By Mike Anton
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

ESTES PARK -- Nothing undercuts the nobility of a 700-pound elk like seeing its antlers decorated with Christmas lights. Or wind chimes. Or a clothesline full of bedsheets.

"I'm probably the only wildlife officer in America that has taken a bicycle off an elk's neck," Rick Spowart said.

Spowart is a game warden for the Colorado Division of Wildlife, and one of his main tasks is to sever the "human-elk interface" in Estes Park.

A golfer shoos away elk on a fairway at Lake Estes Golf Club in Estes Park. Dozens of the animals wander through yards and streets, a delight to some residents, a pest to others.

It's tough work. Decades ago, this town outside Rocky Mountain National Park decided it would be good to market elk to tourists. Today, with the herd growing out of control, many think they've had too much of a good thing.

Try planting aspens or shrubs in the front yard here. Go ahead, try. The elk will eat them and the newly planted lawn and flowers, too.

Elk in Estes Park fall into swimming pools and walk into homes. They knock out picture windows and strangle themselves in fences. They chase people and get chased by dogs. They are killed every winter on the highways, born every spring in the streets.

"We have calves born in backyards," said Spowart, a man with a sunburned neck and seen-it-all eyes who has spent 13 of his 48 years chasing after Estes Park's elk. "One guy called me and said he couldn't get his car out of his driveway because an elk was calving there."

In Estes Park, elk are everywhere. A century ago, they were nowhere.

How both circumstances came to be offers a window onto the legacy of control in Colorado. Control of the state's wild rivers and wildfire. Control of its wildlife. Control of a landscape that was lightly touched by man before the 1850s and has been mandhandled ever since.

Today, much of what appears to be native to Colorado is, in fact, fabricated.

Consider the South Platte River. When early explorers came upon it, the Platte was wide, shallow, treeless and unpredictable, its shifting course charted by annual spring floods and regular droughts.

Now the river is narrower, deeper, crowded with cottonwoods and as finely tuned as a Rolex. Dams and ditches have changed the Platte's ecosystem, killing off dozens of plant and animal species while allowing dozens of others to thrive.

Wolves and grizzlies have disappeared from Colorado, but the state is loaded with transplants: Mountain goats and pheasants. Chukar partridges and turkeys. Kokanee salmon, striped bass, tiger muskies and northern pike.

Another import, the rainbow trout, was once Colorado's unofficial state fish. Millions were hauled here from California and dumped in streams to feed 19th-century miners. Eventually, the rainbow helped decimate the indigenous greenback cutthroat trout.

Farms replaced grasslands, and have, in turn, been replaced by parched land as cities siphoned off the water. Highways and subdivisions have sliced and diced historic migratory paths, decimating animal populations. More than a century of fire suppression has left Colorado's canopy of pines far thicker than it was, shifting the balance of nature underneath.

"When you can get on your cell phone on a mountaintop in the Holy Cross Wilderness and call Eastern Mountain Sports and ask them how your camp stove works, I don't know what in Colorado is wild anymore," said Dan Lueke of the Environmental Defense Fund in Boulder.

Elk have been in Colorado far longer than humans. Their ancestors crossed over from Asia during an ice age tens of thousands of years ago. Ancient petroglyphs in southwest Colorado depict Indian elk hunts. Great herds roamed the state well into the 1800s.

It took just a few decades to nearly wipe them out.

"I believe I am getting a bit sated with all this killing. It has lost all pleasure for me," wrote one market hunter hired in 1878 to provide Leadville miners with three tons of game meat a week. "The only consolation the remembrance of it can afford me is the certitude that my record will never again be duplicated by a market hunter. The game is going."

Elk meat sold for pennies a pound in Denver. Hunters decimated whole herds in search of a trophy. Many elk were slaughtered simply for their two ivory canine teeth.

Colorado's last wild bison was killed in 1897. That year, only a few hundred elk remained.

