Valley Floor Education Day Looks to Instill Stewardship

By Julia Caulfield

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At the end of what is likely the strangest school year ever, a field trip to the Valley Floor feels almost as normal as you could imagine.

The entirety of the Telluride Elementary School – that’s kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades – tromp through the open space learning about birds, forest habitat, Elk, the river, and the history of the Ute peoples who lived on the Valley Floor. It’s the Valley Floor Education Day.

“We have the four different stations. We have the pond, we have the river, we spruce, and we have willow, and different experts are at each of those stations, ready to just blow the minds of the kids who show up there to learn about what’s going on,” says Sarah Holbrooke, Executive Director of the Pinhead Institute. Pinhead, along with Sheep Mountain Alliance, the Telluride Institute, and the Telluride Historical Museum are collaborating on the day.

A station of note for many children, the pond, where creepy crawlers, and slippery suckers are at their fingertips.

Luke Niehaus is in 2nd grade. His favorite part of the day is looking at the macro invertebrates that live in the pond.

“Looking at the underwater sea creatures, that would be underwater. I thought the leach looked like a worm a bit,” he says.

Vicki Phelps is the expert at the pond station, she’s been a watershed educator for a number of years. She says piking the children’s interest is her goal.

“This is just a tiny little teaser in a way,” she says, “because we don’t spend a lot of time studying it. But it gives them an excitement, and they want to do more. They want to learn more.”

Liliana Glidewell also enjoys the pond station.

“The best part has been checking out all the cool bugs and stuff,” she notes.

Liliana is in 1st grade. Her mom, Shayka Glidewell is also along on the field trip. For her, she says the Valley Floor Education Day helps give the students a better understanding of the place they live.

“I feel like it’s one of the key things in letting them know that they’re aware of their surroundings, and what else is here on the Earth,” Glidewell says, “A lot of times when you’re in school, or you’re doing skiing, you’re just ‘oh, it’s just my friends’. So you get an idea of what you do, how it affects others, and the wildlife around us.”

If you ask Lexi Tuddenham, Director of Sheep Mountain Alliance, finding that connection to the land is the key.

“It is their open space. It belongs to them as a community member,” Tuddenham says, “We think it’s really important for kids to form that long term relationship from an early age, where they both have the awe and the wonder, but also know that this a place where they can come to for solace and solitude, and to get in touch with a larger picture beyond themselves.”

She says the science is – of course – important, but the day is about teaching the children to have stewardship for the land.

She says, “we’re going to need them to keep working for these places that are ever under threat from climate change and many other forces.”

Telluride celebrated Valley Floor Day on May 9th, with a banner on Main Street – recognizing the 12th anniversary of the Valley Floor becoming Open Space – a community treasure, available to explore for generations to come.

Valley Floor Project Remediates Toxic Mine Tailings

By Julia Caulfield

Drive along the Spur, and you may see a large construction truck near the roundabout. You may hear a bulldozer beeping. What a person driving may not know, is behind a small group of trees, a multi-million-dollar project, years in the making, is underway to restore the Valley Floor landscape, and cap acres of toxic mine tailings.

Walk along the river in this area, and there are places where a chalk like soil – which is actually tailings – sluffs of into the water. Nothing is growing out of it.

“Right now we’re standing on the north bank of the river as it goes by the current tailings pile, and what we’re seeing is the clear tailings, there’s no vegetation on the tailings, it has that white color and the bank is essentially calving off into the active stream channel” says Lance McDonald, Telluride Project Manager.

The project – officially called the Society Turn Tailing Remediation and River Restoration project – is a collaboration between the Town of Telluride, Idarado Mining Company, and the State of Colorado. It was originally scheduled to occur last summer, but high river levels pushed it to this year.

The project is twofold: 1) remediate mine tailings by capping them and move the river away from tailings and 2) restore a portion of the San Miguel River to a more natural pattern. It had been straightened in the past for mining purposes.

“One of the primary objectives of this is to get the interaction of the stream flows away from the tailings. So one of the first things that we looked, and worked with the Town on, is trying to get the river as far away from the tailings as possible,” says Dave Blauch, Senior Ecologist with Ecological Resource Consultants – the company assisting with the project.

Blauch adds “then it was trying to figure out, how can we consolidate the tailings into a safer area and get that revegetated and capped and stabilized?”

The project dates back to 1992, when the Idarado Mining Company entered into an agreement with the State of Colorado to cleanup a number of tailings piles on the Valley Floor. The original remediation agreement, or consent decree, required that Idarado cover and cap the tailings.

It also states the landowner can propose a “alternative plan” for the project. After the Town of Telluride purchased the Valley Floor in 2009, it began working on a new plan.

The original agreement between Idarado and the State would cap roughly 26 acres of tailings with a foot of clean soil.

“That’s this whole area. That was going to be capped. All the trees would be taken out, and there would be one half or two feet of dirt on top of this whole thing,” says Lance McDonald as he walks along the river.

In the new plan, McDonald says “What we’re doing is we’re consolidating the tailings into a smaller capped area so it’s taller, but it’s much less of a footprint and we can keep a lot of the existing vegetation.”

McDonald also notes the Town is using manmade berms already on the Valley Floor to cap the tailings. He says using the berms limits truck traffic into the area, and lowers the cost of the project.

“And then it has the benefit also of restoring the landscape to its pre manmade condition. These berms that were out here, at one point a north channel was dug across the Valley Floor, so the spoils from creating that new channel were placed on the side,” McDonald says.

