Alderfer/Three Sisters Forest Health 2023-2024

If you’ve recently been out to Alderfer/Three Sisters Park recently, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of forestry activity happening, especially in the eastern one-third of the park.

Managing and maintaining forest health is incredibly important to the safety of everyone and everything, and so, after 100+ years of the forest overgrowth, JCOS is able to start work on this park.

Starting in August 2023, the JCOS Forest Management Team will remove seedlings, saplings, and even some larger trees – mostly Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir – so that the density of the forest will be reduced. Eventually some 240 acres throughout the entire park will be mitigated. This will result in a healthier ecosystem that will be far more resilient to wildfire than what is currently in place.

The initial shock of seeing the forest immediately after mitigation may give one pause, but with time (next year), the area will host new growth that will include aspens, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers. There will be more open ground between large confers – as a healthy Western forest should be – and the entire forest will be more resistant to the normal wildfires that they evolved with.

The proposed schedule:

• August 2023 – begin tree removal. Eastern trailhead closed Mondays – Thursdays.
• August 2023 to Spring 2024 – continued tree removal and slash management, working across the park from east to west.
• Spring 2024 – estimated project completion.
• Noxious weed and erosion control will be ongoing.

There’s a downloadable Fact Sheet that will give much more information on the plan at Alderfer/Three Sisters (https://www.jeffco.us/DocumentCenter/View/39669/AlderferThree-Sister-Forest-Health-Project-Factsheet-2023-2024) and a Youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Acn41xDj6t8) for even more info.

Still have questions or concerns? AL*@je****.us or (303) 271-5967

Miss Mountain Manners says “Know before you go!” by checking the Alerts and Closures page at https://www.jeffco.us/1531/Alerts-Closures