My last hike up Cherry Creek ended at Nine Mile Station. This one began at Dayton Street Station. There is a trail that connects the two but it runs along the trough between Cherry Creek Reservoir Dam and Interstate 225. Since they try to keep things from growing on the embankment of the dam, there's not much there to see so I skipped the nicely maintained dam, knowing I had a considerable distance to travel anyway. Also, I was breaking in some new boots and expected them to give me trouble before the hole was over.
The train platform has two elevators and a pedestrian bridge that leads back to the parking area and bus stops north of the interstate. Further down is another pedestrian bridge that recrosses both the highway and the tracks to the dam.
These are wetlands and, as such, they're favored areas for birds (and, of course, bird watchers.)
Here's a bridge-eye view of the train station which, like several stations on the R line are in the median of a highway.
Here's a warning I haven't seen on my hikes in the Denver area. Most of my explorations have been West of the Valley Highway that divides the South Platte Valley and the Cherry Creek Valley. Nearer the mountains, we have few tornadic storms full of lightning but Cherry Creek is well out on the plains and Interstate 25 is the beginning of tornado country. There's little shelter from storms out here.
Cherry Creek Reservoir Dam is one of the larger earthen dams in the area. It's 4400 meters (a little over 2.7 miles) long and rises to a height of 43 meters (about 141 feet). It looks over two railway stations and the interstate. Like all the local dams (Strontia, Chatfield, Englewood, Holly, etc.), the purpose of Cherry Creek Dam is flood control. It was constructed by the Corps of Engineers between 1948 and 1950.
On the average, the reservoir fed by Cherry Creek and several smaller tributaries only covers 3.6 square kilometers and is 5.23 kilometers in length. It's average depth is about 14 meters and it's stocked for sport fishermen. There are several docks for boating. The reservoir has a capacity of 170 million cubic meters.
Most of the reservoir parks (Cherry Creek Park is a Colorado state park.) in the Denver Metro area conserve important wetlands.
The water was low at the time. The extra capacity will be needed in the spring when snows melt. Cherry Creek has a history of some devastating floods. Currently, I can't see the lake from the Interstate but I have seen it from the eastern end of the dam. The creek fluctuates wildly over a year.
Cherry Creek Gage heights from the United States Geological Survey website
Keep in mind that this isn't a mountain stream. It arises from Palmer Divide south of Denver so it's fed by the same aquifers as Little Dry and Willow Creeks. The drainage area is broader but it doesn't get runoff from mountain snowpacks directly (although those do feed the aquifers in the Denver Basin.)
The park is bordered on the west by the affluent neighborhood of Greenwood Village and the Denver Tech Center.
It is a refuge for a variety of wildlife. I saw a herd of deer but I wasn't quick enough with my camera.
At one point, a flock of geese flew low overhead, so low that I could clearly hear the sound the wings make. They don't flap that often. They mostly glide.
That geese fly in V-formation is common knowledge. Some other birds do it also. Canadian geese used to migrate through Colorado on the way to warmer lands to the south, but with global warming, they have decided that Colorado is a nice place to put down stakes and we have a pretty year round stable goose population here.
Geese fly close to each other and they swap out the front position. A goose further back flies a little above the goose in front of it. Each goose provides and uplifting force for the next goose back. The "point goose" works the hardest..... that's why they change positions.
Once while driving through Kansas at night (the flat makes me nuts during the day) I noticed a lot of weird red lights ahead....a broad area of red lights. As I got closer, I heard, "whoop.......whoop.......whoop...." What was this?! I was in the middle of the field of electric generating windmills before I realized what the were.
The downstroke of a goose's wing gives off the same "whoop" sound but, over that, there's a "burrr". It sounds a little like a card inserted into the spokes of a bicycle wheel. My son-in-law explained that it comes from the second and third lead feathers of the wing.
A goose's wing produces a horizontal tube of turbulence that creates an upward push off the top of the wing. That's the secret of the V-formation.
If you want to know more, Robert M. May wrote an article on bird flight for Nature magazine.
Geese aren't the only wildlife along Cherry Creek. It's actually a very active corridor for wildlife into the Denver Metro area (Denver likes it's wildlife).
I don't imagine that many animals come directly from the mountains across Interstate 25. But Cherry Creek provides a clear path up from the more rural Palmer Divide which separates the South Platte and Arkansas River watersheds and is a spur of the Rocky Mountains to the West.
I saw deer and bald eagles too but they were quicker than my camera
Beaver are a keystone species along Cherry Creek. A keystone species may have a small population but they have a huge effect on their environment. They are nature's terraformers and wildlife managers
One outstanding keystone animal is the wolf. When all the wolves were removed from the Yellowstone River watersheds, the prey species overpopulated and ate the vegetation that kept erosion in check. Sediment plugged up the river and changed it's course. The reparian plants and spawning salmon suffered, too. When wildlife managers brought wolves back to the area, everything returned to normal.
That can backfire.
When I was in college, a friend and I decided to canoe down Chewacle Creek from Auburn to Tuskegee. We didn't make it. The wildlife managers had stocked the area with beavers to build dams and help with erosion. What they did was undermine the trees along the banks and the next hurricane that came through dumped all the trees into the creek. We spent most of the time porting the canoe around obstacles.
As we neared the first road we saw on the map, we kept hearing cars...a welcome sound, until we came around a bend and saw it on the far side of a thirty foot high pile of trees and bramble. It took us an hour to saw through that.
Cherry Creek has several beaver dams along its length. Their presence overall is beneficial to the ecosystem providing small lakes for erosion and flood control and a place for aquatic and amphibian wildlife and water fowl.
A nice thing about Cherry Creek trail is that there are bathrooms in many of the parks that dot the creek. You can actually ask Google if there's a bathroom near you and it will usually direct you to one.
Winter isn't a very picturesque time on the plains. If you have time to stay in one place (these Cherry Creek hikes are through hikes so I don't have a lot of time to just sit) you might be surprised at how much wildlife you can spot in an area like this. But the spring is a better time for that.
Wetlands are inconvenient for some folks. They might want to build on them. Or they might not like the view from their picture window. But wetlands are vital to the environment. They not only provide habitat for wildlife but they're buffer zones. Things happen more slowly in wetlands. They provide larger areas for storm water to collect and reduce flooding and erosion. They also cleanse water that feeds aquifers.
When I was young, outdoorsy people used to say that, if you want to drink out of a stream, follow it downstream for 100 feet (a third of a football field) and if you don't encounter a source of pollution (dead animal, sewer outlet, etc.) the water is clean.......not so much anymore. Everywhere is suspicious. But streams and wetlands still clean the water flowing through them to some extent.
Some cities conserve their wetlands. There are greenways and wetland parks all over the Denver Metro area. There are even constructed street margins, "berms", designed as micro-wetlands to control flood waters and cleanse water seeping into the ground.
How does your area handle wetlands? It's a consideration of activists in many areas
