Rocky Mountain National Park
Slowly, like the ice receding from a frosty, high mountain lake, the blustery and heavy-handed winter that clobbered Colorado began to relax its grip on this majestic land in the past few weeks.
Early Wednesday, during a brief snow squall that whistled over the peaks of the you’re-not-kidding Never Summer Mountains, a bull elk walked from the darkness of the pines into a streamside meadow. He lowered his heavy, antlered head and began chomping on the fresh willow buds, green aspen shoots and sprouts of new grass that poked through the dull winter landscape.
There are too many of them, these great, thick-furred woodland symbols of the West. The elk are giving the ecosystem of plants and birds and beavers a merciless beating with their incessant eating.
The most likely scenario tendered by park officials to deal with the overpopulation is to shoot about 1,000 elk. This is mixed news for the six-point bull that dined last week in a swampy place near West Horseshoe Creek.
He’ll have more to eat, of course.
But on a less positive note, it’s likely the big guy might get a little lonely during the mating season.
Because the elk targeted by either hired sharpshooters or licensed hunters – a key issue that has not been decided – will be the females.
“Preferred option”
Today most of the breeding-age cows in the park are pregnant, the work of the crazy-eyed bugling bulls last September. The cows will give birth in late spring – May and June. For many of the cows, those will be their last calves. And their last spring.
Officially, park officials call the elk harvest plan the “preferred option.” A final decision could be announced in June. Killing was chosen over a list of possibilities that included doing nothing to injecting female elk with a birth control drug. The park service also prefers to hire “sharpshooters” to kill the elk. Probably at night. With silencers.
A month ago Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., proposed a bill that would change the 1929 law banning hunting in national parks, allowing licensed hunters to cull this park herd instead of using paid shooters. Last week Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., followed suit with a similar proposal.
On a sometimes-warm, sometimes-snowing day last week, people in the national park and in the gateway town of Estes Park mulled the death of elk.
“At Moraine Park last evening the herd came out of the woods,” said vacationing Ed Durham of Columbia, Mo. “There must have been 500. If they have to thin the herd, that’s fine. But they need to let hunters do it. That’s the only right way.”
Just outside the gate, on the grass beside a souvenir rock store, employee Taunya Gibbons stopped splitting firewood for a moment.
“The solution would be reintroducing wolves,” she said. “That’s how it worked for thousands of years. But people have that ridiculous ‘big, bad wolf’ thing in their heads.”
Elk were eliminated from the area by the 1870s, victims of unregulated hunting. With their main prey gone, wolves vanished from the area by 1900. Elk were reintroduced in 1913 and 1914, just before the national park was established.
Last year, the reintroduction of wolves was quickly crossed off the possibility list by park officials.
“When you move to an inner city you expect to deal with gangs and drugs,” said Gibbons, who came to Estes Park six years ago. “If you move to a place like this you should expect to deal with wolves.”
Better than starvation?
Estimates put the number of elk in and around the park as high as 3,100. A sustainable population that will not eat its way through the park’s vegetation, biologists say, is between 1,200 and 1,700 animals. The plan could kill up to 700 elk per year at the start of the program, with the number tapering to as few as 25 in ensuing years. The plan could cover 20 years.
“Killing a thousand elk is a terrible thing to have to do,” said Durham, who said he’s a former hunter. “But to lose elk to starvation and disease, well, there’s nothing worse than that.”
Gibbons leaned on her ax and looked to the southwest, down U.S. 36 as it meanders through the edge of the town and into the park at Beaver Meadows. She sighed.
“They say wolves aren’t an option,” she said. “They say people won’t tolerate wolves. So now what? Well, now they have to go in with rifles and kill about half of all the elk in the park. Is that better?”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
