It doesn’t rain much in Southwest Colorado. It gets really cold and snowy sometimes. But come summer, Durango’s parks are often lush with greenery.
Residents who like the feeling of grass between their toes have the city’s maintenance crews to thank for ensuring Durango’s parks return to life each spring.
The Parks and Recreation Department undertakes a monumental effort each spring to de-winterize more than 300 acres of parks, said Parks and Recreation Director Cathy Metz. Staff members check hundreds of sprinkler heads for breaks, assess thousands of feet of irrigation lines for leaks and put plugs in the ground to aerate compact, moist soil, she said.
City crews typically start de-winterizing efforts with athletic fields in April. With soccer and lacrosse beginning in the early spring, fields need water and care to be in peak condition, Metz said. Workers then pivot to address neighborhood parks.
Each park has an irrigation system, each irrigation system has zones and each zone has at least one sprinkler head, Metz said.
Jenkins Ranch Park, a neighborhood park, for example, has 125 irrigation heads, said Scott McClain, assistant director of Parks and Recreation. Smith Sports Complex has 335 irrigation heads, he said. The total number of sprinklers scattered around the city was not readily available, McClain said.
“We have to turn on each individual head,” Metz said. “It takes some time to go out and check the irrigation system.”
Irrigation heads are often damaged by snow removal: Plows either push snow onto the irrigation heads or hit the sprinklers with a blade and break them, Metz said. A new irrigation head can cost the city anywhere from $10 to $100, depending on the size and complexity of the component, McClain said.
“The park system is irrigated at night, so before they’re running at night and we’re not watching them, we want to determine that there are not breaks in them,” Metz said of the city’s irrigation system.
The city is also responsible for de-winterizing public restrooms. The buildings don’t have heat, and Parks and Recreation crews must ensure the restrooms are in working order before anyone uses them, Metz said.
As the weather gets warmer, so does the soil, and warmer soil is better for planting grass. The soil should be about 50 degrees or higher to facilitate seed growth, Metz said. When that day comes, Parks and Recreation crews plan to spread a compost in parks and cover it with seeds to fill bare spots.
Crews also refill mulch beds and replenish wood chips at city playgrounds, Metz said.
And with the wet winter Durango experienced, a lot of tree branches broke. Parks and Recreation crews are pruning trees and turning trimmed branches into mulch, which the department offers for free to residents.
“It was fairly extensive throughout the city, so we’re catching up on checking and repairing those broken limbs,” Metz said. “We did experience a fair amount of snow.”
bhauff@durangoherald.com
