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It might take a big toolbox to address heavy recreational use and prioritize ecosystem health at North Star Nature Preserve, but Pitkin County Open Space and Trails staff think they have it assembled in the area’s latest management plan.
The Pitkin County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) unanimously approved a new North Star Nature Preserve management plan on Wednesday. A conservation easement on the east Aspen nature preserve requires an update to the management plan every five years.
The latest involved years of planning and studies, and, ultimately, there is agreement on one aspect of the 248-acre stretch of wetlands and former agricultural fields: It’s a deeply special and unique place in Aspen.
Open Space and Trails, which manages North Star Nature Preserve and the adjacent James H. Smith open spaces under one plan, received 970 responses to surveys, a handful of letters from partner organizations, and heard from dozens of people during numerous public meetings. Land managers, nearby homeowners, longtime visitors and scientists who studied the property have each recently testified to the importance of North Star.
But managing recreational use on the segment of the Roaring Fork River that flows through the property while protecting both the riparian ecosystem and the ability to find tranquility and solitude remains a chief concern, especially for nearby homeowners. And it’s complicated by the web of land management and ownership, which takes six bullet points to describe in the management plan. The management area includes land owned by the U.S. Forest Service, Pitkin County, the city of Aspen, the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES) and private homeowners.
The 2025 North Star Nature Preserve Management Plan describes the desired conditions for the property, including that the area is “managed first and foremost for ecological integrity and resilience, while allowing human presence in limited areas for environmental education, research, respectful recreation, and access to nature.”
The plan lays out 39 indicators that are meant to guide Open Space and Trails in ensuring that management is on track to meet the desired conditions, with thresholds that raise a red flag if something is amiss.
“We believe that this draft plan addresses the most frequently raised concerns,” Open Space and Trails senior planner Carly O’Connell told Open Space and Trails Board members at a March 5 meeting in which they recommended adoption of the North Star Nature Preserve Management Plan update to the BOCC.
O’Connell said she believes the plan includes the tools needed to maintain “desirable conditions” at North Star — tools that were identified after years of studies, including 28 independent ecological studies conducted since 1989. Seven of those studies are from the past five years, and the county oversaw a large visitor-use survey in 2024, while collecting extensive public comment.
“This plan does represent a significant increase both in staff costs and in project costs,” O’Connell said. “This plan represents a significant time and cost investment.”
Open Space and Trails Director Gary Tennenbaum echoed a similar sentiment to the BOCC on March 12, during the first reading of the updated plan.
“This is the county’s highest priority because it gets the most attention from the public,” Tennenbaum said. “This has been my biggest priority, is to make sure this special place stays special.”
The latest management plan lays out several new tools to address persistent concerns at and near the nature preserve, including parking, wildlife and habitat protection, residential development, and crowding.
Open Space and Trails staff have been trying to minimize crowding and congestion, especially at the main river access point, for more than a decade. Excessive crowds, dangerous parking and a rowdy atmosphere in the 2010s, when the North Star Management Plan hadn’t been updated for more than a decade, raised alarm bells, and the county redesigned parking areas, hired extra staff and strengthened partnerships with other local groups.
The most recent management plan includes a new peak-use policy meant to proactively address crowding and parking on the busiest days.
The top reasons that survey respondents cite for visiting North Star are to enjoy natural scenery (92%) and experience tranquility (78%), but any one visitor’s experience of North Star Nature Preserve probably has a lot to do with when they were there. On warm, sunny weekend afternoons in the middle of summer, the preserve attracts a lot of river users.
A visitor-use survey from 2024 found that “visitor crowding on the river itself is relatively low” using a metric of “people per viewscape.” According to the survey, most people felt crowding when there were six people in sight. This translates to 370 users per day. Actual use numbers over the past several years show that this number was exceeded once, during the July 4 holiday weekend. There were four days total with more than 300 visitors in 2024 and 2025, near the Independence Day weekend.
The parking lot feels busy and crowded far before the river itself, with congestion at Wildwood happening when there are about 130 daily visitors. The plan notes that “maintaining parking as a limiting factor helps manage total river access.”
