Colorado River front is to the Colorado River.

Like frosting on a cake.

It.

It's the top, and it's the very best.

It opens up a natural beauty for the people of the Grand Valley and the people of Colorado, as well as tourists coming to Colorado.

The river is really important to us.

It's our ecosystem.

Life support.

Well, it's our primary source of water, irrigates our fields.

It also is the source of life for the area.

The Colorado River corridor really defines the Grande Valley, and in turn, it defines much of our culture.

The river corridor embraces much of the beauty of this high desert valley.

People who enjoy being outdoors care how it looks.

They enjoy having a place to walk and not stumble over junk.

Everyone goes to the riverfront.

I don't know anyone that hasn't gone there to have a good time and just hang out, and it's nice when it's clean and well-maintained.

Like many American cities, junkyards and indust heavy industry were located along the river, and it's only fitting that this town, it's called Grand Junction, would reclaim its river and recover its river in that Mesa County.

And fruit and palisade would do the same.

So the efforts this entire community, the Grand Valley, all of the different entities that have worked towards river cleanup, easement, obtaining easements, obtaining property, building this trail, it is a community effort.

So yes, there will be some community ownership and everybody should feel good because in the years that I've been here, it's always been a very positive atmosphere with everybody who's been working on the project.

The whole motivation for the, riverfront project had been to clean up the south entrance to Grand Junction as you come over fifth Street and the viaduct.

Why, of course, we had the the Jarvis and the Van Gundy, salvage yards, because I remember hearing John Madden, who rode through here on a train one times and he said, I don't know why they call it Grand Junction.

They ought to call it Grand Junkyard.

And so somebody said, let's talk about the entrance to Grand Junction.

And so, there wasn't any doubt, but what the entry from highway for highway 50 across the Fifth Street Bridge was, real key to that, because it was surrounded by junkyards instead of parks or gardens.

The Lions Club has a committee called the Community Betterment Committee, who decide each year what they will give their money to in the various projects that apply.

And a bunch of lions sent in letters and two guys sent in, more or less the same letter, myself and a guy named Larry Jones.

And we both said, why don't we clean up the southern entrance to the city?

The Community Betterment Committee said to Jones and I, that sounds like a nice idea.

Why don't you guys investigate it and see if it's feasible?

So we went down to the city and talked to Kathy Portner and Carl Metzner, and they had a little map of the lower downtown along the river.

And they're sitting right at the confluence of the river was a piece of land and a little island owned by a guy named Carl Lewis.

Lyons gave us $5,000, and we did a little research on property lines and, survey stuff and came up with the idea that we actually could buy 15 acres on Watson Island and 20 acres on the ground.

We hung around with that idea for a while, went back to the Community Betterment Committee and said, if we're going to do this, we're going to need to get a match from the city.

And we think, if you'll start us with 100,000, we'll go get 100 from the city and see what we can do.

We then went down to the city and, and they said, that's a pretty good idea.

Why don't we float down there and see what we can do?

And we got in a raft with half the city council, and we floated from Corn Lake, which at that point wasn't Corn Lake, it was Corn Construction Company and floated down here to Watson Island, got out and wandered around and then got out over near Fruita.

Before we started with the Riverfront Commission, there was no way that without trespassing that you could get from 32 road to Fruita.

So the city won for the idea and they gave us 150,000.

So now we had 250.

We then went to the Energy Impact Assistant Grant giving council.

It was another group of 12 people and said, we have 250,000.

And our ideas, we'd like to buy a piece of land at the confluence of the river and make a park out of it and give it to the city.

They gave us a matching grant of 250,000.

So now we had $500,000.

At that point, the suddenly started to seem like a feasible idea.

The Lions Club and Jones and I took that money, and I embarked on a plan to try and buy Watson Island.

Watson Island, was the first project and a combination of funding from the city and from, an impact fund that the state had.

They were able to get Tom Lewis to sell Watson Island.

It took two years to do that.

We couldn't offer many more than 300,000 because we knew it would take us 300 to buy it and 300 to build it.

He decided to go for the deal, and we signed the purchase agreement about November 1st of 1989.

It took four years to clean Watson Island, and it was done by an ongoing series of volunteer groups who would come down and give their Saturday.

