South Platte/Peregine falcon closure

Can anyone confirm if "The Dome" is included in the "Cathedral Spires" area for the Falcon closures?

I always thought it was closed along with the Pinnacle, etc. but after reading a short part in Stu's book I am starting to doubt myself.

Thanks.

I have always believed that the dome was included in the raptor closures. Here is a link to the guidelines:

Hopefully this will sort it out for good.

Yea Chris, it's closed (presently - until July 31st).

The reason is that Jeffco can't get in there to manage the Sunshine Wall & CP and designate specific route areas that are affected by nesting. There will be further discussion about how to better manage this area once their Spires Park Mgt Plan is drafted & implemented. There are plans to develop an easement from Dvr, implement better erosive measures for trail access, & an active raptor mgt plan to allow for climbing to balance with the environmental concerns.

Their most pressing item on their agenda at this time is public safety & parking for the Clear Creek Canyon.

With respect to the Bishop, it's private property (which is also the access trail to the Dome & Little Dome); officially, you would need to get permisson from the property owner. But if you want to avoid any troubles, head on down the road to some the other formations for the time being.

We've been getting a shitty deal on this for a while, but I think we'll be seeing some better days in the years to come as the park comes to fruition.

Thanks dudes, I read that information also. That settles it.

The Raptor management plan likely includes provision for opening the crag within some number of days after either a confirmation nesting did not take place or after fledging (chicks flying) if it did. It might be worth contributing to the monitoring to verify these events. If the Raptor management plan does not contain these provisions you should be working with the relavant agency to see that they are changed to include them. Being part of the process and getting it open at the earliest possible date is better than sitting back bitching until 7/31. Or at least that's how we do things up our way...

The ownership situation there is complicated. Jefferson County Open Space has two noncontiguous tracts of land, which include The Dome and Cynical Pinnacle. JeffCo does not own The Bishop or Sunshine Wall. I'm not sure about Poe Buttress. The two other landowners in the area are the city of Denver and an out-of-state private individual. Neither of JeffCo's land parcels touches the road, so you need to cross other land to get to any of the crags. Although neither of the other landowners has made any attempt (e.g. even a single "No Trespassing Sign") to keep people out, JeffCo does not have formal legal access to their property on a regular basis. This lack of legal access is the reason they give for not doing any raptor monitoring, and for why they institute a blanket seasonal closure over their property.

JeffCo appears to be the agency responsible for the Cathedral Spires seasonal raptor closure. If so, it is unclear how (or if) the closure extends to non-JeffCo property (The Bishop, Sunshine Wall). Unless there is some pact between JeffCo and the other landowners, access to The Bishop and Sunshine Wall should be no different in the March 1 - July 31 "Closure" period than during the rest of the year.

After submitting my recent post, I read the post by Healyje. In Fall, 2002 I visited the JeffCo Open Space office and spoke with Colleen Gadd, the identified point of contact regarding the closure. I volunteered to help out with raptor monitoring, but was told that no monitoring was allowed for the Cathedral Spires area. Climbers were told to be patient. Almost four years later, nothing has changed.

We should respect JeffCo's authority to manage their own land. However, I think that asking for increased openness about the details of the seasonal closure is a reasonable thing to do.

I would personally take exception to that stance, ask for a copy of the Raptor management plan, and begin monitoring myself. If the provisions for an early open aren't included I'd publicly petition for their inclusion. See my post on monitoring / identifying Peregrines here on CascadeClimbers.com under "josephh" near the top of the page. If you get me Coleen's email I'd be willing to write her on the matter as well.

[Note: on a quick google, I found Coleen's email and it looks like Rick Thompson and Deanne Buck at the Access Fund are up to speed on matters under Coleen's purvey so they would be my first stop in the matter and then I'd take it up with her directly if they weren't able to intervene ( rvtdesign@msn.com / deanne@accessfund.org ) . I also see Coleen deals with a broad plate of use interests from climbers to gold miners so some patience, calm, and civility would probably be in order in any dealings with her.]