Open Space and Trails staff can use past trends to anticipate crowding and implement the peak-use policy. That will probably mean that visitors will see more staff, more outreach via a variety of channels, and signs installed along the highway directing people to park elsewhere. Open Space and Trails staff could also coordinate with the Forest Service to temporarily shut down the Wildwood parking lot in favor of a drop-off-only and turnaround zone. Other potential strategies include limiting or eliminating commercial operators on certain busy days.
“The peak-use policy I think is likely going to be the most noticeable change at North Star,” O’Connell said.
According to counts included in the 2025 management plan, the July 4 weekend is reliably the busiest time on the river that flows through North Star, with upward of 350 daily visitors in 2024 and 2025. While daily use depends on weather and river flows, counts frequently show between 100 and 175 river users during weekdays in July, sometimes spiking to 250 or more on weekends.
Most of those paddleboarders and boaters access the river from a small put-in along Wildwood Lane, a private road that runs through U.S. Forest Service land that also provides access to the Wildwood preschool and several homes.
Open Space and Trails staff acknowledge that parking and congestion continue to be a concern, and studies that the department commissioned show that the Wildwood parking area is at capacity for two or more hours a day during 80% of weekend days and holidays in peak summer.
“There’s still a lot of work to do there,” O’Connell told the Open Space and Trails Board. “We commit to working to improve that condition at Wildwood.”
Wildwood, including the river access point, is not actually part of North Star Nature Preserve, but it is included in the management area. The small beach that serves as a put-in is on Forest Service land, and there are several private parcels nearby. Pitkin County pays for a Forest Service employee who can issue tickets there, staffs the area with Open Space and Trails rangers, and works with ACES naturalists for onsite education.
The peak-use policy is one of many adaptive management strategies included in the updated plan. Pitkin County staffers have committed to ongoing monitoring that will inform how the area is managed and have set up a system of 39 ecological and social conditions that serve as indicators of how management of the nature preserve is fairing. If conditions approach certain thresholds laid out in the plan, that raises a red flag that something needs to shift.
For example, the plan identifies beaver presence and activity as an indicator of a healthy riparian and wetland system. The threshold, or minimum acceptable condition, is that beaver activity does not decline for more than two consecutive surveys, which the county commits to conducting every two to four years.
Other indicators include biodiversity, water quality, hydrologic conditions, bird diversity, recreational use and congestion.
O’Connell told the Open Space and Trails Board that the indicators and thresholds will help maintain desirable conditions at North Star.
She said there has been some confusion over the use of thresholds and that “they’re not the bar; they’re the red flag. Anytime we see ourselves getting toward that line, we have so many response options in this plan to course-correct.”
The update allows for more flexibility in response than past management plans. For example, although Open Space and Trails in the past has closed river access late in the summer during low flows, this plan accounts for more climate factors, such as if people want to paddleboard during unseasonably warm spring temperatures. O’Connell said the county can close access to protect wildlife during sensitive times, if necessary.
Several management options that are considered in the plan would need extensive coordination with the U.S. Forest Service, which owns the land at Wildwood, such as temporary closures of the Wildwood parking area during peak days. Other options would require either the completion of a land swap the county proposed last year that would give the local government ownership of the put-in, or a federal environmental review. These include converting to paid parking at the put-in or consideration of a permit system to limit river use.
“A permit system is considered in this plan, but that is an example of an action that cannot be implemented today because we don’t own the Wildwood put-in,” O’Connell said.
The county submitted a proposal in January 2025 to acquire the land at the Wildwood put-in from the Forest Service. There have not been updates to that process as the White River National Forest has suffered from staffing and budget shortages.
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Additionally, Edgar and Elizabeth Boyles, who live along Wildwood Lane and frequently advocate for management that focuses on conservation and limiting recreation at North Star, own a mining claim near the put-in. They filed paperwork with the Forest Service in August 2023 to explore mining for gold on land that overlaps the parcel that would be exchanged. The White River National Forest is “currently in the review process for the claim holder’s plan of operations,” according to a statement from the federal agency.
Other options for limiting use rely on help from the public, including a voluntary group-size limit of six people. Commercial groups are already required to limit their size to six or fewer individuals.
The newest update also includes a formalization of Open Space and Trails’ position on residential development near the preserve; the county department asks to be included in all land use applications for properties adjacent to North Star and will advocate for strategies to minimize disruption to wildlife, such as avoiding construction during key periods for wildlife.