We picked up nails.

We picked up boards.

We picked up bricks, glass.

We eliminated junk cars.

They took 1710 ton truckloads of trash off Watson Island and 4000 tires.

And finally, four years later, we dedicated the, site the Lions Club had a big picnic here and the trail system was off and running.

The Lions Club, when they helped by Watson Island, they put up $100,000, but they did not want to be the project managers for, the way Watson Island would be used.

So they insisted with their gift that, the city and the county provided that there had to be some managerial group.

So we ended up with the Mason County and City of Grand Junction agreeing that they would appoint a riverfront commission.

And there was a meeting held in the basement of the Daily Sentinel.

And we sat down and said we should form some kind of a group that has a real diverse, broad support from all the people in Grand Junction and see if we can take these funds and, really do something with it and make this a project.

That commission was the managerial group for raising funds.

I was one of the original commission in 1987.

We used to meet where IL Bistro is and, have about once a month and sometimes twice as a thing build up ahead of steam.

And, in the early days, y I like most volunteer organization and y we did the grunt work as well.

The commission was a real diverse group.

Had Harold Island, which was right across the street.

Ward Scott, Pat Gormley, Helen Traylor, Jim Rob and Bill Eller were chosen as chairman.

I was on it.

Bill Graham was on it.

Prior Mayor Jane Quimby was on it.

Rebecca or Bannock?

We really had a, a very diverse group of people.

The original idea was to create a great big park from Fruita to Grand Junction along the river.

We soon realized that that wasn't going to work because it was way too expensive.

So, the early years, of course, were were very short of money.

We worked hard to just raise nominal amounts of money to begin with.

We got good support from the city and the county.

We decided on a mission statement.

Somebody said, let's just be really wild.

And, we decided that we would have as an ultimate goal, a trail from state line to county line with the Garfield County line.

None of us really thought that we would get any further than Watson Island.

Everybody on the commission had a piece of trail that they they were working towards, and it depended upon your connection.

There were a whole batch of things kind of going on and not being sure that they'd happen, but you kept working towards the.

The Jarvis family, meanwhile, had 44 acres on the other side of the river, and Frank Dunn had about 35 acres right next to Watson Island.

The next deal we put together was with Frank Dunn and purchased all his land between Watson Island and the Fifth Street Bridge, then across the river.

The trust for Public Lands came in and helped, and Pat Gormley and Ward Scott worked real hard with them and the Jarvis family to eventually purchase that 42 acres over there.

Jarvis wanted 3.5 million, and we didn't have anything more than a little bit.

The city had used that property at one time as a landfill, both for dumping and then to bring it up to ground level.

They used mill tailings.

The trust for Public Lands worked it out that the city would put up certain money.

The public, citizens would put up a lot of money, and the Department of Energy would put up the rest, because the Department of Energy had to remove those mill tailings.

We ended up brokering a deal with the help of our, good senator Tim Wirth, and with help from Ben Nighthorse Campbell, got him to put a railroad spur here.

And they put the tailings on railroad cars and then trucked it once it got out of town on the other side of Orchard Mesa, down to a dry lakebed that, 60 acres had approximately 5000 automobile bodies on it, all of them contaminated because the uranium, our trucks had gone by and the wind blown enough or off of the backs of trucks to contaminate the vehicles.

The tailings guys were going to have to go down, pick up all the junk cars, take them to a clean site, wash them and clean them all off, dig up the site, clean it all off, put fresh dirt back in, and then take all the junk cars and put them back where they were.

That seemed to be a kind of a silly thing to do, and, Jim, Rob and I had quite a negotiation with the ultra folks.

Finally, they, decided it made good sense for them to give us the money that they were going to use to dig it up, and we would use that money to help purchase the land.

Then they could take the cars away and we could turn that into a park site.

And that's the evolution of how we purchased with the city and with grants from the Goodwin Foundation and, the Coors Foundation and other various, local foundations, put that all together and spent 1.2 million and bought that property over there.

Meanwhile, palisade got involved, and Jim Rob was instrumental in helping palisade get a trail organized.

Helen Traylor was instrumental.

