Three years ago, a teacher at Red Hill Elementary School approached Principal Eric Olsen with an idea to take advantage of the school’s outdoor environment, which includes a small creek on the west side of…
The numbers don’t lie; skipping a year of the highway cleanup results in twice as much trash the following year.
The Eagle River Watershed Council shared their 2021 Community Pride Highway Cleanup numbers with the Vail Daily on Monday, along with the numbers from other recent years.
Before this year, the last five highway cleanups had yielded, on average, about 12 tons of trash per year.
This year, volunteers collected 22 tons of trash after the 2020 cleanup was canceled due to COVID-19.
That number sounded all too predictable, said Holly Loff with the Eagle River Watershed Council.
“I’ve said, for years, that the average amount of trash that gets put down on our highways in an average year is about 10 to 12 tons,” Loff said. “So the fact that we didn’t do it last year, and there’s about 22 tons, tells me that’s about right.”
The Royal Elk Glade at Beaver Creek is one of my favorite tree runs of all time. With no shortage of steep terrain and a magical run out to give your legs a break, it…
There are plenty of things we could take a side on this week, from contentious legislation being debated the state Capitol, to hot-button local issues, but we’d rather just give thanks.
We’re in a grateful mood after the big highway cleanup over the weekend. Organized by the Eagle River Watershed Council, some 1,000 community volunteers lined our highways on Saturday morning clean up a huge mess that has been accumulating for two years. It was an inspiring effort, and we at the Vail Daily were proud to be a part of it, cleaning up a stretch of I-70 behind our office in EagleVail.
The tamarisk is an aggressive invasive plant that out-competes native vegetation, contributing to a number of negative impacts to riparian ecosystems. Consuming a large quantity of water annually and spreading viciously, tamarisk plants choke out native vegetation, affect resource availability, create a largely unproductive monoculture, and lead to increased wildfire risk, as well as river access challenges for wildlife.
At the upper elevation boundary of where this invasive vegetation is typically found, a grove of tamarisk will be the focus of a large mitigation effort to be coordinated by Eagle River Watershed Council and collaborators, including the Bureau of Land Management and Eagle County. The effort, which will take place on Friday, May 21, and Saturday, May 22, will include the removal and treatment of tamarisk to cease upstream spread.