Welcome to the March 2025 Keep Routt Wild Newsletter!

Hello, Keep Routt Wild followers!

Our newsletter this month covers four items:

-       Winner announced for KRW Wildlife Photo Contest

-       Mad Rabbit Trails Project update

-       Bears are Waking Up!

-       Proposed Solar Array near Hayden

We will also include our usual section “What we are reading and watching” that includes interesting articles about local wildlife and conservation issues.

For those who are unfamiliar with Keep Routt Wild, we are a community organization dedicated to the preservation of wildlife and wild places in Routt County. To find out more about Keep Routt Wild, go to our website, or follow our nearly daily postings on Facebook. We are a 501(c)3 non-profit, and you can donate to Keep Routt Wild here.

Wildlife Photo Contest Winner and Honorable Mentions

Wow! What a great evening at Wildhorse Cinema and Art on March 10th where we and nearly 100 attendees viewed all the entries to the Keep Routt Wild Wildlife Photo Contest on the big screen while enjoying savory refreshments. Grey Barbier won the contest with his photo “Sharptail Dancing” taken near Lake Catamount. Congratulations Greg, and we hope you enjoy the $500 gift certificate donated from SITKA clothing and gear!

Didn’t get to attend? You can recreate the experience and view all the entries at the video link here. The high-definition video montage showcases the 146 photos from 58 entrants, all to pleasant background music. So grab your earbuds and enjoy the show!

We wish to thank Undiscovered Earth who hosted the venue at the Wildhorse Cinema. This was an amazing venue where one could get appetizers and drinks from the “Speak Easy” and then wander to the theater to view the beauty of Routt County on the big screen. Riverside Cafe supplied the appetizers while we supplied beverages. And, of course, we want to thank SITKA again for their gift certificate which gave us the idea of the contest in the first place.

Here is the list of the winners and honorable mentions:

Winner - Sharptail Dancing by Grey Barbier

Honorable Mention - Most Iconic - Rabbit Ears Guardian by Lee Sussman

Other Honorable Mentions-

Moose Tooth by Mark McCaulley

Pronghorns by Cyndi Marlowe

Heart You by Cyndi Marlowe

Elk Herd Hiding Newborn Calves in Treeline by Randy Weinstein    

Broad Tailed Hummingbird by Terry Berrien

Bighorn Sheep on Red Dirt Pass Trail by Nicolas Huret          

Mountain Lion by Tristan Thrasher

Posing Pine Martin by Anita Merrigan

We’d like to thank all the contestants. We received consistent feedback that this should be made an annual event, and we are seriously considering doing so.

Mad Rabbit Trails Project Update

Status: Mad Rabbit Trails Project still NOT approved.

The Mad Rabbit Trails Project proposed EA (Environmental Assessment) is sitting somewhere in Washington DC, where it remains unapproved since last summer.

We reported on this delay and our offer to help on the required wildlife studies in our February Newsletter, which you can read here. Since then, the Gazette published an article about the project, and its “limbo” status with extensive quotes from Keep Routt Wild and Routt County Riders. You can read it here:

After funding, controversial Mad Rabbit trails in Colorado Remain ‘in limbo’

We now believe that it is unlikely that the Mad Rabbit project will be approved soon enough for trail construction to occur this year, as we stated to the Gazette.

We don’t know when, or if, Mad Rabbit will be approved. Complicating the approval process is Forest Supervisor Russ Bacon’s retirement from the Forest Service. Bacon served as the Reviewing Official for Mad Rabbit. We note that the Adaptive Management Plan that would be required for project approval remains unfunded and unstaffed, and certain pre-project baseline monitoring identified under the plan has yet to be completed. It is unclear where or when the Forest Service can acquire the funding and personnel to implement this essential aspect of the proposed project.

Meanwhile, the City Council sits on 2A funds dedicated for Mad Rabbit. At some time, the City needs to decide how many years it wishes to wait instead of using the funds to construct trails within the city limits for use by all our residents.

