$30 million may flow into Mountain Valley restoration project

TENNESSEE PASS Federal land managers have embarked on a $30 million project to remake a Colorado mountain valley that during World War II was transformed into an elite military training base.

The ecological restoration along headwaters of the Eagle River home of the famed 10th Mountain Division would require scooping out millions of tons of gravel and sand to turn a straightened waterway back into a river that curves through a floodplain.

It would mean yanking nonnative thistles and other invaders across 2,000 acres, recontouring and revegetating with native flowers and willows.

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"A lot of our pristine headwaters in Colorado have had impacts. This is an opportunity to restore the ecosystem in an area that has historic value and make it better," said Marcus Selig, regional director of the National Forest Foundation, which led creation of a 50-page master plan. "Our goal is to put the area on a trajectory to be natural. We'll engineer the floodplain. We'll design it so that high flows in spring can restore a balance."

But historic preservation of scattered concrete foundations of the Army base looms as a hurdle. And water pressures complicate restoration. Colorado Springs and Aurora own rights to groundwater under the headwaters, within a 30,700-acre watershed, and to snowmelt trickling down surrounding rocky peaks.

A project proposal put forth this month by the U.S. Forest Service preserves the option of cities drilling into a re-engineered valley to reach groundwater and building a reservoir above wetlands to supply residents along Colorado's increasingly populated Front Range.

If the project survives bureaucratic review and gets funding, it would rank among the nation's most ambitious feats of ecological restoration. It reflects a growing interest among restoration ecologists in "novel ecosystems" recognizing that exact replication of nature before it was altered may be unfeasible, while embracing the role of revived natural processes.

"We're restoring it to its current potential," Forest Service fisheries biologist Matt Grove said. "We have to look at the stream we have now. We don't have the unaltered thing."

The plan incorporates post-war recreational uses of the area such as camping and skiing to backcountry huts that 10th Mountain Division war survivors built in memory of slain comrades. And it calls for state-of-the-art historical interpretation at sites around what became Camp Hale, which once had a population of 17,000.

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$30 million may flow into Mountain Valley restoration project