She was on the Audubon Society, and she was instrumental in getting the government to help pay for, along with Tillie Bishop and construct the trail system known as the Audubon Trail, which goes out along connected Lakes Park.

This part was built first.

The county had gotten some money from the Colorado Lottery for building a trail, but we couldn't build it because there was no no Parks Department to oversee it.

So Bennett and Stein came to me and said, do you think Audubon might be interested in sponsoring the Audubon Trail?

They all agreed that that would be a good, project for them to sponsor in 1987, we were able to dedicate the trail.

The trail is a mile and a half from highway 340 to connected lakes.

This was a crucial part of the whole thing, mainly because the community was surprised at the use and the enjoyment people had from this trail.

Then the Nesbitt family, who owned United, had mined out all the gravel in the Connected Lakes area, donated that land to the park and the Park service, created the Connected Lakes Park and put trail access up into the rim.

Subdivisions along the Redlands.

This portion from where the end of Connected Lakes, which is down by the Redlands Parkway Bridge.

This piece of it was really the first, that came along at the same time everyone was talking about, we were going to have a trail that ran from the county line to the county line.

It grew in terms of the number of organizations that were interested in being along the river.

I think that, Jim would be proud of, our continuing to carry out his dreams and his desire of what this river should be.

Jim, Rob was a close friend of our family.

Through political circles, through parks, circles and with this project, through Greenway circles.

It was over 20 years ago that Jim contacted me and asked me to come up to Grand Junction and share with both a community meeting in the evening and then following that, a service group luncheon.

What we'd done in Denver, the value that it had brought, not only to the South Platte River and its tributaries, but also what that added economic value could be for Grand Junction as it was in Denver.

The commonality between the Grand Junction project and what we've done here is the human dynamic, the spirit.

And there is always on any one project, if not continually.

There's almost always a an original life force behind a project, the Grand Junction case.

I don't think there's question that that's James Rob.

He began to see that we could have a trail all the way from Fruita through Grand Junction down to palisade.

What's an island being the center of the world.

And we could have little parks along the way.

And those would be, the string of pearls that, contributed to his vision of what this could be like.

Many of the parcels along the riverfront have been protected in perpetuity, from development.

And and I think that is a legacy for those, landowners who care so much for, the Grand Valley and the and the properties along the river.

Many of the folks that we've dealt with have been reluctant, but actually, we're willing sellers of their property so that we could put the trail or get the trail through their subsequent visits to them.

They're really ambitious to get more of the trail done.

They'd like to get out and use the trail because it is in their backyard.

They do have a good, good increase in their quality of life because of the trail or the habitat.

Wildlife viewing, fishing, those kinds of things that are there.

People enjoy that.

In any city plan, it's important to recognize rivers as green corridors.

You take an urban waterway that's been ignored and abused, you clean it up, you make it attractive.

You make it desirable.

You bring in not only that, environmental and recreational component.

People can bow to river, bike along the river, picnic along the river.

When they do that, then quality, development, be it residential, commercial, retail, follows trails, really, become a self-policing mechanism.

The greatest way to protect a waterway is by active use.

The greatest way to let any waterway become abused and ignored is by lack of engagement amongst a community.

So when you take the rivers that Grand Junction is working on and you make them a place of pride, a place of desire, and of esthetic and personal value, you bring community spirit, you bring economic impact, and you guarantee, because we're hopefully a little wiser than we were a few decades ago, that the abuse and the pollution and the abandonment never happens again.

We've sent a concept paper to go Co this spring asking for resources to help us finish some of the stretches within, the Central Valley.

So we're very close to having the Corn Lake section 32 road to 29 and 27.5, and then joining that with what the city of Grand Junction has done.

And then the pieces that we've been successful in obtaining from the Redlands Parkway bridge out to Fruita are there.

We've got quite a bit of it done.

Island Acres on the east and Corn Lake Colorado River Wildlife Area connected lakes.

And then the section we opened in 2000.

The fruit section hopefully at some point will be tied together with a trail system that parallels the Colorado River.

We'd like to see something completed and have the public out using the trail system and enjoying what we're trying to do as a community.

It's not an overnight process.

It's taken us 22 or 3 years to get where we are today.

But, people still love it and people are still, contributing to it.

