{"id":1312215,"date":"2019-07-08T21:16:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-09T03:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/restoration-hundreds-of-volunteers-helped-to-reseed-basalt-mountain\/"},"modified":"2019-07-08T21:16:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-09T03:16:00","slug":"restoration-hundreds-of-volunteers-helped-to-reseed-basalt-mountain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/restoration-hundreds-of-volunteers-helped-to-reseed-basalt-mountain\/","title":{"rendered":"Restoration: Hundreds of volunteers helped to reseed Basalt Mountain"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nearly 300 volunteers came together June 15 to help reseed part of the Colorado Parks and Wildlife land on Basalt Mountain that was destroyed by the Lake Christine Fire in 2018.<\/strong>
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Nearly a year after the Lake Christine Fire broke out in Basalt, members of the community were able to come together and begin the restoration process.<\/p>\n

With no lack of willing participants, Roaring Fork Outdoor Volunteers led a reseeding project on June 15, and they had to even turn away people who wanted to help.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did have to go ahead and put a capacity limit, just for what we can actually accomplish in a day and the amount of people we can handle. But we are thrilled at the turnout,\u201d said Olivia Deihs, program manager for RFOV. \u201cWe are so thankful for everyone\u2019s community support and coming out to start the healing process. There will be ongoing projects for years and years going on Basalt Mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n

With around 300 people preregistered and nearly that many who showed up at Basalt Middle School on that Saturday morning, the project showed more than anything how ready the community is to move on from the wildfire that burned more than 12,500 acres last summer.<\/p>\n

Along with RFOV, the Roaring Fork Conservancy and Colorado Parks and Wildlife came together to organize the June project. The reseeding efforts took place over roughly 500 acres of Parks and Wildlife land near the gun range. Volunteers took shuttles from the school to the burn area where they spent several hours hand-seeding areas that couldn\u2019t be reached by machines or through aerial techniques.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s awesome to be part of a community like this. It doesn\u2019t take much of an ask to gather this many people behind a like cause,\u201d said Matt Yamashita, the area wildlife manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, which manages around 2,000 acres on Basalt Mountain. \u201cAs part of our process, we are trying to manage this for wildlife. We are going to be planting seeds up there that in five, 10 years, hopefully we\u2019ll see a bunch of deer and elk following suit.\u201d<\/p>\n

While general aesthetics and the return of wildlife are part of the restoration efforts, at the top of the list is soil and erosion control. A slow-growing, juniper-pinyon woodland, volunteers were primarily planting seeds for various native grasses and shrubs to help stabilize the soil. Without the vegetation, flooding can become a major concern in post-burn areas.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about soil retention,\u201d said Rick Lofaro, the executive director for Roaring Fork Conservancy. \u201cRoots hold soil together. Plants take up water in an area that\u2019s just burned. The concern is how severe the burn was and how hot the soil got and whether or not the soil becomes hydrophobic, and in a hydrophobic situation it\u2019s like water running off a parking lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lofaro said it\u2019s also important to re-establish the native plant species as events like the Lake Christine Fire leave the door open for non-native species and weeds to take root. It\u2019s something they will monitor over many years.<\/p>\n

While the reseeding project was a start, it\u2019s only that. Only those few thousand acres of Colorado Parks and Wildlife land on Basalt Mountain are safe for volunteers at the moment. Most of the remaining burn area is part of the national forest, where downed and burned trees remain as hazards and will need to be removed before the public can safely help with the restoration efforts.<\/p>\n

There will be plenty more projects over the coming years related to the Lake Christine Fire where volunteers will be needed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis community comes together like no other that I\u2019ve seen,\u201d Lofaro said. \u201cIt\u2019s great that we have so many volunteers coming out to participate and really the best prescription for this forest type is to do seeding and work on erosion control.\u201d<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nearly 300 volunteers came together June 15 to help reseed part of the Colorado Parks and Wildlife land on Basalt Mountain that was destroyed by the Lake Christine Fire in 2018. Nearly a year after the Lake Christine Fire broke out in Basalt, members of the community were able to come together and begin the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1312215","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-20 08:39:10","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1312215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1312215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1312215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1312215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}