Along Hermosa Creek, a small, unsuspecting patch of cottonwoods, ponderosa pines and Rocky Mountain junipers could be the only surviving trees of the last old-growth forest in the Animas Valley.
“It has been cut down ever since we’ve been here,” said Bill Simon, who moved to the property that abuts the woodland in 1987. “About 15 years ago, someone moved in and took all the trees out. But what’s left is an unusual remnant.”
The area in question, which lies near the intersection of county roads 202 and 203 in Hermosa, about 10 miles north of Durango, used to cover about 3 acres, Simon said.
These days, however, what’s left of the undisturbed forest amounts to just under a quarter-acre, clinging to a patchwork of irrigation ditches diverted from Hermosa Creek.
“It’s startling,” said Simon of the forest’s disappearance. Simon, 71, is most widely recognized as one of the co-founders of the Animas River Stakeholders Group.
The definition of an old-growth forest, at least to forestry experts, has evolved over time, yet the common understanding of the term refers to an area that has not been modified, changed or impacted by Western settlement.
“Then the characteristics of that forest – age, species, composition – really mean that a natural process has determined what it looks like,” said Robert Leverett, co-founder of the Native Tree Society.
In the prized Animas Valley, a relatively flat swath of land that sits along the Animas River, that’s a rare occurrence. Settlement began in the valley as early as the 1870s, before Durango was officially incorporated, and was home to more than 100 people.
“It just took off,” local historian Duane Smith said. “The resources (in the valley) were pretty stretched. Before coal saved them, wood was used for fuel, so they logged what trees they had pretty quick.”
Smith said archival photos from that time show the Animas Valley as a treeless landscape, dominated by ranches, cattle grazing and the railroad.
So that an isolated plot of trees remained untouched is rather odd, if not exceptional. However, over the years, the old-growth forest has received no attention or serious push for preservation.
Save for the effort of Simon.
Simon said in the late 1980s, he approached the Nature Conservancy with the idea of placing some protections on the forest, but the conservation group deemed the area too small.
When contacted, officials at the Nature Conservancy did not recall the nearly three-decade-old matter.
As a result, around the turn of the century, when the property was sold and developed, the new landowners, who Simon said were likely unaware of the ecological rarity, removed most of the trees to make way for a home and a field for livestock to graze.
“A lot of those trees were felled with a bulldozer, piled up and burned,” he said.
Indeed, a visit to the land behind Simon’s house today reveals the last remaining trees that display a succession fitting for the ecosystem in the Animas Valley.
The oldest and tallest are the cottonwoods, which Simon said date back 250 years. Those trees provide shade for blue spruce and ponderosa pines to grow. Eventually, the cottonwoods give way, and then, the pine trees, too, are overcome by Rocky Mountain junipers, the last in the succession.
Locals commonly call Rocky Mountain junipers red cedars because of their close resemblance.
Kent Grant, district ranger with the Colorado State Forest Service, said in his almost quarter-century tenure with the agency, old-growth forests on private land are a rare thing to come by.
“My short answer is no, there’s not a lot of old-growth forests on non-federal lands, and if there is, it’s pretty much inaccessible,” he said. “A lot of that timber was cut, so there’s not nearly as much timber on those properties as there might be on some of the public lands, which were much more vast and harder to get to.”
Grant was not familiar with the property behind Simon’s, but he said in the few instances where the agency has encountered old-growth on private land, it has made site-specific recommendations to the landowner, which can include preservation, or if there is a fire danger, mitigation.
“We have no legal authority to go in and do anything,” Grant said. “On private lands, there’s really no obligation on the part of the landowner to preserve old-growth stands. It’s a personal decision they would make.”
Property owners within the parcel could not be reached for comment.
Regardless, for the Native Tree Society’s Leverett, no matter how big or small, saving what can be saved of the country’s last remaining old-growth forests is important not only for forest biodiversity, but also for research and even cultural purposes.
Four years ago, Leverett surveyed the San Juan Mountains around Durango, with a concentration on the forestry along Hermosa Creek, finding acres of old-growth woodlands, and even the tallest tree in Colorado within U.S. Forest Service land.
“I was totally blown away when I first went into Hermosa Creek,” said Leverett, who has spent most of his career taking inventory of the country’s forests. “There was old-growth and some incredible trees relative to Colorado. That whole area suddenly became more important.”
Leverett said preservation of old-growth stands really gained traction in the early 1990s with the controversy surrounding the protection of the spotted owl in the redwood forests of the Pacific Northwest.
“These giant trees were disappearing alarmingly fast,” he said. “And it triggered lot of emphasis on rediscovering old-growths.”
Still, outside forces appear to have put undisturbed forests in danger. Factors such as logging, fires, beetle kill, drought – the list goes on – have many of these areas stressed, Leverett said.
“There’s some things going on we are thinking are a product of climate change that portend badly for old-growth forests, which oftentimes are the most susceptible,” he said.
Simon and Grant were put in touch as a result of this story, and the two may survey what could be the last remaining old-growth forest in the Animas Valley.
Yet, as officials around the country address the ever-complicating question of forest management, how to deal with the dwindling of patches of land not disturbed by man continues to force a balancing act between conflicting interests.
“We’re not talking about making all the forests off-limits. That never made any sense, and it was never going to be done,” Leverett said.
“But what little is left is forest heritage. And how important is it to retain a piece of our heritage that we can revisit and use as a benchmark to how well we’re doing?
“I’ve spent a lot of years of my life dealing with that question. There are those of us who believe it’s worth doing.”
jromeo@durangoherald.com
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to clarify that the tree species Rocky Mountain juniper is the last in the succession of old-growth forest in the Animas Valley.
