Editor’s note: This is the second story in a two-part series from Aspen Journalism about the management of the North Star Nature Preserve east of Aspen. This first story examined a potential land exchange that could be complicated by a mining claim, and this story looks at past management, recent studies and what’s next for North Star.
For decades, Pitkin County Open Space and Trails has been trying to strike a tenuous balance at the North Star Nature Preserve: Protect wildlife habitat and an important riparian ecosystem while also supporting public access to a treasured community asset.
The county is preparing to update the North Star management plan, in the face of criticism that past management has failed to prevent or even helped cause overcrowding of the nature preserve.
When boaters and paddleboarders go to float through North Star, they pass through a complicated web of ownership and land governance.
First, they drive up Colorado Highway 82, turn onto a road maintained by the Wildwood Road Association that runs through Forest Service lands and enter the Roaring Fork River, which is governed by state right-to-float laws, from Forest Service property.
Once on the river, they pass by private properties and land owned by the U.S. Forest Service, the city of Aspen and Pitkin County, and finally get out of the river at a takeout in North Star Nature Preserve, owned by Pitkin County and governed by a conservation easement held by Aspen Valley Land Trust (AVLT). Limited parking is available along the Highway 82 right of way, owned by the Colorado Department of Transportation.
No agency has sole jurisdiction over this beloved community asset. For decades, this wasn’t necessarily an issue.
Orphan open space no more
In the 1950s, much of the land surrounding the flat stretch of the Roaring Fork known as Stillwater or North Star was a ranch where James H. Smith and his family raised hay and pastured cattle, according to the history in Pitkin County’s 2020 North Star Nature Preserve Management Plan. At various points in its history, the area was eyed for housing developments, a reservoir and even chairlifts to access skiing on Richmond Ridge.
Other areas east of Aspen were also focused on commercial activity; gravel pits were operated in the Stillwater area beginning in 1938 and continuing into the 1980s.
Pitkin County in 1978 acquired 175 acres of land that is now North Star Nature Preserve through a “gift-sale” that involved funding from The Nature Conservancy. The county began studying the area to understand the vegetation and habitat beginning in 1981, and the first resource-management plan was prepared in 1989.
From 1984 through 1999, the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES), which also owns land along the Roaring Fork east of Aspen that is adjacent to North Star Nature Preserve, managed the area on behalf of the county. But as more visitors started using the river in the early 2000s, Pitkin County’s newly created open space department took on a management role.
“We were the only department in Pitkin County, the only organization in the valley, that had the funds and the ability to manage this,” said Pitkin County Open Space and Trails Director Gary Tennenbaum.
North Star and other county open spaces that were acquired prior to the creation of Pitkin County’s property-tax-supported open space and trails fund in 1990 saw minimal initial management, according to Dale Will, who was director of Pitkin County Open Space and Trails from 1999 to 2016 and who is now the department’s acquisitions and projects director.
“We called them orphan open spaces because they were being managed by the public works crew as best as they could,” Will said. “They had at least a weed-spraying crew.”
A group of concerned citizens called the North Star Users Group worked on the 2000 Resource Management Plan, which Will said was written before Open Space and Trails took over management of North Star, and a conservation easement with AVLT that was conveyed in 2002.
“There was no staff involved that had expertise in conservation easements or in managing public lands,” Will said. “I appreciate the spirit of how that came about, but honestly, the documents were not that sophisticated, and I don’t think they were drafted all that well, especially in hindsight.”
Shortly after the adoption of those governing documents, Will said, the county asked the new open space department to take over management of North Star.
“Open Space adopted the orphan, so to speak, after all these documents had been done,” Will said.
The 2000 management plan permitted only one commercial paragliding operator and one commercial kayaking/canoeing operator to use the North Star open space.
Pitkin County and the city of Aspen jointly acquired roughly 70 additional acres adjacent to North Star known as James H. Smith Open Space in 2001. The bulk of the combined nature preserve property, 188 acres (77%), is closed to human access to protect wildlife habitat.
“We didn’t have these management controversies,” Will said of the early years of the county’s management of North Star, “and we also didn’t have the amount of residential use surrounding it at the time.”
Colorado law allows for the “right to float” through navigable waters, meaning landowners cannot prevent the public from floating navigable waters that run through their property.
The section of the Roaring Fork River that passes through North Star has long drawn river users. Kirk Baker ran a kayak school that made use of the mellow stretch to teach beginner boaters starting in the 1970s. Because North Star is close to town and relatively flat, it became popular with people looking to play in water close to Aspen, attracting floaters on inflatable tubes — although the frigid water doesn’t lend itself to sitting in it for long stretches — and, especially in the past 15 years, stand-up paddleboarders.
The 2002 conservation easement is intended to preserve and protect the area’s ecological values and wildlife habitat while also allowing for recreation — two objectives that often conflict.
“Open Space has kind of been caught in the middle of trying to abide by the old documents and this runaway popularity that was independently growing,” Will said.
