Colorado Catches Up: A State Strategy, a Fire Line on Rock Creek, and a Lot of Fence Posts
Part 2 of a four-part series on beavers, drought, and wildfire in the Upper Arkansas By Jo Thompson, Seasonal Stewardship Coordinator
We ended Part 1 with a promise to dig into the policy side: CPW's first statewide Beaver Conservation and Management Strategy. That's still the plan. But a lot happened between July and now. A wildfire burned west of Leadville. Nathan Ward and I visited a beaver complex that stood in its path. And I spent time in Gunnison-area creeks learning to build structures that do what beavers do.
Each of those turns out to be a chapter of the state strategy playing out on the ground. So, this post moves back and forth between the page and the creek: what the strategy says, where to find beavers on a map, what happens when beavers and people want the same patch of floodplain, and how you can join in the work.
A green line on Rock Creek
The Willow Fire started on June 28, 2026, about six miles west of Leadville and south of Turquoise Lake. Officials say it was human-caused. By the time evacuation orders were lifted at the end of July, it had burned roughly 7,200 acres. On July 6, it reached the Colorado Outward Bound School's Leadville Mountain Center. The school lost its ropes course and campgrounds, but firefighters were able to protect the rest of the basecamp.
In September, Nathan Ward, Coordinator of the Upper Arkansas Watershed Partnership
(UAWP), and I visited the campus. A beaver pond complex runs along Rock Creek there, and the fire's edge is easy to read. Beyond the creek stands a forest of blackened and rust-red conifers. In front of it, a broad band of willow, sedge, and grass is still green and gold. I saw the fire damage on campus, and I saw where the fire stopped. The beaver-built wetlands along the pond complex acted as a fire break and helped keep the damage from being worse.
In Part 1, I wrote about the research showing that beaver-dammed stretches of stream stay green while fire burns around them. Ecohydrologist Emily Fairfax and co-author Andrew Whittle titled their 2020 study "Smokey the Beaver." Rock Creek is an example of that in our own backyard. Colorado's new beaver strategy cites the same work, along with newer research on fire resilience. It also cites a 2024 study of beaver ponds in Colorado and Wyoming that found they trap the sediment washing off burned slopes. That matters here, because next spring's runoff will likely carry ash and soil off the Willow Fire burn scar.
Colorado catches up: what the strategy says
Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) released its Beaver Conservation and Management Strategy earlier this year. The whole thing, appendices included, runs 158 pages. Its overarching goal fits in one sentence: "Increase beaver populations and beaver-occupied wetland habitats in Colorado until social or ecological carrying capacity is reached."
The strategy lays out why this matters now. Colorado has lost more than half of its historical wetland acres since the 1800s, including beaver ponds, wet meadows, and willow shrublands. Statewide mapping found more than 25,000 acres of beaver-modified wetlands that haven't been occupied by beavers in the past decade. Meanwhile, the sentiment is changing and more people now see beavers as a keystone species whose wetlands store water, filter it, and buffer floods, drought, and wildfire.
CPW built the strategy with internal working groups, a technical advisory team, public comment, and focus groups that drew about 170 participants from many sectors. The result has five main chapters: population status, harvest management, restoration opportunities, living with beavers, and translocation. Each ends with a goal and a list of strategies and actions. CPW is clear that this is a foundational document, not a detailed operational plan with budgets and timelines.
Two ideas from the strategy run through the rest of this post:
Habitat has a social side. The strategy separates ecologically suitable habitat (water, willows, room to spread out) from socially suitable habitat, where beavers are unlikely to collide with roads, ditches, and other human uses. It notes that coexistence, outreach, and relationship-building can increase the amount of socially suitable habitat.
People are part of the plan. One of the strategy's "visions of success" is that "networks of trained practitioners exist in all major watersheds to restore beaver and their habitat, and to provide rapid response to land and water managers experiencing beaver conflicts to assist with non-lethal solutions when feasible."
There's a local touch in the restoration chapter, too. Its before-and-after photos of beaver dam analogs on Rough and Tumbling Creek come from Mark Beardsley of Salida's EcoMetrics, whose Fourmile Creek work we featured in Part 1.
Where are the beavers? Check the map
If you want to see beaver country from your desk, start with the Colorado Beaver Activity Mapper (COBAM). The Colorado Natural Heritage Program at Colorado State University built it, with funding from the Colorado Water Conservation Board, CPW, the U.S. EPA, and the Walton Family Foundation. It's free and runs in a web browser. The state strategy leans on it heavily and commits to keeping it updated.
