With snakes and tourists mingling, “Over the River” (the official name of the project) could easily become “Into the Ambulance.”
Which is another problem. With thousands of visitors flocking to the two-week art exhibit, U.S. 50 along the Arkansas River would become deluged with traffic. And construction of the project – a real road-jammer – would take two years, according to Zwaneveld, who said he has met with Christo and Jeanne-Claude about two dozen times since 1996.
“Getting an ambulance in there would be a problem,” Zwaneveld said. “We might have ambulances stationed 24 hours a day along the river.”
And the sheep?
“That’s a real concern,” he said. “A few years ago the Division of Wildlife did a study on the bighorns, implanting heart monitors inside several of them. When the sheep saw a raft, which is common, their heart rates went way up. A letter from a Colorado State University professor called the sheep ‘nervous Nellies’ and said the stress levels would kill them.”
Making the Nellies especially nervous would be the massive cranes and bulldozers needed to install 2,400 gigantic cement anchor blocks along the riverbanks. Each block would weigh about 400 pounds, with a pair (one on each side of the river) supporting one of the 1,200 cables.
“Each block needs a level pad,” Zwaneveld said. “And we’re concerned that disrupting all that dirt would allow non-native weeds to grow.”
On a brighter note, the uranium might kill the weeds.
On Feb. 15, a truck carrying uranium ore on U.S. 50 near the town of Swissvale – one of Christo’s most coveted stretches of river for some of his fabric panels – crashed on a sharp turn, spilling uranium onto the road.
“The Department of Transportation is pretty concerned about a thing like that happening with all those tourists packed into the canyon,” said Zwaneveld.
And then there are the eagles. Many of them winter along the river, and, well, there’d be 1,200 metal cables there, too.
“What we definitely wouldn’t want,” Zwaneveld said, “is having eagles fly into the cables. It would kill them. Or they’d break a wing and fall into the river and drown. There’s the Endangered Species Act, the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Bald Eagle Protection Act. …
“That would really be bad.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
