Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we will offer our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems).
There are some parks and open spaces in metro Denver that, if you use your imagination and squint just right, can make you feel miles away from the city.
It would be kind to say that Bluff Lake Nature Center is one of these places, but in truth, the 123-acre wildlife refuge and environmental education center never lets visitors forget where they are. Airplanes, cars and motorcycles can be heard at every point. Nearby hammering and drilling at construction sites in the Central Park neighborhood add to the din.
That urban setting at the intersection of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Havana Way, however, is what makes it so amazing that Bluff Lake is the No. 1 spot inside the city limits for birdwatching, according to the ebird online database and community forum.
Birders have recorded a whopping 230 different species at Bluff Lake, including common residents like red-winged blackbirds, hairy woodpeckers and green-winged teals; more magnificent denizens like great blue herons, great horned owls and Swainson’s hawks; and rare visitors like a semipalmated sandpiper and a Cordilleran flycatcher. In the last two years alone, birders have positively identified at least eight species new to the preserve, including a golden eagle and a red-eyed vireo.
The number of species spotted there is far more than at any other city park, open space, creek, wetlands, greenbelt, trail or pond inside the city limits. On my most recent visit, I was graced by a family of great-horned owls, two kinds of hawks, yellow warblers, American coots, cliff swallows and goldfinches.
The juxtaposition of city life with natural beauty is part of what makes Bluff Lake such a great place to walk — especially when you consider its history at the edge of urban and rural.
Like all the land in Colorado, the area around Bluff Lake was used by the Cheyenne, Arapahoe and other Native American tribes before settlers from the east began creating farms and ranches. But by the late 1800s, the 9-acre lake was part of a vast swath owned by Cyrus Richardson, a rancher and lawyer. It was fed by streams and used to irrigate local nurseries.
It continued in the role of an irrigator until the 1940s, when the city’s Aviation Department bought the land around the lake to use as a “crash zone” for Stapleton International Airport, according to a history of Bluff Lake that is laid out on its website. Crash zones were “required at the end of all runways to shield the surrounding community from airplane activities.”
It also became part of a massive north-south aviation and military-industrial complex that ran from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal chemical weapons manufacturing plant, down through Stapleton and into Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center and the Lowry and Buckley air bases.
By the mid-1990s, most of these facilities had been decommissioned and/or replaced (although there is still a military presence at Buckley) and city planners began to turn the land — some of it contaminated by this point — toward other uses, like housing and open space. That worked particularly well for Bluff Lake, which had been virtually undisturbed by humans for 50 years as a crash zone. Birds and animals, on the other hand, had turned it into a home.
Around that time, the Sierra Club sued the city of Denver, saying that the airport had allowed de-icing chemicals to spill into Sand Creek, killing the fish, according to Bluff Lake Nature Center’s website. The two sides eventually settled and Denver agreed to preserve the Bluff Lake area and invest more than $3 million to “enhance wildlife habitat, restore the banks of Sand Creek, build an interpretive trail system and construct open-air shelters.” That process has continued, and today the nature center is owned by its governing nonprofit organization.
The care put into it is evident. A long stairway leads down from the parking lot to a spot on the creek. This is a good place to find herons and egrets on some days. From there, walking counter-clockwise around the trail, you can find woodpeckers, warblers, towhees and dozens of other species. Eventually, the path leads to a long boardwalk out into the lake, where it’s possible to see geese and ducks of all kinds, depending on the season.
At the far point of the lake is a bird blind for more viewing. Past that, coming back around toward the parking lot, the trail rises along the bluff that the lake is named for. This is the best area to see swallows, hawks and, of course, that owl family nesting in a large tree above the lake.
With the housing developments that press into the sides of Bluff Lake, you will not have forgotten that you are in the city when you get back to the parking lot. But taking a long last look through the lenses of your binoculars, you will not have forgotten how resilient nature is, either.
