The Kawuneeche Valley was once so full of beaver water that the Colorado River had no clear channel. This stretch explains what emptied it, from trapping to browsing elk and moose, with the distance to keep from a moose and a look at the forest coming back after the East Troublesome Fire.
Moose. That's what everybody comes to this valley to see, and they aren't native to this part of the Rockies. Colorado introduced them outside the park in the late nineteen seventies. Look for them where there's willow and water, and stay at least a hundred and twenty feet back. A big bull can weigh fifteen hundred pounds and top thirty-five miles an hour, and if a moose holds its head high or low, it's time to retreat. Coyote Valley Trail is on your left in about a mile, the easiest real walk of the tour. A photograph from nineteen twenty shows a different valley. From the air it was so full of beaver wetlands that you can't find the Colorado River's channel at all. Look at it now, a grassy floor and a small river. The Park Service helped start that. It judged beavers tree-felling, land-flooding nuisances and allowed trappers to kill more than two hundred in the nineteen forties, and this valley has an estimated ninety-four percent fewer beaver ponds than it did in nineteen fifty-three. Tall willow and open water fell by more than ninety percent in twenty years, and elk and moose likely triggered that. One moose can eat forty-five pounds of willow in a day. In October of twenty twenty, the East Troublesome Fire grew more than a hundred thousand acres in one day, swept into the west side of the park and spotted a mile and a half across the Continental Divide. Beetles had already left this forest gray and volatile. But lodgepole cones can stay sealed with resin for years and open only in extreme heat, so those crowded young pines, all one height, are this forest doing what it does.
Photo: Rachel Kramer · CC BY 2.0