A mountain summit in Jefferson County where millions of ladybugs breed with surrounding foothills that are home to elk moose, mountain lions, bears and other animals long has been off-limits as private property.
Now this 9,741-foot Mount Tom, 30 miles northwest of Denver, is public open space following a $25 million deal by the Conservation Fund, Great Outdoors Colorado, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and Jefferson County. They’ve acquired ownership of about 2,000 acres that eventually will be accessible to the public.
“Even if our population stopped growing, all you have to do is go skiing on a weekend, or go camping in the summer, and see all the vehicle traffic heading up into the mountains,” the Conservation Fund’s state director Justin Spring said.
The emerging new Mount Tom Conservation Corridor “is much closer to home,” Spring said, “and in a few years it will be a really accessible mountain recreation area.”
For wildlife including the ladybugs, conservation of habitat is essential – a primary purpose of the multi-agency deal that agency officials announced Tuesday.
This land sits south of the Golden Gate Canyon State Park within Jefferson County, and includes forested foothills holding headwaters of Van Bibber Creek, a tributary of the South Platte River. It is surrounded by 20,000 acres already protected against development. Connecting protected landscapes helps wildlife move and survive in a rapidly urbanizing region.
The land previously belonged to the Baughman and the Cappello families who used it for cattle ranching. Back on April 8, 1952, an Air Force B-25 crashed into Mount Tom at a speed estimated at 200 miles per hour, government records show, leaving scattered wreckage. The property owners in recent years could have sold to developers, who had made overtures. “And without these private landowners placing a priority on conservation,” Spring said, the deal to create public open space couldn’t have happened.
The $25 million deal includes an easement to protect 400 acres that will stay privately owned as ranchland. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has acquired 1,180 acres adjacent to the existing Ralston Creek State Wildlife Area. Jefferson County Open Space has acquired 740 acres, encompassing the summit of Mount Tom, which will be designated as county open space.
A trail up Mount Tom is envisioned, bringing people to the largely untrammeled terrain where ladybugs breed, if that is deemed “sustainable.”
For the next few years, CPW biologists and county open space crews plan to conduct studies to assess wildlife needs, including species population surveys, and whether recreational use by potentially large numbers of Denver residents escaping their increasingly dense-packed city would be sustainable.
On the CPW portion of the land, recreation “is mainly going to be focused on fishing and hunting,” agency spokeswoman Kara Van Hoose said.
“We’ve seen many different wildlife species on the property,” Van Hoose said, referring to images from remote-controlled cameras that the private owners had installed.
“We have to find out what is living there, how long it has lived there, where it moves, and whether there are any diseases in the area. There aren’t any trails,” she said.
The studies will take at least a couple of years. “Ladybugs will continue to use Mount Tom,” Van Hoose said. “They blanket the area. It is pretty amazing. These are the regular ladybugs you would see in your garden — a lot of them.”
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