Opinion: Preserving Anemone Hill


Tuesday’s Boulder City Council vote to limit trail building on Anemone Hill, to exclude mountain bikes from its north and east sides, and to ask the Open Space board to study a mountain bike link up out of Boulder Canyon and then west to Four Mile Canyon, was exactly the right thing to do.
Anemone Hill is the long ridge between Boulder Canyon and Sunshine Canyon (the west extension of Mapleton Avenue.) 
Anemone Hill has a rich and diverse wildlife habitat, especially on its north side, which faces Sunshine Canyon, where most of the rejected trails were proposed to be built. Indicator species (which give information on the health of the habitat) that live in that area include Northern goshawk, Abert’s squirrel, black bear, and wild turkey. Building trails every couple of hundred yards on the ridge’s north face would have destroyed much of this important habitat.
The east side, because it is so accessible from Settler’s Park off Canyon and Centennial Trailhead off Mapleton, is used by families with kids and strollers, as well as by people just wanting to get away for a few minutes. But having to continually jump off the trail to courteously allow a mountain bike to pass makes the experience unpleasant at best, irrespective of the good intentions of the bike riders.
We need to remember that the City of Boulder has provided more opportunities for mountain biking than most places. Boulder has a large network of trails to the north, east, and south of town, almost 50 miles in total. And we have an extensive bike path/lane network to allow people to get around without having to drive, or ride in traffic. The city Parks Department recently completed, with the much appreciated volunteer help of many mountain bike riders, the Valmont Bike Park. It was not cheap — according to a recent city communication, the land alone cost over $4 million, the improvements over $3 million, and operating costs are at least $150,000 annually.
In addition, the bike links from Boulder Canyon up Chapman Drive to the top of Flagstaff and from Eldorado State Park to Walker Ranch are proceeding. And the Colorado Department of Transportation, Boulder County, and city Open Space department are working to add bike lanes on Colorado 93 between the city limits and Highway 72 and will finally build an underpass near Community Ditch (which Open Space will fund), so there will be safer access to mountain biking on both east and west sides of 93.
The proposed link out of Boulder Canyon should be very appealing. The trail would leave the Boulder Canyon bike path just west of the Dome rock (the white granite dome just a few hundred yard up the canyon on the north side), go up the hill side, and then traverse to the west and drop down into Four Mile Canyon, allowing a link to the County’s existing Benjamin and Betasso bike trails. There is excellent parking on the south side of the highway, much preferable to parking in the Mapleton neighborhood, and an underpass to safely cross the road. Because this area would not be heavily used by hikers, it would eliminate much of the friction.
Boulder Open Space, unlike parks in many parts of the country, has never been simply about recreation, but has focused on prevention of sprawl and preservation of habitat so that we can maintain some connection to nature in our increasingly urbanized, wired, and wireless society. As council member Matt Appelbaum said when I asked him why he voted to preserve the Anemone area, “It isn’t about the bikers, it’s about the north slope of Anemone, which has been kept in pretty pristine condition, and it would be a mistake to put more trails there for any reason. Boulder is unusual in that it makes protection of the environment a very high priority - Boulder’s vision from the very beginning has been that, yes, we will allow recreation, but we want to protect the very special natural areas that we have.”


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