Boulder – Rocky Mountain National Park expects to spend as much as $18 million to reduce its elk herd by shooting some and dispersing the others.
The potential costs of a 20-year elk management plan were displayed at a meeting Monday evening in Boulder where park officials outlined ways to reduce the herd and solicited public comments.
Park officials said the program could require hiring extra staff or a contractor to shoot elk, building fences to protect vegetation from them, transporting carcasses, testing them for disease and processing the meat.
Superintendent Vaughn Baker said he was surprised when he first saw what the program might cost. “Doing something like this is not going to be cheap, for sure,” he said. “But we’re talking 20 years.”
As many as 3,100 elk have been gobbling up young willows and aspen, which beavers, songbirds and butterflies need to thrive. The park favors an aggressive reduction plan: killing 200 to 700 elk annually for four years, then smaller numbers for the next 16 years.
Its goal is to maintain a herd of 1,200 to 1,700 elk.
The estimated cost of the park’s preferred alternative: $16.5 million to $18.2 million.
The park has already received about 500 responses to the elk management plan it proposed last month. Its preferred plan calls for killing them at night with silencer-equipped guns to minimize disturbances to park visitors – many of whom come to admire its impressive elk herd.
According to park biologist Therese Johnson, most people recognize that something should be done to manage the elk population, but there are contentious disagreements about the best approach, she said. “For and against wolves. For and against hunting. And we have heard from people who prefer fertility control to killing the elk.”
At the Boulder meeting, one woman who identified herself only by her spiritual name – Jewels – tearfully questioned the plan to slaughter hundreds of elk each year within a national park.
“It breaks my heart to hear this,” she said, “that they would be shot.”
Others questioned why the park waited so long to do something about an unnaturally large elk population within and around its borders.
“Fewer elk are going to help all of us,” said Wally Wedel, a cabin owner near the park who said the elk are crowding out deer, rubbing paint off cabins, eating gardens and knocking downs bird feeders with their antlers.
The park is accepting public comments on its preferred plan until July 4.
In Estes Park, state Division of Wildlife district manager Rick Spowart said he has been taking “lots of calls from angry hunters” who want an elk season within Rocky Mountain National Park.
However, hunting is prohibited in national parks, and any exception would require congressional approval.
The park cannot relocate the elk because a fatal and contagious illness, chronic wasting disease, exists within the herd. Any elk killed would be tested for the disease. Those with the disease would be incinerated or disposed in a chemical digester. The park plans to donate disease-free meat, but recipients would have to sign a form acknowledging the presence of the illness in the herd.
The park service is hosting three more 6 to 8 p.m. meetings this week on its elk management plan: tonight at the Pulliam Community Building in Loveland; Wednesday at the Grand Lake Elementary School; and Thursday at the Holiday Inn, 101 S. St. Vrain Ave., in Estes Park.
Staff writer David Olinger can be reached at 303-820-1498 or at dolinger@denverpost.com.