The new century brought a fledgling conservation movement that had new ideas about wild places and wildlife. In 1912, government game officials decided to turn back the clock. Several hundred elk were shipped from Yellowstone National Park and let loose across the state -- the ancestors of the 230,000 elk that roam the high country now.

Elk feast on bluegrass at the Lake Estes Golf Club. The majestic animals, once all but wiped out in Colorado, have become so numerous through wildlife management that they threaten some ecosystems. The dilemma dramatizes human impact on Colorado.

But the train cars that hauled them carried more than animals. Behind their doors lay a Pandora's box of unintended consequences that have vexed wildlife managers ever since. The massive herd in and around Rocky Mountain National Park is descended from just 28 elk.

"Man screws things up. The elk are a good example of that," said Dave Stevens, a park biologist for 24 years. "Nature is not as simple as man thinks it is. We think we can control anything we want in nature. Problem is, we don't know enough to do it right."

For years, the park's elk were fed during rough winters and protected from poachers and predators. From 1917 to 1926, rangers systematically killed dozens of mountain lions and coyotes.

It worked. By 1930, there were 350 elk in the park. That year, biologists first noted that ecologically diverse aspen groves were being damaged by the animals. It was decided that the growing herd needed more food, so the park's boundaries were expanded and livestock grazing was banned.

By 1940, the park had 1,500 elk -- a 50-fold increase in just 27 years -- and there was even more damage to the range. One outdoor magazine said parts of the park had become "game slums" -- overpopulated with elk and overgrazed.

Everyone agreed that something else had to be done.

So rangers began shooting. Over 25 years, hundreds of elk were killed in the park, largely outside the public eye, an effort that kept the herd under control.

In 1968, the annual "reduction" came to a halt. The conservation movement had changed -- it was now an environmental movement -- and controlling elk with a rifle became unfashionable at best, cruel at worst, and certainly out of step with the Park Service's mandate to manage nature with a light hand.

Since then, the elk have been controlled by encouraging hunting outside park boundaries. It worked for awhile. But as the population of the Estes Valley tripled, so did the number of elk.

With 10,000 people and 3,300 elk, the place is getting smaller all the time.

"It's a major problem, a terrible problem," said Skip Peck, manager of the Estes Park Golf Course. "We have three to five hundred head on the course every night in the fall and winter. You can imagine the damage they cause."

The greens get pockmarked with hoof prints, the fairways littered with droppings. During the fall rut, bulls dig huge holes -- 6-feet around, a foot deep -- urinate in them and then roll back and forth.

"Part of their mating ritual or whatever," Peck said.

The course's logo is an elk, and the tourists who play around the animals love the moving hazards. Peck does not. He has tried scaring them off with pepper sprays, flashing lights and mountain lion scat. Nothing works. The nitrogen-rich bluegrass is an all-you-can-eat elk buffet. The trees are their appetizer, the shrubs dessert.

"They're domesticated," Peck said. "They're not afraid of people. They're at home here."

He has all but given up. Dave Acton has not.

Acton and his wife, Sharon, will not be held prisoner by the herds of elk that lay siege to their yard. Their landscaping, however, is another matter.

Their aspens and spruce are wrapped in metal fencing. Their honeysuckles are draped with mesh. Soon, a stockcade fence will enclose their petunias, daisies and roses.

"You know, for years I went elk hunting and never got one," Dave Acton said with a wry smile. Now, there are days he has 75 outside his door.

Among them is a 7-point bull that returns year after year. Last winter, Acton awoke to find a blue spruce he had planted 20 years ago had been ripped apart by the bull, which was lounging nearby.

Acton called Spowart, the state game warden. He advised Acton to wrap another spruce in wire as soon as he could. All the while, the bull watched them from the grass.

The next morning, that tree had been stripped nearly bare.

"I just know he understood what we were talking about," Acton said.

Acton wanted to bring a hunter to his property to shoot the bull. When he asked his neighbors whether they cared, most said no. One, though, threatened him.

