Vail, Lodges at Timber Creek partner on Gore Creek stabilization, restoration project

Since 2016, the town of Vail has engaged in ongoing efforts to restore the health of Gore Creek and the surrounding areas.

“I know the town of Vail prides itself, this community prides itself on environmental sustainability,” said Pete Wadden, the town’s watershed education coordinator. “One of the top values of the town in the town’s founding charter from the 1960s was environmental stewardship. So I think it’s really part of the fabric of this community, it’s a part of what attracts people to Vail.”

Earlier this year, these efforts included bringing back Project Re-Wild, a cost-sharing program that offers property owners and homeowner’s associations an opportunity to work with the town to fund, plan and execute stream bank restoration and stabilization projects along the creek.

While Project Re-Wild initially launched back in 2017 and ran for a few years, it took a two-year hiatus and returned in 2022, with even more funding and direction. According to Wadden, the initiative’s original iteration had “pretty limited funding” that really only allowed for cost-sharing on the costs of design and permitting projects, but not the cost of construction and completion.

The renewed 2022 Project Re-Wild, Wadden added, “is much more generous.”

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“We really want to take action to show our values to our community and to our visitors and show that we’re not just paying lip service to the environment but we’re willing to take responsibility for protecting our key natural resources,” Wadden said.

In total, the town of Vail allocated $150,000 for the initiative and will fund up to 50% of all project costs with a cap of $50,000 for multi-family HOAs and a cap of $25,000 for single-family homes and duplexes. (This is compared to a cap of $7,500 in the initiative’s inaugural iteration.)

Part of the impetus for bringing the program back this year, and for the funding being allocated, is to help home and property owners come into compliance with a new vegetative setback regulation that goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2023, Wadden said. The regulation — passed in April 2022 under the Stream Corridor Protection Ordinance by Vail Town Council — establishes a 10-foot no-mow zone around the stream bank, creating a vegetated buffer along the town’s waterways.

“The town is requiring people, in many cases, to change their landscaping along the stream bank, but we also wanted to offer some resources to help property owners come into compliance and not leave that burden only on the property owners,” Wadden said.

Applicants to the Project Re-Wild program were considered as long as the project aligned with the overall goals of the greater Restore the Gore initiative.

“So if they’re using best practices in stream bank restoration and stabilization, if they’re using native vegetation, if they’re potentially removing hardscape or chemical-intensive landscaping like turf-grass or non-native ornamentals — then it aligns well with the goals of the Restore the Gore initiative and the town is willing to help out with funding,” Wadden said.

Lodges at Timber Creek    

And late this summer, the town completed one of these projects on private property in West Vail at the Lodges at Timber Creek.

According to Jon Aliber, the property’s HOA president, the owners at the Lodges at Timber Creek grew concerned that “the accelerating erosion” along the creek bed “was putting our trees and homes at future risk.”

“The owners at the Lodges of Timber Creek value the proximity to the river and support efforts to keep it healthy. Over the past several years, the erosion was beginning to undermine the trees along the river. These trees are a great part of our community and needed to be protected,” he said. “It was estimated that failure to take action would result in the river encroaching on our homes within the next 10 years.”

Wadden said that this project had been identified for many years — by both the property owners and town — as one that was a priority, but that it wasn’t until this year with Project Re-Wild that the groups were able to tackle it. Primarily, he agreed, the problem on the property was erosion.

“The impacts to Gore Creek are largely a result of changes to the hydrology of the overall watershed since Vail developed over the last 60 or so years,” Wadden said. “And in the case of Lodges at Timber Creek, the stream was very constrained there when both I-70 and the Frontage Road were built right across the creek from them. I think the boulder wall that stabilizes the Frontage Road really constrained the streamflows and forced a lot of that energy — especially during high water — into their stream bank.”

This “burden of that high water,” he added was “really eating away at their bank,” creating a steep cut bank and occasionally seeing chunks of the stream bank fall into the creek.

“They were quite literally losing property to the stream,” Wadden said.

Part of the benefit of the private-public partnership model with the Project Re-Wild — outside of the shared costs — is that the town can help with permitting processes, which “for good reason” can be complex and onerous for in-stream projects because of the potential for downstream and ecosystem impacts, Wadden said.

“There’s a lot of need for these overlapping permits from the state, the city and the federal government,” he said. “Part of the importance of the collaboration is that we can defer some of the costs and that we can help navigate some of those permitting processes.”

For the Lodges at Timber Creek, this project involved stabilizing the creek bed to prevent further erosion as well as restoring and improving the riparian habitat along the stream.

“Riparian vegetation is the water-loving vegetation that grows on stream banks, so types of plants that really need to have their roots wet, like willows, alders, dogwoods — that would naturally occur along streams in Eagle County or in Vail. In a lot of places, that stuff has been degraded by development or removed and been replaced with ornamental vegetation or turf grass,” Wadden said.

However, riparian plants, he added “serve an important role in preventing erosion, shading the creek, providing habitat for all different kinds of species and providing nutrients to the stream, filtering pollution out of the groundwater and surface water that might flow past their roots.”

Part of the collaboration on this project extended also to the Colorado Department of Transportation and the U.S. Forest Service to utilize woody materials from the West Vail Pass highway project.

“We incorporated some woody materials, which provides really good fish habitat and really good natural bank stabilization,” Wadden said. “It was essentially donated by CDOT and the U.S. Forest Service. We paid a nominal fee to the Forest Service for that woody material, around $20 for two truckloads of woody material.”

Overall the cost of the project was $65,000 — and split between the town and the Lodges at Timber Creek’s homeowner’s association.

“It would have been extremely difficult for an HOA to undertake such a significant effort without the professional guidance we were provided. We care about our community, wanted to do the right thing to resolve the problem, but have limited budgets given the size of our association,” Aliber said. “Having the town cost-sharing program was an excellent way to get this project done along with identifying sources of material needed for the restoration.”

Plus, the outcome not only restored the creek bed but also the reason that many owners chose to live there, he added.

“The reclaimed property is beautiful. Our HOA community is excited to be able to take advantage of this; that is why we all choose to live in Vail by the river,” Aliber said.

Whether through a private-public partnership or through its other Restore the Gore efforts, the town of Vail is working to “establish a contiguous riparian corridor along nearly the entire length of Gore Creek that spans both public and private property,” Wadden said.

“Over the last six years of the Restore the Gore effort, we’ve planted about 20,000 native trees and shrubs on that town-owned property,” he said, adding that the town-owned property includes about 40% of the stream front between the Grand Hyatt Hotel and the East Vail highway exit.

While the focus so far has been largely on the town-owned property as the town seeks to set an example of restoring habitat and finding best practices for this restoration, Vail now hopes to include private property in the efforts as well, according to Wadden.

“From the perspective of an ecosystem, property boundaries don’t really matter very much, so it’s really important for all property owners and all property managers along the creek — whether public or private — to be involved in this restoration effort if we want to restore the creek to the healthy status that it had before the ’80s or ’90s,” Wadden said.