The burble of Bear Creek weaving in and out of ice floes at Muskrat Meadows in Bear Creek Lake Park is music to the ear of neighborhood activist Katie Gill.
The riparian oasis drowns out busy Morrison Road just to the north and has soothed Gill and thousands of Lakewood residents through COVID and other life challenges.
Lately there’s been welcome music in Gill’s other ear. It’s the sound of Front Range cities saying they’re no longer interested in storing more water in Bear Creek Lake in an expansion that would flood Muskrat Meadows and some of the southwestern metro area’s favorite picnic areas and recreation trails.
The state and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will continue their study of the controversial lake expansion, but important backers are now urging the state to look elsewhere for bigger storage pools. Of the cities Colorado’s water board was counting on to justify continuing the study, Dacono and Berthoud are no longer interested, but Brighton has stayed “in.”
Former state Water Conservation Board director and prominent water attorney James Eklund recently wrote a letter for Gill’s group Save Bear Creek Lake Park, saying expansion should no longer be one of the options studied under the Colorado Water Plan. A bigger pool that would flood the beloved recreation areas, Eklund wrote, is “neither called for nor justified” in the water plan’s search for new storage.
The audible braking of momentum for a bigger lake heartens Gill and one of her advocacy partners, Don Baumgardt, but they say they will remain vigilant.
“The river is a living thing, and when people come down here, it’s part of their mental health,” said Gill, standing on a wooden bridge over the creek and buttonholing other hikers to take a save-the-park flier. “The river is the heart and soul of the park. It’s about alternatives to urban heat islands. It’s about carbon sequestration. You’re not going to get that back.”
Plan could have expanded the lake 10 fold
While state water officials half-joke that they are “in the fifth year of a three-year study” of Bear Creek Lake, they acknowledge heavy neighbor pressure against drowning chunks of the park, and the dam renovations that would accompany it. The board’s special projects coordinator, Erik Skeie, said the state keeps track of cities’ changing interest, and there are various decision points the study could end early if it’s clear the original idea has little support.
“Of course we care. We’re stewards of state funds. We care a lot whether or not stakeholders would be interested. We’re not just going to do this for the sake of doing it,” Skeie said.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which originates and reviews others’ large-scale water engineering plans, was the first to pitch a bigger Bear Creek Lake, in 2015. Bear Creek Dam was a 1970s effort of the Army Corps for flood control in the South Platte River Basin, like the larger Chatfield Reservoir to the southwest.
The lake usually holds about 2,000 acre-feet of water as a recreation and wildlife pool. Lakewood manages the surrounding park, with hundreds of thousands of annual visitors entering with a $10 day pass.
The Army Corps said it wanted to study adding 20,000 acre-feet of water storage to the dam’s flood control mission, and the state of Colorado has for years been looking for new places to store municipal and agricultural water. At the time, the Colorado water plan called for 400,000 acre feet of new storage. (An acre-foot of water supplies two to three families for a year.)
One problem for neighbors and recreators is that in the shallow Bear Creek draw, adding 20,000 acre-feet of water would explode the surface area to more than 600 acres from 110 acres, according to Save Bear Creek Lake Park. Not only would the larger pool flood a mile of Bear Creek riparian walkways, but the larger surface area would dramatically increase water losses to evaporation.
For Gill and Baumgardt, pointing out the threat to affordable, economically diverse family recreation is just an opening argument.
“You start out NIMBY, but there’s a lot of layers to the onion,” said Baumgardt, who moved to Colorado from Texas as a retiree in order to spend more time with grandchildren. He bikes and hikes the park trails. “There are a lot of other reasons you just don’t need to do it.”
You just don’t flood streams and drown wildlife habitat in the dry Rockies, Gill added. “Only 2% of the American West is riparian, but 80% of wildlife relies on the riparian ecosystem at some point in their lifecycle,” she said. “This is one of the most intact riparian areas coming out of the mountains and into the metro area.”
Gill, who is mayor pro tem of Morrison, and allies have been working for years to build opposition to any expansion that involves flooding park land. Lakewood passed a proclamation in 2022 calling for “substantial weight” to be given to any alternatives to a 20,000 acre-foot storage pool.
Distant cities among those in need of future water supplies are well aware of how many years, if not decades, it can take to get environmental and construction permits for bigger dams even when neighbors support them. The $3 million joint Bear Creek Lake study by the state and the Army Corps is meant to show what is possible, not to dictate policies, the water board’s Skeie said.
“Ultimately this is just answering the question of whether or not this dam could hold
more water,” said Skeie, including ongoing hydrology studies by the Army Corps. That and other research will also detail how much work would be required on the dam and berm for them to safely hold back varying levels of new storage.
Dacono, which had signed on earlier as a potentially interested party for new storage, in effect took itself off the waiting list.
“Dacono completed an initial feasibility evaluation of the project and did not identify it as a feasible future water supply,” interim city manager Jennifer Krieger said in an email statement. “However, the city of Dacono has not entirely eliminated the project as a possible future water supply at this time, and it will continue to stay informed and coordinate with (the water board) on the feasibility analysis.”
A Berthoud representative sent the same word-for-word statement about Bear Creek Lake, down to “not entirely eliminated.”
Brighton remains more of a “maybe.”
“The city is actively exploring opportunities for additional water storage capacity along the Front Range. The city has not committed resources to the Bear Creek Lake project at this time, but will continue to monitor the project through the required studies and processes,” spokesperson Kristen Chernosky said in an email response.
State officials are not surprised at the changes in momentum, Skeie said. Conversion of some of Chatfield’s flood control pool to water storage “took about 40 years,” he said.
Growing Bear Creek Lake is not off the table
The save the lake group is not opposed to some small expansion of water storage at Bear Creek, though it remains adamantly opposed to anything approaching the 20,000 acre-foot upper limit of the study. Eklund’s detailed letter encouraged the Army Corps and the state to consider already available alternatives for local cities to store more water, including abandoned Front Range gravel pits and recharging aquifers.
If the Army Corps still sees Bear Creek Lake’s footprint as the best place for water, it should consider dredging parts of the shallow basin to allow deeper storage without flooding Bear Creek and Turkey Creek, Eklund’s letter said.
“As growth and development continue to occur in the surrounding communities, open space and outdoor opportunities and experiences provided by the lake and park will become more and more valued, desired and sought after,” Eklund wrote. “This project should be evaluated based on these realities.”
The state expects the Army Corps to finish the key studies, remove some of the less promising alternatives, and go back to the public for meetings talking about a new project scope sometime this year, Skeie said.
The neighbors feel they are being heard, for now, but keep brainstorming about ways to get more control over the creek area if the idea regains momentum. The advocates have watched Save the Colorado, a northern Colorado-based river protection group, help communities pass “rights of nature” resolutions meant to officially identify human advocates for wetlands affected by policy choices. Bear Creek might benefit from such a designation, they said.
“We’re all about dealing with Colorado’s water crisis,” said Gill, who brings people to walk through Muskrat Meadows and Skunk Hollow when they need persuading. “But this is not the way to do it.”