Open Space and Trails gathered public input for the plan through focus groups, a working group, public open houses and two questionnaires. Several organizations that partner with the county — including ACES, Aspen Valley Land Trust (which holds the conservation easement for the property), Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and the White River National Forest — submitted letters.
Open Space and Trails staff analyzed the feedback and identified several common concerns.
“The most common concerns center on crowding, river-use levels, visitor capacity, and the social and ecological impacts of river use, especially during peak periods,” the staff wrote in a memo to the Open Space and Trail Board. “Open-ended comments on these topics tend to be more negative than positive, reflecting the typical pattern that those with concerns or dissatisfaction are more likely to submit written feedback in opt-in public questionnaires. This is known as the ‘negativity bias,’ and recognizing the non-response, respondents who do not answer open-ended questions, is important as they may be satisfied or neutral.”
To address these common concerns, three researchers — Jonathan Lowsky, Chris Mons and Steve Lawson — whose work informed the updated plan, presented information and answered questions at an Open Space and Trails Board meeting earlier this month.
Each endorsed and praised the plan for its adaptive management and use of best practices, and provided an explanation for how the plan meets concerns such as ecosystem health, recreation impacts on wildlife and river-use capacity.
Lowsky, a wildlife biologist, has been monitoring conditions at North Star Nature Preserve for more than 25 years and helped write an early management plan in 2000. He addressed concerns that massive increases in recreation, beginning in the 2010s with the explosion of stand-up paddleboard popularity, have caused declines in wildlife populations in the nature preserve.
“We do have data from before the stand-up paddleboard was introduced to the valley, and we’ve only seen increases in the wildlife populations out there,” Lowsky told board members. “Intuitively, you want to say, ‘Yeah, all those people out there have negatively impacted the wildlife.’ We don’t see it in the data.”
Mons, a professor emeritus at Utah State, who evaluated the plan’s ecological monitoring strategies and collaborated on visitor-use studies, added that “the vast majority of habitat in the preserve is not occupied by recreation use at virtually any time.”
That’s because about 77% of North Star Nature Preserve — everything west of the river — is a dedicated wildlife zone that is closed to public access. On the east side of the river, there are five points of access to the property from the public East Aspen Trail, which also limits impacts to riparian and sensitive areas.
Preserving that people-free zone is key, Lowsky said. But he also said there is tremendous value in allowing access along the river corridor — while staying on the water and respecting the rules. This access is what inspires people to appreciate the value of the preserve.
“You need to allow people to experience it to appreciate it and feel ownership of what Open Space and Trails is trying to do out there,” Lowsky told the Open Space and Trails Board.
Plus, Tennenbaum said, “we don’t own the river.”
Lowsky said the health of the riparian ecosystem has continued to improve under the county’s management.
When the county acquired the property in 1978, its wetlands had been drained and the river straightened to create agricultural fields, and the hydrology had been dramatically altered by a transbasin diversion of water from the Roaring Fork River’s headwaters to the Front Range. Further damaging the wetland was the ongoing removal of beavers, which were trapped for their fur in the area during the 1800s, and continued to be shot and killed until about 2000, “mostly for mosquito control,” according to Lowsky.
Neighbors and river users “didn’t like when (beavers) created dams and backed up water, creating mosquito habitat,” Lowsky told board members.
Mosquitos are now controlled by a local mosquito-control district, which uses a larvicide called Bti, and without human predation, the beaver population at North Star Nature Preserve has rebounded. The beavers have been instrumental in helping the area heal from its agricultural past.
“North Star, through the help of beavers, mostly, and just the resiliency of riparian areas, is orders of magnitude better than it was when I first got here in 1998,” Lowsky said.
Several neighbors who spoke at the Open Space and Trails Board meeting requested both more work to protect the tranquility of the nature preserve — for both humans and wildlife — and more proactive measures to restore wetlands.
With this year’s historically low snowpack, retaining water in wetlands is top of mind for many locals. Open Space and Trails completed a restoration project on North Star’s fen between 2019 and 2021, removing drainage ditches and working to control the invasive reed canarygrass.
The county now monitors the passive work of allowing beavers and natural processes to heal the agricultural scars, but according to a letter and comments from members of the East Aspen Caucus, the county ought to be doing more proactive work to restore the area’s wetlands.
