The Homestake Valley on the eastern edge of the Holy Cross Wilderness near Red Cliff looks like an undisturbed hideaway at first sight.
From the turnoff on U.S. 24 at Homestake Reservoir Road to the dam 10 miles upstream at 10,200 feet, Homestake Creek meanders through a wide wetland teeming with lush shrubbery, wildlife and the occasional lily pond. At the head of the valley looms Homestake Peak, a picturesque 13,200-foot pinnacle on the Continental Divide.
Despite the tranquility, however, there are reasons for concern over this remote gem. To most, the meadows look pretty much like any other mountain wetland in Colorado, but there is something rare about them: peat bogs — called fens — that have been there since the glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago, according to ecologist Delia Malone, who has studied the area.
Fens are important — not just because they absorb carbon dioxide from the air, which helps ameliorate a warming climate — but because they store water as well.
“Wetlands, and fens especially, are storing snowmelt and not releasing it rapidly,” Malone explained. “You can imagine a big sponge. When the dry season comes, that sponge is slowly squeezed. Water is discharging out of the fen and into the stream to maintain stream flows.”
Until last August, dispersed camping in the valley was allowed almost anywhere, but White River Forest officials decided then to limit camping to 48 designated sites scattered along the road, none with facilities aside from fire grates. (There is also an 11-site campground called Gold Park.) The goal was to help preserve and protect the delicate valley and its fens.
Since Homestake Valley camping has become increasingly popular, however, the forest service is now proposing to charge $15-$25 a night for those sites (currently free) and to hire a concessionaire to manage them. The revenue would cover the cost to the concessionaire of cleaning the sites, maintaining infrastructure and providing trash removal.
As is customary, the before implementing the proposal.
“Over the past several years, camping along the roads in the Homestake Valley has significantly increased and people are beginning to camp in more sensitive areas, leading to impacts to sensitive areas such as streams and wetlands,” . “Designating dispersed camping sites allows us to maintain current levels of use but focus camping to the less-sensitive areas that are already being used.”
But camping isn’t the only source of concern for those who want to protect the valley.
The cities of Aurora and Colorado Springs own water rights in the valley and the water in the existing Homestake Reservoir above it. Both have long wanted to build a second dam that would store and divert the water to the Front Range, potentially destroying the wetlands.
“They’d either be flooded and destroyed, or they potentially would be cut off from the stream,” said Michael Gorman, campaign director for the Wilderness Workshop, a Carbondale conservation advocacy group. “There is the other issue of removing water from the Colorado River Basin. It would be taken out of this watershed and sent under the Continental Divide.”
In a statement this week, Aurora Water said feasibility studies are being conducted to determine the best alternatives for the project, adding that “wetland delineations” have not been completed.
“As with any project that will be subject to extensive permitting analyses, avoidance of negative wetland impacts is preferred,” the statement said. “If negative impacts are unavoidable, those impacts will be minimized and mitigated to offset unavoidable losses.”
But the wetland vegetation in the valley supports a healthy habitat for wildlife, Malone said, and it depends on water flow for survival. “If we alter the flow of water, the vegetation dies. The forest service has declared fens an invaluable resource, an irreplaceable resource.”
Peat is partially decomposed organic matter — leaves and twigs, primarily — and a fen is defined as a decomposition accumulation depth of 40 centimeters (15.7 inches) or more.
“Those leaves and twigs, depending on the location, have built up over thousands of years,” Malone said. “It has to be cold and it has to be wet.
“Those two factors decrease the rate of decomposition. Instead of those leaves and twigs decomposing into soil — which is what they do in other wetlands so you get muck — when we dig down 40 centimeters or more, you can often still see the structure of the leaf. Thatap because this very slow decomposition process is slowed because of cold and wet,” she continued.
The Wilderness Workshop has been pushing back against the dam proposal since 2021, when it organized a protest in Red Cliff called Save the Homestake Valley. Since then, it has led a community science project called Bioblitz, cataloging plant and animal species in the valley.
“There is this potential threat hanging over the valley of inundating these fen wetlands and shrinking the (Holy Cross) Wilderness boundary to accommodate for the road and the displacement that a reservoir would cause,” Gorman said. “The shrinking of the wilderness there would be a bad precedent, and certainly a loss for conservation.”