Once the tailings have been capped, all the disturbed soil will be vegetated with native plants.

The Town is also moving the river further south of the tailings so even if the river floods its banks, the water won’t hit the capped tailings.

According to Ross Davis, Idarado Mine Site Project Manager for Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, after a number of conversations with the Town of Telluride, the State felt comfortable with the new plan.

“We felt like this was probably a better solution than what was originally outlined in the consent decree. It just so happens to be that the tailings remediation will coincide with some river restoration, so we see it as a win-win for the State and Idarado fulfilling their obligations, as well as improving the waterways and improving some habitat as well,” Davis says.

That river restoration piece of the project sits just upstream from the tailings. It doesn’t have anything to do with the tailings project per se, but McDonald says given the fact that all the machinery would already be on site, it made sense to pull it in to the project.

“The river alignment is being reestablished across this wetland area, reconnecting the river to its historic flood plain. Whereas where it is right now, south of the railroad grade, in a straight line. The river naturally would have meandered out across this meadow, so what this is doing is reestablishing the river into this area, and then once the river is established in this area it can meander or reshape itself however it would like to in the future,” says McDonald.

The entire project will cost roughly $3.4 million. A number of partners are involved in the project including Valley Floor Preservation Partners, Colorado Water Conservation Board, and Trout Unlimited. The Town of Telluride is contributing around $700,000 from the Open Space fund; however, those funds are only used for the river restoration project.

The project is the final piece in Idarado Mining Company’s consent decree on the Telluride side.

The Society Turn Tailing Remediation and River Restoration project is scheduled to be completed in November.

The San Miguel River will be closed to recreational use from Eider Creek to the Society Turn starting Monday, July 13th and continuing until the project is finished.

Valley Floor Education Day Pairs Learning with the Local Environment

By Julia Caulfield

It’s a cool spring morning with a light breeze. Birds are chirping as ninety kindergartners, 1st, and 2nd graders are piling onto the Valley Floor after walking from the elementary school. The forecasted rain and show are holding off for the moment, but by the end of the morning a wintery mix is pelting down, making the whole experience a notably colder one.

The students are on a field trip for the 2nd annual Valley Floor Education Day. Over the course of about two hours, they rotate through four different stations to learn about different parts of the ecosystem – from pond, to river, to willows, to forest. Surrounded by the sound of the rushing San Miguel River, wind blowing through the trees, and birds singing, the banging of construction equipment is the only real reminder that we’re a just a short walk from town.

“The Valley Floor is our backyard, so that’s where we should be educating kids…” says Sarah Holdbrooke, the Executive Director of the Pinhead Institute.

Valley Floor Education Day is a collaboration between the Pinhead Institute, Sheep Mountain Alliance, and the Telluride Institute’s Watershed Education Program.

Holbrooke says, beyond being in Telluride’s backyard, there are multiple reasons to bring kids onto the Valley Floor.

“I mean number one just exercise, right? ... Secondly, my gosh, what a beautiful valley we have, so even if all they do is enjoy the few wild flowers that are growing now, or see the clouds coming in and enjoy that, or notice the threatening weather about to descend on us, that’ll be a good lesson. But boy, we have amazing scientists who are devoting their time...so hopefully the kids will leave with an understanding of what ducks live on the pond, or what fish live in the river, or what you can do with willow branches, or what it’s like to spend a little mindfulness…out in nature” says Holbrooke.

The focus for Valley Floor Education Day centers around STEM learning – that’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. And the stations each bring in different elements of the learning curriculum.

At the pond station students get to investigate the wildlife that lives both above and below the water. They look at birds through a scope, and get up close and personal with insects and other small organisms.

Moving on the river station they get to calculate the speed of the river by counting how long it takes for a stick to make it through the current.

Then on to willows where students learn about the Ute people and miners who lived on the Valley Floor in the past.

Finally, the forest station helps students see the connections between a health forest and a health human.

For some, this is their first time on the Valley Floor, but for 1st grader Cooper Zimmermann? This is not his first trip.

“I live here, so, I’ve probably been here a lot” says Cooper.

Cooper says he likes getting to learn about the trees in the area, and learning how to tell if they’re alive or dead. But when asked what the best part is, he says it’s basically everything.

He says, “exploring all of nature and seeing what types of birds and animals there are, and just pretty much looking around.”

Cooper’s mom, Nancy Zimmermann is also on the trip to the Valley Floor. She says it’s important for young kids to come out and experience the Valley Floor because they’ll be the ones protecting it in the future.

“It’s a big part of what makes Telluride special, is this Valley Floor, and the kids growing up here will eventually be the stewards of the Valley Floor when they’re all grown up, and hopefully keep this in perpetuity and pristine conditions for generations to enjoy”, Zimmermann says.

The importance of building a connection with the land is something Lexi Tuddenham, Executive Director of Sheep Mountain Alliance, acknowledges as well.

“It’s a real way to both enliven their curiosity about science and nature, and also allow them to develop a sense of place, and develop a connection to the place they’re growing up,” says Tuddenham.

The snow and rain keep the second half of the K-2 students from coming out to the Valley Floor for the afternoon, but don’t worry, they’ll get their chance as soon as the weather clears up.

May 9th is Valley Floor Day. This year celebrates the 12th anniversary of the Valley Floor becoming open space.