Paul Adams Asks The Question ‘How Wild Do You Like It?

It is early January, all of my favourite streams in Colorado are frozen and fishing is still three months away. Instead, when the weather and my enthusiasm align there are always outdoor projects to keep me occupied. Yesterday I was clearing willows; widening trails, opening a new access to the stream and trimming branches that overhang fishable runs. Tidying up ‘nature’, making it a little more tamed. Some of the bigger projects are referred to as ‘habitat improvement’ but that label is at best an opinion, perhaps a contradiction, or even outright hypocrisy. Extend that thought and it raises a broader and rather disquieting question: just how natural do we like our nature to be?

‘Natural’, ‘native’, ‘wild’; virtues that most Piscatorials would endorse but the terms get bandied about very casually. My favourite Kent/Sussex drains, for example, with their placid, reed-fringed water, abundant birdlife, and moody tench. These are beautiful but certainly not ‘natural’. They are the product of man’s efforts over half a millennium to tame the encroaching sea and render the land fit for agriculture. Large pump stations maintain this delicate balance, reversing or exaggerating the effects of gravity on water. The details are very different between Kent and Colorado but the contradictions will resonate.

For centuries, into the mid-1800s, this high valley was the seasonal hunting ground of nomadic, Native American tribes. They hunted the large herds of elk and deer before retreating to lower elevations for the winter. They left very little physical legacy here, the faint outline of their seasonal camps apparent to only the most observant. In the early 1800s, commercial trapping reached Colorado. Small groups of rugged individuals targeted beavers, their pelts being taken in service of fashion and commerce and masterminded, ironically, from London. Beaver populations were devastated and, except for a handful of the remotest areas, they were extinct in Colorado within a few decades. Starting in the early seventeenth century, this destructive wave rolled across America, south from Canada and west from the European colonies on the Atlantic coast. A pre-European beaver population estimated at 200 million was reduced to a few hundred thousand. On the plains, buffalo herds suffered a similar fate.

‘Modern’ Colorado dates from the discovery of gold in 1858 near the current site of Denver, with miners chasing their dreams higher into the mountains in the following years. Numerous gold and silver discoveries, booms and busts, rolled across the state into the 20th century but in the 1860s and ‘70s Colorado transitioned from a sparse, migratory population to one much larger and settled, with the familiar infrastructure of towns, roads, railways and agriculture.

The valley, cabin and stream that I now call home fit neatly into this narrative. Gold was discovered in the mountains twenty-five miles to the north in 1859. The Farnum family moved west from Iowa to ‘homestead’ the land in 1867, only the second family to do so along forty miles of the Tarryall valley. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, the federal government offered 160-acre tracts of land to settlers prepared to build a home and farm these unoccupied western lands. Of course, this legal directive ignored any claim that the native population could morally assert. On arrival the homesteaders hurriedly built a primitive shelter, often pits excavated into the hillside, fronted with local timber and roofed with turf. Probably not their first, but around 1890 family members built a sixteen by twenty foot log cabin which survives as the main room of the cabin I am writing from today. The adjacent hillside is dotted with the stumps of pines felled to furnish the walls and roof. I can be confident of the date as the interior walls were insulated with newspaper, fragments of which are still attached to the pine resin.

Beavers are central to any discussion about the landscape of the Rocky Mountains. It is a common misconception that they build dams to hunt fish in the deeper water, whereas they are in fact herbivores; one more reason for their respect here at TPR&F. Instead, deep water is their protection from predators, being ungainly and vulnerable on land. The water they impound slows, dissipating energy and dropping sediment, moving across a much wider front than the original channel. Beavers usually live close to a dam for many years, harvesting grasses, shrubs and trees close to the water for food and construction. The dam is raised to compensate as sediment accumulates behind, but is eventually abandoned when the local vegetation has been exhausted. Left undisturbed, a healthy population of beavers raises a flat, fertile valley bottom. It hosts dense stands of willows and other moisture loving shrubs, gnawed to ground level where beavers are active and re-growing to ten or twelve feet in height when the beavers temporarily vacate.