"She said if we did it there was going to be trouble," Sharon Acton said. "She just loves the elk."

Plenty of people in Estes Park do. Many say the elk were here first -- humans are the invaders. "People need to go back to where they came from if they can't leave nature alone," said one longtime resident.

When a magnificent bull known as Samson was poached in town three years ago, people came unglued. They immortalized the animal in a life-sized bronze statue.

But Samson is not alone in people's hearts. There's Goliath and Velvet. Shaky and Horny. Gimpy and Elvis. "They come back to the same neighborhoods year after year," Spowart said. "Some of the old-timers call them the town bums."

Others see elk as the town's golden goose, bringing in tourists who bring in the money.

"I got people who'll walk right up to them with a camera," said Ed Grueff, owner of the Estes Park Brewery. "Eight feet isn't close enough -- they got to get within three feet. One of these days, somebody's going to get killed."

Last year, Spowart warned Grueff to stop feeding elk. Actually, the animals, dozens of them, routinely help themselves to a trailer of warm waste grain behind the brewery.

Grueff has promised to fence in the trailer. In the meantime, he came up with a new beer: Staggering Elk Lager.

"It's the No. 1 seller in-house," Grueff said. "I had T-shirts printed up. Probably sold a thousand already. Can't keep them in stock."

This summer, the Park Service completed a five-year study of the elk, the first step toward development of yet-another management plan for the herd.

"The point of this won't be to stop the elk from eating someone's petunias in town," Therese Johnson, a park biologist, said. "Our goal is to protect the park and try to restore it to its natural conditions."

The challenge of doing that stands before her: a nine-foot-tall, barbed-wire-topped fence that underscores that little remains natural in a place that's visited by more than 3 million people a year.

The fence was put up in the early 1960s to help scientists understand the long-term impact of elk on aspen. Inside is an acre thick with generations of healthy trees. Outside are the bones of an aspen feast, a jumble of dead wood and skeleton trunks.

What is truly natural lies somewhere in between.

Some experts theorize that an overpopulation of elk has reshaped the park's entire ecosystem. A steep decline of aspen and willow has meant fewer beavers. Fewer beavers has meant fewer dams. Fewer dams has meant more running water and fewer standing pools -- a new hydrology that has hurt certain birds, butterflies, amphibians and insects while benefiting others.

Other experts argue it's not the elk but a warming climate and the absence of fire that are changing the park's ecology. Most of the pine forest, expected to burn every 25 to 30 years, hasn't seen a significant fire for a hundred years.

"We've had meetings in the field with 10 scientists discussing an issue and you'll get 10 different answers about what's going on," Johnson said. "When we can't even get the scientists to agree, how are we going to get the public to agree?"

Everyone agrees they probably won't. The next step, an environmental impact study that will use a newly developed computer model of the elk herd to recommend what should be done, will take at least a year and is likely to be controversial.

The range of options is broad, although some -- like reintroducing wolves, or shooting animals -- don't seem realistic. Elk could be relocated. Or rubber bullets could be used to keep them away from trees as a form of "behavior modification." Or aspens could be saved by fencing them in.

"It's a very artificial system up there," said Dan Baker, a research scientist at Colorado State University. "I know people don't like to hear that, but it is."

Baker and a colleague are working on a possible answer to the elk problem that carries with it even more questions.

No safe, effective birth control exists for elk or any animal species. This fall, Baker will begin testing the effectiveness of a non-steroidal contraceptive that's permanent after just one dose. What the tests won't tell him is what affect the drug would have on the herd's long-term health or gene pool.

"Are we playing God here? Sure, I can see how people would say that," he said. "But people are going to have to look at the choices. Do you want this animal killed? Or do you want to control its fertility? Do you want elk or aspen? Do you want a variety of different birds that are certain to disappear if we do nothing?

"There are going to be trade-offs. People are going to have to decide."

Just as they always have.

October 3, 1999

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