Tipping point in 2014: AVLT blows the whistle
By 2014, North Star had dramatically increased in popularity and the conservation values of the area were under tremendous pressure. People flocked to the river in droves, parked their cars on Wildwood Lane in ways that blocked school bus and emergency vehicle access, brought dogs, loud music and glass containers — all of which are prohibited — and left behind loads of trash, often including the tubes they floated on. It was a mess.
Longtime users of the preserve were concerned that wildlife was suffering as a result. The most visible, immediate red flag was the absence of the large, charismatic great blue herons. North Star had been the home of a high-altitude heron rookery since at least 2000, but the number of active nests had dwindled as recreational use picked up on the river.
“The herons were gone right around 2015,” said Jim Kravitz, naturalist programs director at ACES, who also lives near the preserve.
An assessment by Jonathan Lowsky of Colorado Wildlife Science in 2018 showed that the increase in recreation and the declining health of the trees in which the herons were nested probably helped to spur the herons to abandon the site. Lowsky and other birding experts note that it’s typical for herons to relocate, especially when large amounts of excrement, which is highly acidic, begin to affect the health of nesting tree stands.
New heron colonies have since been spotted upstream from North Star and at Hallam Lake, and herons continue to use the wetlands for hunting and foraging, Lowsky said.
With noisy, sometimes raucous recreational use increasing and concerns about its impacts on wildlife and habitat, AVLT alerted the county in May 2014 that it was in violation of the terms of the conservation easement.
That 2002 document specifies that the county must update its management plan for North Star every five years and that “no amendments or changes to the management plan may increase the type or intensity of recreational, commercial or public use beyond what is specified in the existing management plan.”
AVLT requested that the county update the management plan and create a short-term plan to mitigate high use of the area during the summer months.
“Recent past easement monitoring reports have provided a reminder of the need to review and update the management plan per the requirements of the easement and have indicated an increase of public recreational use of the preserve,” Connor Coleman, stewardship director for AVLT at the time, wrote in a letter to Open Space and Trails.
In a response, Pitkin County noted that studies of the area’s vegetation, wildlife, wetlands, river health and recreation were underway, and acknowledged the unique challenges presented by the web of land ownership and jurisdiction in the area.
“Most of the public use you reference involves people floating through the preserve,” Will wrote in May 2014. “Our ownership of North Star does not create control of the river due to the overlapping public right to float navigable waterways, the [Forest Service] ownership of the boater’s put-in at Wildwood, and CDOT’s ownership of roadside parking along this reach of the river.”
The county has since updated the North Star Nature Preserve Management Plan twice — in 2015 and 2020 — with the next update scheduled in 2025.
“We got that notice of violation and then we got on it,” Will said. “Those management-plan iterations have all struggled to contend with the amount of demand there is for the amount of people who want to float down that river.”
Conditions improve, but county still searching for magic number of river users
Since 2015, Pitkin County has addressed concerns about parking, litter and noise at the nature preserve through targeted enforcement, expanded ranger presence and educational programs, but the number of users, especially those on stand-up paddleboards, continues to grow.
The county started tracking public use of the river through North Star in 2018, when 6,284 people floated through the preserve. Use peaked in 2020, with nearly 15,000 visitors on the river; this was during the height of COVID-19 pandemic precautions, when outdoor recreation was among the limited opportunities to socialize.
The number of boaters and floaters depends on weather and runoff, and Open Space and Trails issues voluntary closures when river levels drop below 60 cubic feet per second, which is the point at which floaters begin to hit the bottom of the river and need to walk.
In the relatively dry and warm summer of 2021, when the voluntary closure began in mid-July, there were 7,988 river users at North Star. There were fewer visitors, 7,015, during the wet summer of 2022, and more (9,235 users) last summer, when high snow levels and high flows meant the voluntary closure didn’t hit until mid-August.
Open Space and Trails now has agreements with Colorado Department of Transportation and the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office that allow open space rangers to issue parking tickets along Highway 82, and the county also works with the Forest Service to manage parking at the Wildwood put-in.
Still, with more than 9,000 river users in 2023, there simply is not enough parking — nor the desire to create enough — to accommodate the crowds. The county encourages alternative transportation, including using commercial operators to shuttle visitors.
Until 2015, under the terms of the 2000 management plan, there was one permit available for commercial river use, held by Baker of the Aspen Kayak School, which he later sold to Charlie MacArthur in 2007, who renamed it Aspen Kayak and Stand Up Paddle. There were no restrictions on the number of clients that commercial operations could host.
“That one commercial operator could have had 40 buses and people going out on the river every 10 minutes,” Tennenbaum said.
In the 2015 management plan update, Pitkin County allowed for an unlimited number of commercial permits but restricted how those businesses could operate. Commercial operators were limited to six people per launch and one launch per hour. They were also asked to educate their clients about the environment and ecology.
“That made a huge difference,” Tennenbaum said. “Commercial clients are not the issue. They’re not getting the tickets, they’re not the ones out there creating the problems. We feel the commercial use piece is the better piece at this point. It’s the public use that we’re still working on.”