A different valley, but beaver activity across a quarter mile width of valley bottom

There were almost certainly no beavers in the Tarryall valley when the Farnum family settled here. During their first year they dug over a mile of ditch, diverting stream water to irrigate the meadow in this semi-arid climate. This seems to confirm that earlier beaver ponds had long since drained and Tarryall Creek had returned to a narrow channel.

As a reaction to the excesses of nineteenth century industrialisation, America’s attitude to nature and the environment became more sympathetic around 1900. Creation of the National Wildlife Refuge System in 1903 and the US Forest Service in 1905 were important landmarks. Beavers benefitted from this change in attitude, with reintroduction programs occurring nationwide in the first half of the twentieth century. I have no precise information but can speculate that beavers returned to Tarryall Creek before the Second World War, by which time the pattern of cultivated grass meadow and ditch irrigation was long established.

That they were not always welcome is evidenced by the box of traps that I inherited with the cabin. A widely held prejudice survives among the farming and ranching community that sees beavers only as a source of flood risk, ignoring the numerous, wider benefits and mitigation options that allow for co-existence.

I have stewarded a stretch of the Tarryall valley for nearly twenty years. At the outset there were beaver dams on the properties immediately above and below mine, and evidence of past beaver activity here but no active colony for nearly a mile. This initially caused me no disquiet as I was judging the water as a trout fisherman, conditioned by contemporary imagery of free flowing streams. Having done nothing to actively encourage them, save for the attractions of benign neglect, a beaver colony has returned.

Several smaller dams were built, often not surviving the next spring run-off, and bank-side holes and flattened grass trails all evidenced the beaver’s increasing presence. These new arrivals were likely young adults who typically leave their family unit as two year-olds to establish their own territory. An impressive dam has been built over the past three years and continues to be extended both vertically and laterally. From an original channel twenty feet wide, the water level has been raised over four feet, backing up nearly a quarter of a mile and extending laterally over 100 yards.

A corner of the meadow that was dry for many years is again permanently flooded. A commercial rancher might disagree but for me the loss of a few bales of hay is a small price to pay for the attractions of an expanding wetland. In a previous article I mentioned the wisp of snipe that now frequent this wetland, just one example across the full spectrum from microbes to muskrats to moose. (‘Wisp’ is one of several evocative, collective nouns attributed to snipe. Others include ‘bevy’ and ‘walk’).

As the water freezes in December, the extent of the standing water behind the new dam complex shows starkly.

Two hundred yards from the stream (seen at the top of the previous photograph), separated by the hay meadow, is a grove of mature aspens, a favoured haunt of birds, deer and elk. Had the beavers been left undisturbed, these aspens, a favourite food of theirs, would have been harvested long ago. Instead, the dry meadow made the risks and labour too great to warrant their destructive attention, though that may change as the wetland again encroaches closer.

At the risk of this becoming a hydrological treatise, the use of ditches for irrigation has another unanticipated consequence. If the stream channel was to migrate – its natural inclination – the inlet to the ditch would eventually be bypassed and receive no water inflow. A new ditch system would be prohibitively expensive and legally doubtful, so by the placement of rock and log structures to limit bank erosion, the stream is contained to its existing channel. Oxbow cut-offs are evidence of past stream migration across the valley floor but little of this has occurred in the last century or more.

So, while there is little disagreement that the Tarryall valley is beautiful, extolling it as ‘natural’ needs significant qualification. Much rests on the time horizon. 200 years ago the valley floor was likely covered with braided streams, ponds, willows and other wetland vegetation. Trapping and agriculture have since limited beaver numbers and their effects on the immediate landscape, with irrigated meadow replacing willows and pools. Perhaps in recent years the trend has reversed somewhat. Left undisturbed, and increasingly unconcerned by my presence, beavers are again expanding the wetland and reclaiming meadow first cultivated 150 years ago.

And what of the fish in Tarryall Creek? Brown trout predominate and spawn here every autumn. Rainbows are a regular catch and, although many are stocked fish introduced annually by landowners upstream and down, there is some limited, local reproduction. The occasional brook and cutthroat trout are certainly stocked fish. All thrive in this mountain stream but any thought of them as ‘native’ is wide of the mark.