“With minor facilitation and management policies which prioritize natural river processes, the beavers can expand across North Star into that northern part, creating a large wetland, and they can do this within five years,” Sallie Bernard, a homeowner in the Preserve neighborhood, told the Open Space and Trails board. “The value of the expanded wetland is immense.”
An expanded wetland would create water storage and provide a reliable source of flows to the Roaring Fork River, create a fire break for town and decrease the amount of invasive weeds, while also providing healthy habitat for birds and other wildlife, Bernard said.
The county agrees, and the plan prioritizes increasing the function and expanse of wetlands. Bernard and other neighbors want the county to look into expanding the beaver population in the area and exploring new technology to bring water back to old oxbows in the river.
Wildlife studies have shown that beaver activity at North Star is robust, and Lowsky told Open Space and Trails Board members that he estimates that there are three to five beaver colonies per river mile in the area. The number of beavers that an area can support varies widely, but Lowsky said he thought North Star was near or above carrying capacity.
And Bernard and other longtime North Star advocates say it’s worth looking at the area’s carrying capacity for recreation, as well, beyond the visitor-use survey that established social crowding tolerance. A lengthy letter from the East of Aspen Caucus and neighbors requests that the county “establish a maximum river user capacity per season, per day, and per hour for monitoring use and informing any future permit system.”
Graeme Means, a member of the Open Space and Trails Board, also brought up concerns about capacity of a different sort.
“How much capacity do we on Open Space and we as a community have to care for this piece of property?” Means asked at the March 5 meeting. “Open Space is putting a great deal of time and effort into this property, more than any other property, by far. I cannot imagine another environmental group that could put in the kind of energy that we have put in to. I don’t think there’s one out there.”
Open Space and Trails is partnering with a wide range of environmental and land management organizations in the valley, including the city of Aspen, the White River National Forest, ACES, Aspen Valley Land Trust, Roaring Fork Conservancy, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife, but the county department funds the vast majority of work that happens at the nature preserve.
Means noted the passionate concern for the property and suggested that a community-initiated Friends of North Star group, modeled after the Independence Pass Foundation, could help support the intense management efforts that the new plan and community comments demand. Likewise, he said the Open Space and Trails Board needs to better understand just how much of the county’s coffers are going toward this one property.
“As a board member, I don’t know what proportion of our staff time and our money is going specifically into this North Star property, but I think we as a board need to understand that better,” Means said. “I think we ought to ask staff to update us on how much energy is going into this. We can balance with all our properties with our mission statement and figure out what is our proper capacity. I think we need to do that.”
Editor’s note: Graeme Means serves on Aspen Journalism’s board of directors, as does Morgan Boyles, son of Edgar and Elizabeth Boyles. Pitkin County supports Aspen Journalism with a grant from the Healthy Communities Fund.
Some neighbors aren’t convinced the county should own the property and have called for limitations on public use, a management tool county staff has said they can only explore once they have authority and own the land at the Wildwood put-in.
The data from Lowsky’s report highlights a few areas of concern — including the decline of red-winged black birds and the fact that there are no current great blue heron or red-tailed hawk nests on site — but largely shows that habitat is improving and a wide variety of wildlife use the nature preserve.
“Our intention with filing the NOI on the mining claim is to establish additional documentation of our rights to the mining claim so that we can have a seat at the table when a land exchange is discussed,” members of the Boyles family said in a statement.
Overall trends also show a clear increase in the number of river users, and neighbors and frequent local users say there is not enough reverence for the sacred place. It’s clear that many in the community want to see fewer paddleboarders on the preserve.
Heimerich said they are projecting to reach the storage condition on Monday, June 19, which means they will start to ramp down diversions on Sunday, June 18.
Plug will keep standing water in fen, supporting wildlife habitat, groundwater and carbon sequestration
Colorado still does not seem to have the policies in place to implement a large-scale, traditional conservation program in the near future.
ICE holding facilities are typically used to process and detain people before they are transferred to a larger detention center or released. They often consist of small concrete rooms with no beds and are not designed for overnight use.
Elizabeth Stewart-Severy is a freelance journalist based in Snowmass Village. She grew up in Aspen and has worked as an editor at Aspen Journalism, reporter at Aspen Public Radio and an English and journalism… More by Elizabeth Stewart-Severy