I think we should be happy with what we've got and be proud of what we've got, but there's still a lot of work yet to be done.

I would love to see the volunteerism of people my age and older people continue for the riverfront.

It takes a lot of work to maintain one of these, trails once you've got it up and going.

And we have a lot of partners that take responsibility for their own sections, and we continue to work with the Tamara's coalition and others to clean out the non-native species, along the river so that you can actually see and enjoy the river.

I think if you set aside and let Tamaris go unchecked, you know, you're going to have you're going to have more costly problems down the road.

The Tamara's can Russian all of or non-native.

It cuts off recreation impacts.

They enjoyment along are areas that are kind of special to western Colorado.

This project started with about 100ft of tamarisk removed.

And now we have a couple miles of it to where you can see the, the river and enjoy it, which I think is a really important goal, as well as having a trail along here.

And how do we keep people engaged in, in, riverfront efforts?

I think it's, through continuing to develop, the jewels along the necklace, if you will.

I think that analogy was used in the past, where you've got a series of little parks connected by a ribbon of, of trail, and each time you develop a new, gem or jewel, that increases, the public's interest in, in the entire project, the riverfront project, seem to continually encounter resistance to trails.

And when we finally put the trails in, we find out that people take good care of them.

And I think it's very important that we piecemeal this together and get little tidbits of it done incrementally so that the large scale trail is complete.

We've been working with the Riverfront Commission basically since the inception to work on trail linkages between the BLM lands, which have a lot of backcountry, primitive trails, and connecting those trails to the urban trail system, as well as to the riverfront trail system itself.

I think for the continued success of the riverfront, trail project and effort, we have got to further a public private partnership.

Obviously, segments of the trail system go across private property.

But for the generous donations of private property owners, landowners that are willing to let people cross, portions of their property to complete the trail system, we wouldn't have the the success that we could ultimately enjoy.

One of the things I really love about the riverfront, Commission and the Riverfront Partnership is that it is brought together, private citizens, it's brought together nonprofit organizations, it's brought together all kinds of government entities.

And they have managed to stay together as a partnership and support each other at different times.

When one entity didn't have resources to work on a trail section, another one did.

The riverfront project has been a, program in progress.

It's an ongoing.

We've been going at this now, better than 20 years, almost 30 years, and there's probably another 25, 30 years to go before it's completed.

So you really have to make it inclusive rather than exclusive.

If you want everybody to feel a part of the ownership of what is put into this project for reclaiming the river, we are preserving for future generations this corridor, the idea to save the river or in this case, the rivers plural.

I think that's the success.

And that was our long run vision to take this place, to reclaim the habitat and to have a major recreation facility that runs the length and breadth of the valley that people can use for biking and fun, or in fact, for driving to work if they so choose.

If we can move people from between, Fruit and Grand Junction and Grand Junction and Palisade, and create that linkage, I think it will affect, lifestyle as well as, recreation every trail segment we build gets utilized heavily in the the more those main segments are built between Fruit and Grand Junction and Palisade, that's the that trail segment will be used at tremendous levels that we probably can't even comprehend right now.

A trail system such as what we're putting together here has a huge benefit to the community as a whole in terms of making it a desirable, attractive, pleasant place to live and work I would love to see, first of all, a continuous trail from one end of the valley to the other.

And then I'd like to see and then of these along the trail to provide all the different things that different age groups might want to and, to enhance or encourage them to use it.

There's a great deal of pride here in palisade associated with, Riverbend Park and the trail system, our ability to use it, it's close in to the community.

It's.

You don't have to go a long way away to really experience, fairly natural habitat as well as developed, amenities.

The City of Fruit of Values, the river and recognizes it is probably one of the primary, environmental assets we've got going for us.

We've got parks along the river.

We've got, trails along the river.

We really understand that it's a life red.

And we're put a lot of effort into recognizing its importance.

There are some real key pieces now to put together, and I see over the next 10 to 20 years, especially with the development of Los colonias and some things that are really going to link everything through the whole Grand Valley here.

The small role that I played is, just makes me feel good that we have, put into place a project and trail system for people to see the natural beauty of the valley, and that succeeding generations will also have the opportunity to see and witness in and enjoy what was created at this point in time.