Brown trout were never indigenous in North America. Two different strains were introduced from Germany and the UK in the 1880s and quickly stocked across much of the US. As a generalisation, brook trout (technically a char, not a trout) were native to the cooler parts of the eastern U.S. and Canada, and Rainbows to the western and northern states. Neither were native to Colorado.

Which leaves the cutthroat trout, but even that is a complicated story. Cutthroats are native to Colorado and were caught in abundance by early visitors to Tarryall Creek, but as mining expanded and assumed industrial scale and technology, the environmental consequences were devastating. Pressurised water was used to shatter sedimentary deposits and then separate heavier gold and silver from rock and soil. This water was drawn from the streams and rivers, before being returned below as a slurry. Whether poisoned or denuded of light and oxygen, downstream waterways were sterilised, all the trout killed. Tarryall Creek takes its name from the long abandoned town located twenty-five miles upstream in the foothills of 13,000 and 14,000 foot peaks, site of the first gold mining in the county. Sadly, Tarryall Creek was an early victim of this fish kill. Today, upstream from my cabin, there are self-sustaining populations of cutthroat and brook trout but they are strains reintroduced from distant and unpolluted parts of the American west.

There is an emerging scientific opinion that cutthroat, and especially brook trout, are better adapted than browns and rainbows to a stream heavily populated with beavers. They thrive in slower water and pools, don’t need the clear, stony beds that other trout prefer for spawning, and are well adapted to migrate through semi-permeable beaver dams. So, as beavers re-establish themselves here, my thoughts turn to the stocking of cutthroat or brook trout. I don’t yet feel that the science is sufficiently proven and there would certainly be competition from the resident browns, but it is a worthy consideration. Man playing God with Nature, again?    

So, as ‘natural’ as it may feel to catch ‘wild’ trout on Tarryall Creek, there is nothing ‘native’ about them. All four species were re-introduced to the stream in an unofficial and ad hoc manner between the late 19th and middle of the past century. But as a more uplifting sideline, in remote headwaters of this Platte River basin, DNA testing has identified cutthroat strains that are consistent with an indigenous trout, resident since the retreat of the last Ice Age. Seemingly they survived – small fish in isolated populations – above the mining devastation.

Natural; but not untamed. Native; sometimes. Beautiful; certainly to my eye. Different from the past and, depending on the time horizon, sometimes for the worse but also for the better. I will hopefully enjoy Tarryall for many more years and leave it a little better than I first found it, though ‘better’ is of course just another qualitative and personal opinion.

Postscript

My morning walk today was under low clouds with a few flakes of snow. After several hours sat at a computer, mid-afternoon brought the belated realisation of a clear sky, offering a final hour before the sun dips behind the ridge to the west. Willow – the border terrier, not the bush – needed no encouragement.

A strong wind tempered the warmth as we climbed the steep slopes that overlook Tarryall Creek and the meadow. On this aspect the recent snow was gone, though the flats were covered with an ice crust and north-facing slopes still held drifted snow. Interspersed with the dominant ponderosa pines, bristlecone pines claim the steepest, rocky and exposed terrain; unpretentious trees, lacking the imposing girth and height of some evergreens, the elegant symmetry of others. Instead they are typically squat and scraggly, often multi-trunked, branches carelessly intertwined, dead limbs scarring their evergreen appearance.

Contesting the honour with giant sequoia and varieties of cypress, bristlecones are among the longest lived trees in the world with exceptional examples that are more than 4,000 years old. These in Tarryall are youngsters in comparison but still at least 300 years old, perhaps much more. As the native tribes hunted this valley, trappers decimated the original beaver population, the Farnums settled and farmed, the bristlecones witnessed it all. Knotted, twisted limbs spared them the fate of cabin lumber and now they see the beavers reclaiming a little of their former domain. Bristlecone pines: native, natural, indigenous and wild.

Writing & Images Paul Adams – Colorado, February 2024