Fossils fuel call for other reservoir site

A key site in Colorado Springs’ water-supply plan for the next 35 years contains valuable fossils and rock formations, according to a leading scientist who wants them preserved.

The site for the proposed Jimmy Camp Creek Reservoir contains “regionally and globally significant” plant and animal fossils and a large but unstudied fossil forest with trees 4 feet in diameter, according to Kirk Johnson, chief curator and vice president of research and collections at Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

The site also is among the top 20 in the world for preservation of mammals from the first million years of their emergence, Johnson believes.

“I would strongly encourage decision makers to consider alternate sites for the proposed reservoir,” he said in a fivepage June 15 letter sent to the Bureau of Reclamation.

The bureau is assessing environmental impacts of seven methods the city could use to provide water through 2043, commonly called the Southern Delivery System. The city wants to pipe water from Pueblo Reservoir to Jimmy Camp Creek Reservoir for storage and treatment at a plant to be built north of Colorado Highway 94 in northeast Colorado Springs.

From 2003 to 2005, Colorado Springs Utilities spent $6.4 million to buy 400 of the 1,874 reservoir acres. Banning Lewis Ranch Management Co. owns the other 1,474 acres, and the city is negotiating to buy it.

Johnson has studied the Jimmy Camp Creek area since 1996 as part of his investigation of ground, water and fossil formations in the Denver Basin, which stretches from Colorado Springs to Greeley.

The reservoir site is in the southwest corner of the basin and includes one of the world’s best examples of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary, Johnson’s letter said.

The boundary is the moment in time separating the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, about

65.5 million years ago, which coincides with the extinction of the dinosaurs.

But the boundary is where either the dam or the reservoir would bury it.

“Were the reservoir project to go forward,” Johnson wrote, “I would recommend mitigation to define and analyze the K-T boundary.” He suggested research be conducted as the dam and reservoir are built “as the excavation may unearth significant stratigraphic sections and fossils.”

Johnson notes rock layers range from 70 million to 64 million years old. The most common fossils are of leaves, petrified wood and bones and teeth of mammals and dinosaurs and other reptiles. He said the chance of finding a whole dinosaur skeleton is “high.”

He also said the area contains dozens of large petrified logs up to 50 feet long.

“At one location in the proposed reservoir area, there is a buried forest of carbonized and . . . fossil palm trunks,” he wrote.

Bureau of Reclamation spokeswoman Kara Lamb said Johnson’s concerns are precisely the type the National Environmental Policy Act review is designed to consider.

Lamb said findings such as Johnson’s could lead to specific requirements during the reservoir’s construction or its rejection entirely as a viable site.

Gary Bostrom, Springs Utilities’ general manager of water supply, said the city has known since the 1990s the area may contain items of historical value. But officials moved ahead, buying land because, “At the time, the cultural resources were determined not to be a fatal flaw, nothing that would keep us from considering that as a viable reservoir site.

“It (archaeological value) may affect the viability of Jimmy Camp Creek, it may not,” he said, referring to the Bureau’s review. “If it does affect viability, there are alternatives to Jimmy Camp Creek, namely the Upper Williams Creek Reservoir.”

That site is east of Marksheffel Road near Bradley Road. The city doesn’t own the site but has hired a consultant to appraise it and other land needed for the pipeline project.

Bostrom also noted the reservoir won’t be needed until roughly 2017. But the treatment plant, which would occupy the area Johnson contends is rich in fossil treasures, is part of the first phase due for completion in 2012.

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