Tennenbaum says that river users who follow the guidance of Open Space and Trails — for example, park in designated spots or ride their bikes to the area; remain in their boats or on their paddleboards through the entire float; stay quiet to respect the wildlife; travel in small groups and tread lightly without leaving behind trash — do not cause problems for the wildlife and ecosystem at North Star. Open Space and Trails rangers issue citations to visitors who break these rules. In 2023, commercial outfitters received four citations, while rangers issued tickets to 40 private users.
For this summer, in response to growing numbers of visitors, Open Space and Trails has limited the number of commercial permits to five, but that doesn’t address the rest of the public; last summer, 73% of river users were members of the public who did not use a commercial outfitter.
Neighbors and concerned citizens asked the Pitkin County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) and the Open Space and Trails Board to study the capacity of North Star — although, as open space board member Howie Mallory noted, there is no consensus on what “capacity” truly means at North Star.
Capacity might indicate the total number of visitors that the area can support without damaging the ecosystem. Pitkin County says scientific monitoring over the past decades has shown improvements to the ecosystem.
When the county acquired North Star, it had been used for hayfields and pasture land and the river was probably straightened in areas. Transmountain diversions from the headwaters of the Roaring Fork basin have left the wetlands with far less water than the natural baseline. To this day, a mosquito-control district sprays larvicide multiple times a year to kill off mosquitoes and black flies, which, though irritants to people, are a major source of food in a river ecosystem.
“North Star is a heavily altered landscape. It is not a natural area; this is not a native ecosystem,” Tennenbaum said. “We’re trying to let it rewild, but we know it’s almost impossible to bring it back. We don’t have the same amount of water we used to have because of transmountain diversions. They straightened the river to create more pasture and we can’t get back the bends in the river because we don’t have the same amount of water.”
The county has worked to restore the natural ecosystem. In 2020, Open Space and Trails, with a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, filled in ditches that had been used to drain a fen — a type of wetland that contains peat — allowing groundwater and surface flows to rewater the northwest corner of the preserve.
“By doing that, they restored a tremendous amount of songbird habitat, waterfowl habitat and wading bird habitat,” said Lowsky, who has monitored wildlife use and habitat in the North Star preserve for nearly 25 years. He worked as a wildlife biologist for Pitkin County from 1999 to 2004 and was involved in writing the 2000 management plan.
Lowsky said species such as rails, spotted sandpipers and small mammals benefit from the fen restoration, as do predators such as coyotes, raptors and bobcats.
The county has also worked to restore river banks, planting cottonwoods, willows and shrubs that have increased the amount of habitat for animals such as beavers, mule deer, muskrats and mink.
Using wildlife cameras, Lowsky said, “we’ve seen more beaver activity on the river than ever before and more beaver lodges both above and below ground than ever before.”
Beavers are a key species and have created more habitat for other wildlife to thrive at North Star. Pitkin County has prohibited the removal of beaver dams in the preserve.
“Things are really good at North Star,” Lowsky said. “Everything along the food chain since I’ve been monitoring out there has increased.”
The most recent published reports on wildlife use and habitat quality are from 2017; Lowsky is currently analyzing data collected in the past several summers for updated reports.
“The trajectory of habitat quality and quantity and trajectory of wildlife use have been improving since I’ve been monitoring,” Lowsky said, noting that sensitive and indicator species seem to be doing well. “We have seen there are more sensitive species and greater numbers of each of those than there have been at any point since we’ve been monitoring.”
Lowksy said that he cannot yet speak to the data on specific species, but that the overall trends speak to improving habitat.
Still, overall trends also show a clear increase in the number of river users, and neighbors and frequent local users say there is not enough reverence for the sacred place. It’s clear that many in the community want to see fewer paddleboarders on the preserve.
Michael Kinsley, a current Open Space and Trails Board member and a member of the BOCC when the county acquired North Star, said at the December meeting that numbers are too high now and are likely to increase in the future.
“I want to limit the number, informed by both biological and social factors,” Kinsley said.
The county recently hired DJ&A, an engineering and surveying company, to conduct a visitor-use management study this summer that would help nail down how much use is too much or feels like too much.
DJ&A has worked on capacity and visitor-use studies in national forests and parks across the country. The consultants will gather hard numbers on how much traffic is being generated by river users at North Star using cellphone data and traffic counters.
The consultants will also use photo simulations to survey visitors about crowding and understand the level of crowding that river users find acceptable.
“Data collection is just one part of the process ahead,” said Carly O’Connell, senior planner and landscape architect with Open Space and Trails. “We want to base all our projects on best-available biological sciences as well as social sciences.”
DJ&A will analyze the data and prepare a report, and Open Space and Trails staffers will use that to inform the management planning process, including public engagement.
But Tennenbaum is skeptical that the process will identify an exact number of visitors that preserves the feeling of North Star as a nature preserve and meets the community’s desire for recreation.
“I just don’t think we’re ever going to come to a number,” Tennenbaum told commissioners in December. “However, if you want to do a permit system in the future, we need to be able to control the put-in.”
This concludes Aspen Journalism’s two-part series about management of the North Star Nature Preserve. Part 1 discussed a potential land exchange and a mining claim near the Wildwood Lane put-in.
Pitkin County supports Aspen Journalism with a grant from the Healthy Community Fund. Aspen Journalism is solely responsible for its editorial content.