Bears are now waking up from their winter torpor and searching for food. Unfortunately, every year local bears are euthanized as they become habituated to humans and inhabit human surroundings. A bear that is comfortable around humans, and associates humans with food sources, is a potentially dangerous bear. When found, the bear is given at most one more chance to live wildly by relocating the bear far away from its original location and tagged. If the bear is found searching for food around humans again it is often euthanized.
You can help save a bear by practicing the following bear-aware practices! Let’s keep our bears wild and alive, and our residents safe.

As reported in the Steamboat Pilot, there is a hitch in the planning process for a solar array south of Hayden.

“According to County Planner Alan Goldich, Trapper Solar — a subsidiary of international renewable energy firm RWE — made an initial application under the county’s older zoning requirements, but the county passed a new, more demanding Unified Development Code last May, just days after Trapper’s initial application.”

We have not taken an official position on this array, but we have deep concerns regarding the environmental impact such arrays pose to wildlife and their habitat. County regulations require these to be fenced, creating 100% habitat loss to big game. According to CPW maps, the proposed solar array impinges on sharp tail grouse habitat, elk winter range, mule deer migration corridors, and is almost entirely situated in pronghorn range. In fact, one of the wildlife photo contest entrants, George Krawzoff, sent photos of pronghorns and their fawns situated within the boundaries of the planned development.

We’re supporters of reducing our carbon footprint due to the impact carbon has on climate change. But with solar and wind, are we exchanging one environmental harm for another? The Princeton University’s Net-Zero America Project, an advocate for a low carbon future, estimated the land area needed to reach the Net-Zero goal, and it is staggering.

“By 2050 . . .  the U.S. would need up to four additional South Dakotas to develop enough clean power to run all the electric vehicles, factories and more,” reports Bloomberg’s Dave Merrill, summarizing the land requirements for the economy to be carbon free when relying largely on solar and wind. You can read the entire summary here:

The U.S. Will Need a Lot of Land for a Zero-Carbon Economy

We found one graphic particularly insightful. It showed how much land is required to power a 100 watts television year-round from various energy sources, shown below:

The calculations above show solar power requiring 140 times the land area of natural gas to produce the same power output. Wind is even worse when the turbine spacing is included, requiring 370 times the land area of natural gas for the same energy output. Nuclear energy is the only carbon-free energy source that comes close to the compactness of natural gas, requiring only three times the land area of natural gas.

All energy development has impacts. We need to be clear-eyed to what those impacts are. Land managers and policy makers especially need to be realistic about the long-term impacts of various energy strategies.

What we’ve been reading and watching

(Click on any title to read the article.)

Federal judges clarify longstanding corner-crossing conundrum for Coloradans wanting to access public lands

“Land ownership in the West is defined by tidy squares. But that checkerboard of public and private land poses a navigational quandary for recreational users. When they step diagonally from one parcel of public land to another, are they violating the private airspace of landowners whose private property intersects with public land at that checkerboard X? The three-judge panel at the 10th Circuit on Tuesday ruled that so-called corner crossers are not trespassing, siding with Wyoming hunters who were sued for trespass in 2022 by a ranch owner whose 50 square-mile ranch in Carbon County includes 27 federal parcels totaling 11,000 acres.”

A Gray Wolf Recently Introduced to Colorado Has Been Killed in Wyoming

“On March 15, USDA’s Wildlife Services responded to a sheep predation event on private lands in north central Wyoming. Evidence, consistent with wolf depredation was observed at the site, including wolf tracks, struggle sites, carcasses with premortem hemorrhaging, and bite marks consistent with known wolf predations.  In total, 5 adult sheep were killed by an adult wolf, including one sheep that was heavily fed upon. Late March 15, Wildlife Services removed a wolf at the predation location. Closer examination showed the wolf had a collar from Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Wyoming Game and Fish returned the wolf and the collar to Colorado Parks and Wildlife.”

Colorado bill aimed at redefining state wildlife management fails

We believe the intended purpose of the bill was to further restrict CPW’s independence to manage wildlife by allowing lawsuits to challenge CPW’s actions based on debates of what is “best available science.” We are pleased to see it fail.

Quote of the Day

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