Outdoor enthusiasts take to the mountains to enjoy nature, and if they’re lucky, maybe see some wildlife along the way. What’s less expected in Southwest Colorado’s wilderness is to see an entire side of a cliff collapse.
On Sunday, Durango resident Gregor Gardner was hiking up Burnt Timber Creek Trailhead, north of Lemon Reservoir. About two miles in, he heard a thundering sound.
“At first I thought it was a shot,” said Gardner, referencing that the trail is a popular hunting spot. “Then I heard all this crashing and roaring. It sounded like a fighter plane had crashed and bombs were going off. I didn’t know what the heck happened.”
He ran to the edge of the trail to look through the trees and saw an entire cliff on the east side of the Florida River cascading hundreds of feet below into the canyon. Gardner, 55, had never seen anything like it.
“I’ve been hiking and skiing and climbing and hunting and fishing my whole life and seen a few rockslides, but to see a whole cliff cave off and go down was like, whoa.”
Butch Knowlton, director of La Plata County Office of Emergency Management, said he reviewed the spot where Gardner saw the landslide and he could clearly notice the difference between old aerial shots and Gardner’s photos.
“There was a massive volume of material that came down,” Knowlton said. “There’s a huge massive knob of material that fell away, rotated north across the small canyon and knocked a bunch of stuff off the canyon wall.”
Knowlton said he will investigate the rockslide more because the upper headwaters are the city of Durango’s main domestic supply of water.
“If there’s something that’s going to create impacts where debris and stuff like that are moving in future storms and runoff, then we need to know about that,” he said. “We monitor anything that may have adverse impacts to the city’s water supply.”
With the large amount of precipitation over the past several days, there’s always a greater risk of the saturated land breaking away, said Stan Sparks, visitor information specialist at the Columbine Ranger Station, which manages Burnt Timber Creek Trail.
Sparks said the station wasn’t aware of the landslide until The Durango Herald told him about it, but he said a trail foreman would probably go to the area to look for damage.
It is unclear whether the section of Burnt Timber Creek Trail that Gardner was hiking is technically located within the 2002 Missionary Ridge burn zone, where Knowlton said the fire heightened the chance for landslides.
“The vast majority of acreage that burned was in extreme geologic conditions,” he said. “Because it was burning in such rugged terrain, federal officials at the time knew there was going to be a lot of after-effects like debris movement and landslides.”
In 1998, another rock slide sent thousands of pounds of rocks, trees and boulders down Missionary Ridge toward homes in the Animas Valley. No people or property were harmed, but the event cut an area about 200 feet wide and covered seven to 10 acres. Knowlton said he remembers almost 100 people called in to report the slide. The scar of that event can still be seen on the east side of Highway 550.
jromeo@durangoherald.com