The map's main layer, Beaver Activity Areas, comes from aerial imagery. Analysts identified beaver ponds and grouped those within 20 meters of each other into clusters. The result, in the mapper's own words, is "the most comprehensive, recent map of statewide beaver wetlands." Using that data, the strategy reports that about 90 percent of Colorado's beaver ponds are in the mountains.
Other layers you can turn on:
Historical beaver areas: beaver wetlands mapped decades ago in the National Wetlands Inventory. Compare them with recent activity to see where beavers used to be and aren't now.
Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool (BRAT): a model of how many dams each stream reach could support.
Beaver Decision Support System: new restoration-opportunity layers built for the strategy. They flag individual wetland complexes and whole watersheds with lots of suitable but unoccupied habitat.
Land ownership and management: who manages the ground, which shapes what's possible.
To try it, zoom in on the Arkansas headwaters between Leadville and Salida. Turn on the activity areas and the historical beaver areas, then click a few streams you know.
Two cautions as you explore. First, the activity areas come from imagery taken in specific years, so new ponds, and ponds beavers have since left, may not show up yet. Second, a pond map shows ponds. Beavers that live in bank dens along bigger rivers, without building dams, can be hard to spot from the air. If you know of beaver activity the map doesn't show, we'd love to hear about it.
Same creek, different problem: the flooded footbridge
The Outward Bound campus also shows the other side of living with beavers. On the same campus, a beaver dam is backing water up over a walking bridge. UAWP and Central Colorado Conservancy will be helping the school address it.
This is exactly the kind of situation the strategy's "Living with Beaver" chapter covers. Its goal is to "promote the widespread adoption of non-lethal solutions to common beaver conflicts when such solutions are appropriate and feasible." It lays out a step-by-step way to think a problem through:
Is there really a conflict? Sometimes the answer is to watch and wait. Sometimes it's to act before damage happens.
Can this site sustain beavers? A natural stream with food, room for ponds, and reliable water favors a non-lethal fix.
What's the best approach for this site and this level of risk?
For a pond flooding a trail, the strategy's appendix describes a few options. A pond leveler runs a pipe through the dam, with its intake caged well upstream. The beavers keep building to plug a leak they can't find, and the pond settles at a level people choose. Levelers work best at free-standing dams with ponds deeper than about three feet. If the water needs to drop more than a foot, it should come down in stages so the beavers don't abandon the site. The appendix even includes USDA Wildlife Services’ photos of a pond leveler installed near a pedestrian bridge. Another option is to move the trail or crossing instead of installing a device that needs upkeep. A site assessment will show which fits this site.
Why not simply remove the dam, or the beavers? The strategy's answer is practical. If the habitat stays good, new beavers often move in and the cycle starts over. Coexistence devices tend to cost less over time. In one Virginia study, every dollar spent on flow devices saved more than eight dollars compared with trapping, dam removal, and road repairs. Properly installed devices need about one to two hours of maintenance a year and last 10 to 12 years on average.
That word properly matters. The strategy says flow devices should be installed under the guidance of a trained professional. The two main reasons they fail are flimsy materials and installers with little or no training. This brings us to Gunnison.
Learning to think like a beaver: training in Gunnison
This fall I participated in a Low-Tech Process-Based Restoration (LTPBR) workshop and hands-on
training from Coldharbour Institute, a Gunnison nonprofit focused on healthy working lands and watersheds, in partnership with Western Colorado University. We covered the principles of process-based restoration, how to read a landscape for restoration opportunities, the restoration toolbox, and the legal and permitting side of the work. Then, on October 3 and 4, we spent two full days working alongside professionals on a local restoration project.
The idea behind LTPBR is in the name. Low-tech means hand-built structures made of wood posts, logs, willow, and brush, installed by people with post pounders and waders rather than heavy equipment. Process-based means we don't build the finished stream. We nudge the processes that build it, like ponding, sediment deposition, and floodplain reconnection, and then let the creek and, ideally, the beavers take it from there.
Along with riparian plantings, we built two kinds of structures:
Post-assisted log structures (PALS): logs and branches pinned in place with wooden posts, mimicking the natural wood jams that redirect flow, scour pools, and push water toward the banks.
Beaver dam analogs (BDAs): a line of posts across a channel, woven with willow and packed with brush, that slows and ponds water the way a beaver dam does. The state strategy notes that BDAs can help entice beavers back into historical habitat.
