Beavers Restoring Water and Life in Alma, Colorado
Bio4Climate Board member Sue Farist Butler shares this firsthand glimpse of how beavers, habitat protection, and thoughtful community restoration are helping rehydrate the landscape, support wildlife, and create a vibrant nature park in Alma, Colorado.
Here I am at the top of the treeline in Alma, Colorado, visiting my daughter Delia and grandson Milo. 10,587 feet high, near the top of the treeline.
In the background of the photo of Milo’s picture you can see one of the beautiful, educational plaques the town has put up in the park they’ve built on a branch of the middle fork of the Platte River. That photo was taken on a boardwalk that was built over a long old beaver dam.
A new beaver dam just built adjacent to the beaver dam boardwalk, pictured below has raised the water 3 feet from the prior level. This new dam was built in the last year. Before that there had been a stream that had slowly filled in with grasses. Now it’s back to a great fishing spot with brown trout and rainbow trout. Fly fisherman Milo caught a couple of brown trout and a rainbow trout in the last couple of weeks. Then he released them.
Here’s the new dam that’s restored this great fishing spot. Further downstream across the river you can see a new beaver lodge that’s being built. On the far shore the tan earth is the leftover after the gold mining operation has passed through.
The town’s beautiful restoration has protected beaver habitat and created a lovely nature park for the children and people of Alma. Delia teaches nature classes to local children on the banks of this little river.
This lovely restoration in the center of town is a healthy moist ecosystem in a fire prone context. There are beaver throughout the valley keeping the soil moist.
It’s wonderful to see all this protected as part of the civic structure of the town.
Sue Butler has always been a climate activist. Her first energy audit was in 1979, and now she and all her tenants are off carbon fuels and on geothermal heating and air-conditioning. The project is described on her website and film, LeavingtheCarbonEconomy.com (also on Youtube). She is a retired nurse clinical specialist with experience in Intensive Care and Community Mental Health. She also has a PhD in Mathematical Psychology and Behavioral Economics, and helped to found the Laboratory for Probabilistic Reasoning, investigating errors of judgment under conditions of uncertainty. Sue speaks and writes to advocate for the climate in many arenas, was President of Green Decade/Cambridge, and a founding board member and treasurer of the Home Energy Efficiency Team. Her energy is focused on mobilizing people to take actions that will directly contribute to measurable reductions in their carbon emissions and other actions that contribute to climate stabilization. Presently Sue is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School working in the area of Climate and Morality.