Summit County: The land before mining

It’s the pre-mining appearance and functionality the Blue River Watershed Group, the Forest Service, the Town of Breckenridge, Summit County Government and two private landowners hope to restore.

The dredge piles range from several feet to almost 40 feet deep along the watershed — in some places, causing the river to flow underneath and reappear down valley, Forest Service district fisheries biologist Corey Lewellen said. The piles come from dredge boats, which removed the river bottom, turned it on end, and miners combed it for valuable minerals.

An altered river means an affected fish population. In this case, healthy streams flow into the main Swan River from the north, middle and south forks. But their confluence is cut off by about two miles of dredge piles. Colorado cutthroat trout have been out-competed by introduced brown trout, and those fish are inbreeding.

Because the Swan River is “a pretty good opportunity to restore a metapopulation of native Colorado cutthroat trout,” the Forest Service is tackling the project with its partners. Summit County and Breckenridge have been working on their Swan River properties since 2007, but with Forest Service technical support, they and the other partners aim to hire a project design firm and begin implementation as soon as possible — but there’s a long way to go. The idea is to re-introduce the cutthroat in different, but connected, habitats.

“We want them to mingle and mix and from a genetic perspective, that’s good,” Lewellen said, adding that part of the reintroduction effort includes relocating as many brown trout as possible and eliminating the rest to prevent them from again out-competing the cutthroat.

The project will likely be expensive, at several millions of dollars funded by grants and other revenue managed by the Blue River Watershed Group, but it will be worth it, Lewellen said.

“There are 17 miles of habitat we can reconnect if we fix this two miles of dredge,” he said, later adding, “We want to promote healthy fish populations on all our lands… We can’t do that without restoring this.”

But that’s just part of it. The Forest Service is involved in the stream project because it’s part of a broader look at the Swan River watershed — an area covering roughly 20,000 acres. It’s also associated with the agency’s revised mission to get “better bang for our buck,” Lewellen said, by focusing resources more directly instead of haphazardly across the national forest.

“We want to pick a watershed and do everything we can to restore it,” Lewellen said, adding that it’s a multi-year effort to do so. It includes timber management, attention to the bark beetle, wildlife habitat, road decommissioning, abandoned mine reclamation, sediment analysis and control and recreation management, to name a few.

“We can put resources into private property to benefit national forest lands,” he said.

The Swan River in the Dillon Ranger District is one of a handful of emphasis areas, which includes a 50,000-acre habitat restoration project in the Roaring Fork Valley.