The course also stressed the big picture. A structure that slows and spreads water on one property can change how much water reaches people downstream, and when. In Colorado, that water usually already belongs to someone under the state's water rights system. So this work doesn't start with a post pounder. It starts with conversations with landowners, neighbors, and downstream water users, and with checking water rights and getting the right permissions and permits.
Colorado's 2023 stream restoration law, Senate Bill 23-270, exempts certain "minor stream restoration activities" from water rights administration, but only if a project meets the law's criteria. For example, a project can't interfere with the structures water users rely on to divert or measure their water. CPW's beaver strategy encourages anyone planning this work to talk early on in the process with their river basin's Division Engineer at the Colorado Division of Water Resources. For the Arkansas basin, that's Division 2 in Pueblo, whose field water commissioners allocate water among users day to day. Some sites need other permits too, such as federal permits for work in streams and wetlands. As we said in Part 1, any beaver work we take on will respect and protect water rights.
The LTPBR module was one of three independent courses in Coldharbour's Fall 2026 Workshop Series. Another, which I didn't take, was a Beaver Coexistence module that covered the other half of the job. It included a Colorado Parks and Wildlife guest lecture on trapping, relocation, and permits, plus two field days designing and installing pond levelers and culvert fences on active beaver sites. The third course taught aquatic macroinvertebrate sampling. If any of these interest you, keep an eye on Coldharbour Institute's website in case the series is offered again.
Restoration and coexistence really are two halves of one job. Restoration invites beavers back. Coexistence is what lets them stay once they arrive next to a road, a ditch, or a footbridge. The state strategy makes the same point and calls on partners to "explicitly connect beaver restoration with beaver coexistence" so restoration lasts and conflicts stay small.
Want to learn more about LTPBR? Here are some good places to start:
The LTPBR Design Manual from Utah State University is the standard reference. It was the manual for the Coldharbour course, and the state strategy recommends it. It's free to download, and a pocket field guide version is also available.
Free self-paced learning modules on the same site walk through LTPBR concepts with lectures and readings. Utah State also offers paid online Intro and Advanced LTPBR course series in the spring, for university credit or continuing education.
The Beaver Restoration Guidebook (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2023) is a free PDF on working with beavers to restore streams, wetlands, and floodplains. The strategy recommends it too.
The NAWM–BLM Beaver-Related Restoration Training Series is six recorded webinar modules from the National Association of Wetland Managers and the Bureau of Land Management. They're free to watch, with optional paid quizzes for continuing education credit.
Hands-on: watch for workshops like Coldharbour's, and for volunteer build days with local groups, including ours.
Bill Zeedyk's rock structures, which came up in Part 1 and in our first classroom session, are the other half of the low-tech toolbox. Zeedyk's one-rock dams, Zuni bowls, and induced meandering use hand-placed rock to heal gullies and eroding channels, especially in drier places. His book with Van Clothier, Let the Water Do the Work: Induced Meandering, an Evolving Method for Restoring Incised Channels, is available from the Quivira Coalition.
Keep learning: the Beaver Institute
If this post leaves you wanting more, two resources from the nonprofit Beaver Institute are worth bookmarking.
The Beaver Institute Library is a free, volunteer-built collection of hundreds of beaver articles, videos, and web links. You can search it or browse 22 topics, from Beaver Basics and Water Storage to Stream Restoration, Human Dimensions, and Wildfires. Teachers will find a separate Beaver Educator Resource Library with materials for all ages. If Rock Creek has you curious, the Wildfires topic is a good place to start. Visit the library.
BeaverCorps came up in Part 1, when we mentioned that our staff are training as Beaver Coexistence Professionals. The state strategy explains why that matters. It calls BeaverCorps "currently the only professional beaver coexistence training and certification program in the U.S." and points landowners to the Institute's directory of certified professionals. Here's how the program works:
Part One, online: 40 to 60 hours of self-paced lessons, usually finished in about six weeks. Topics include beaver ecology and behavior, water control devices, LTPBR, and permitting.
Part Two, in the field: four real project installations with one-on-one mentoring from Beaver Institute staff.
Tracks and timing: a business track for people starting a beaver management business and a non-business track for agency, nonprofit, and landowner work. Most trainees finish in about 12 months, and new trainees are accepted on a rolling basis.
Cost: tuition is $2,500 as of this writing, with limited scholarships for financial hardship.
