ROCKY FLATS NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE — The Cold War-era Rocky Flats nuclear weapons factory, long reviled as a source of plutonium dust, is becoming more of a haven for wildlife.
A bear raised three cubs. Mountain lion tracks can be seen. A bull moose recently wandered across the 6,000-acre prairie and wetland refuge. A herd of elk, numbering 130 last year, grew to 150.
This week, the feds are launching a planning process to allow for more people.
“A wildlife refuge is not a park,” Rocky Flats manager Dave Lucas said, but the government in four “sharing sessions” seeks ideas for future trials for hiking, cycling and horse-riding where hundreds of military-industrial structures once stood.
Denver-based U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials say they’ve secured $20 million to implement this long-envisioned transformation, which also will include a visitor center hub. There, the feds said, they hope to tell the Rocky Flats story of evolution from American Indian hunting grounds through the Cold War military activities that ruined the environment and workers’ health to the current open oasis amid dust-churning monster house development.
“Places like this produce such an array of benefits to us as humans,” Lucas said Tuesday after rattling across the land in a government van to a derelict ranch inhabited by a large owl. “It is a value to have wildlife and wild places in our lives. A child’s immune system will develop better with exposure to dirt and nature,” Lucas said. “It’s important that children spend time in nature. … We are proposing to open in early 2018.”
Rocky Flats is the last of the major military sites around metro Denver that the government has converted since the collapse in the 1990s of the Soviet Union. Developers took hold of the Lowry and Fitzsimmons bases for housing, commerce and medical facilities. The Rocky Mountain Arsenal northeast of Denver became a 16,000-acre wildlife refuge, with a growing bison herd, which this year drew 330,000 visitors.
Now Rocky Flats, under a federal law passed in 2001, is on that same course. Land deals in recent years, and the apparent end of litigation with surrounding suburbs over roadways, has cleared the way for work on relatively undisturbed wildlife habitat that extends into mountain foothills. This “connectivity” favors a rare diversity of species.
Federal biologists have identified 632 plants. They recently used recorders to document six kinds of bats. Cattails proliferate along water seeps beneath alluvial rocks. Rattlers and bullsnakes abound. Birds include meadowlarks, lark buntings, sparrows and various mouse-hunting raptors.
As at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, Rocky Flats includes a 1,037-acre core area, under Department of Energy control, where people aren’t permitted and land-use restrictions prohibit digging.
Plutonium-tainted and other radioactive waste was buried at Rocky Flats, causing an environmental disaster. A cleanup done by Army and DOE contractors cost taxpayers more than $6 billion before it was done around 2005.
“Downwind of the plant there’s residual contamination,” Lucas said. “Plutonium is one of the contaminants, but it is at levels that were determined to be acceptable.”
And water sampling continues along with five-year reviews to protect public health.
The Fish and Wildlife planners staging the sharing sessions, which start Thursday at the Parkview Swim and Fitness Club, 19865 W. 94th Ave., say they are prepared to discuss plutonium and other worries, which a couple years ago blocked proposed controlled fires designed to boost prairie health. But the feds’ focus this fall is developing a consensus plan, to be unveiled by spring, laying out priorities for roughly 20 miles of trails, access roads and the visitor hub.
The fenced, off-limits area, and carefully managed wetlands along Woman, Walnut and Rock creeks, probably will serve primary purposes of helping elk and other animals survive, federal officials said, especially as Candelas developers push ahead with construction of hundreds of new houses.
“It will be a balancing act,” Lucas said. “We are eager. We are sincere. If people want to be involved, they will have to show up.”