I think both of you need to realize that they are already trying to do that when they formed the task force committee for the Climbing Guidelines & Plan Jeffco. The OS staff they have that will manage the biology & erosion concerns are quite reasonable (regarding this park) as to what we will be asking for and what they would like to see as policy; however, they will not implement such a plan for this park until easements & trails are completed.

As of right now, their main concerns fall with the Clear Creek Canyon PMP, it will be quite an extensive plan to offer better parking & trail systems for the general public to use this area in a safe manner & continue to offer the type of climbing that is indicative of this canyon.

As of this current date, they are looking at a trails usage committee for some of the other park areas that do not address climbing. With respect to climbing, the 60-day deadline for review of the final draft Guidelines expired on May 1st. There were several posts on this website providing both of you with this information to make comment. Even though you may not have made any, your concerns are known, we made sure they did also before we finished the final draft.

When our task force meets again, we will discuss comments received from the community which have been pretty fair in assessing what we tried to accomplish with the Guidelines & what are still being seen as concerns. We will also continue to address what each PMP is looking at, right now the focus is on Clear Creek Canyon.

Well, Mark you sound like you're up to speed and on top of these matters as well. I'm not local so will leave the matter to you, but you should be aware that open monitoring and early open provisions should be a part of the Raptor Management Plan. There is no reason for a crag to be closed if no nesting takes place or more than a few days after chicks have fledged. A rigid calendar with no monitoring is a pretty unreasonable approach to "management"...

I appreciate your view, Jeffco does also. You can pretty much thank Dvr's policy stance on absolutely no climbing or access to climbing areas that they have applied as a blanket over all mountain lands they control.

The Spires will be a better park for us as time passes, we all expect it will.

By the way, that pic you have by your user name is really wild.

Mark,

I now get the picture that it's the legal/ownership issues that are the sticking point. Pretty tough to resolve anything else until those get ironed out...

Yeah, that's a little painting by a local PDX artist I bought, unfortunately without meeting her, and it's been my favorite for the last couple of years...

The closures in the Cathedral Spires are no longer a "Raptor Closure", now they are a "Resource Management" Closure. I know climbers who have been ticketed and fined for climbing on the Bishop, even though Jeffco has no jurisdiction to do so. Basically if you park at the lot and are not fishing you are going to get a ticket.
When the original climbing management plan came out I made an extensive response, I have to say I was not that suprised when I did not even get a reply.
Now days It does not even bother me that much any more as I have realized that if it was not for the closures my obsession with the Cathedral Spires might endanger my marrage. I look at the 6 month closure as my off season.

Kevin, we tried to respond, the e-mail address on your submitted comment and the one on the old climbingboulder.com site wouldn't accept e-mail. It wasn't until the new mp.com site came about that I was able to finally post & contact you to update you on the preliminary OS mgt reports of this area.

I felt your comment was well received & pertinent to the concern of the Guidelines and should be applied toward the PMP.

As I had already stated, effecting a better park plan for the Spires will take time (more time than I had originally thought), there are multiple groups inputting on behalf of the climbing community to bring about a conservational balance to this climbing destination.

For those that haven't been here, this place is breath-taking for a climber to visit, it's wild backcountry feel applied to a scenic river valley with some of the best vertical lines I have ever touched. Then the mixed diversity of the Dome and my addiction to friction just can't be fed enough.

I am tremendously grateful that these organizations & their leaders have taken so much time to help the task force, which took about a year to redraft the first document Jeffco released to the public for comment (basically - the task force rewrote the whole damn thing along with Jeffco personnel).

I am also tremendously grateful to all the work you put into making this area a better experience by replacing anchors that are needed & helping to try and prevent erosion. I think Jeffco will really be able to help us finally get erosion in check when things get going, and Rick & I hope the AF crag program may be able to do more if easements & trails get finalized like we've been told.

It is my wish that you all do not lose hope on this area because of the way things appear to be going now & the time it takes to enact a conservational plan. We have made it clear to them that the S. Platte Cathedral Spires are a very important area to climbing.