BeaverCorps graduates are already working in Colorado. The strategy notes that USDA Wildlife Services staff here are BeaverCorps-certified and available to help with flow device installations. And two staff leading the Yampa Valley Beaver Working Group were going through the training when the strategy was written. Learn more about BeaverCorps.
What we're doing and how you can help
The strategy imagines a volunteer network in each region of the state. Volunteers would help with outreach, coexistence projects, maintenance checks, and community science, such as monitoring beaver activity and wetland health. It also calls for a network of trained coexistence contacts that would eventually reach every river basin, the Upper Arkansas included. That's what we're building here.
Help with coexistence projects. UAWP and Central Colorado Conservancy are working with the Colorado Outward Bound School on its flooded walking bridge. We're also helping landowners with beaver coexistence issues, such as blocked culverts. If you'd like to lend a hand, have a beaver issue on your own property, or bring relevant experience, we'd love to hear from you.
Join the Beaver Working Group. As we shared in Part 1, Central Colorado Conservancy and the UAWP are forming a local Beaver Working Group for the Upper Arkansas. We're looking for landowners, ecologists, agency staff, water users, and curious neighbors. Sign up to hear about field days, trainings, and projects.
To get involved in either, contact:
Nathan Ward, Upper Arkansas Watershed Partnership: info@uawp.org
Jo Thompson, Central Colorado Conservancy: jo@centralcoloradoconservancy.org
Thanks for reading, and until next month!
Sources
1. Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Colorado Beaver Conservation and Management Strategy, v. 2/26/2026, with Appendices A–C. Cited: pp. 14–20, 34, 54–58, 66–85, 133, 141–153. engagecpw.org/beaver-conservation-and-management-strategy
2. Marshall, S.M. and G. Smith. Colorado Beaver Activity Mapper. Colorado Natural Heritage Program, Colorado State University; updated June 2026. Open the mapper
3. Fairfax, E. and A. Whittle. "Smokey the Beaver: beaver-dammed riparian corridors stay green during wildfire throughout the western United States." Ecological Applications 30, no. 8 (2020): e02225. doi.org/10.1002/eap.2225
4. Moravek, J.A., et al. "Maximizing the potential benefits of beaver restoration for fire resilience and water storage." Ecological Applications 35, no. 7 (2025): e70102.
5. Dunn, S.B., S.L. Rathburn, and E. Wohl. "Post-fire sediment attenuation in beaver ponds, Rocky Mountains, CO and WY, USA." Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 49, no. 13 (2024): 4340–4354.
6. Colorado Outward Bound School. "Leadville Update." Updated August 21, 2026. outwardbound.org/cobs/leadville-update
7. Denver7. "Willow Fire 2026" coverage, updated through August 1, 2026. denver7.com/willow-fire-2026
8. Leadville Herald. "Early investigation points to human cause for the Willow Fire." July 16, 2026. leadvilleherald.com
9. Wheaton, J.M., et al. Low-Tech Process-Based Restoration of Riverscapes: Design Manual. Utah State University, 2019. lowtechpbr.restoration.usu.edu
10. Pollock, M.M., G. Lewallen, K. Woodruff, C. Jordan, and J. Castro, eds. The Beaver Restoration Guidebook, v. 2.02. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2023. fws.gov PDF
11. Utah State University. LTPBR learning resources. lowtechpbr.restoration.usu.edu/resources
12. National Association of Wetland Managers and Bureau of Land Management. Beaver-Related Restoration Training Series. nawm.org
13. Zeedyk, B. and V. Clothier. Let the Water Do the Work: Induced Meandering, an Evolving Method for Restoring Incised Channels. Quivira Coalition. quiviracoalition.org
14. Colorado Healthy Headwaters Working Group and Water for Colorado. Training Manual: Translating SB23-270 Projects to Restore Natural Stream Systems, v. 1.0, 2024. PDF
15. Colorado State University Water Center. "Administration of Water Rights." Colorado Water Knowledge. waterknowledge.colostate.edu
16. Coldharbour Institute and Western Colorado University. Fall 2026 Workshop Series flyers: Low-Tech Process Based Restoration Module and Beaver Coexistence Module. coldharbourinstitute.org
17. Beaver Institute. Library. beaverinstitute.org/library
18. Beaver Institute. BeaverCorps Program. beaverinstitute.org/professional-info/beavercorps-program
19. Beaver Institute. Find a Professional in Your Area. beaverinstitute.org/professional-info/find-a-professional-in-your-area
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