The Crystal Valley Environmental Protection Association is celebrating its 50^th year of protecting one of the most beautiful places in Colorado. To say thanks to everyone for their support, CVEPA will host a party on Sunday, August 21, at the recently conserved Sunfire Ranch, and everyone who loves the Crystal Valley is invited.

I was seven the year of CVEPA’s founding, and to me, things seemed pretty quiet around the Crystal Valley in 1972. During our annual summertime visits to Redstone, my brother and I could play in the street without fear of interfering traffic. We saw a couple of cars a day, a few pedestrians and the occasional horseback rider, but most of the time we felt like the only people in town.

To our young minds, Redstone wasn’t really a town, it was a toy, a giant and unique playground. Redstone was a river. Redstone was a riverbank covered with rounded stones. Redstone was mountains and towering trees that were unlike what we saw in our hometown in Kansas. It even had a special smell, probably a mixture of pine needles, soil, and river water.

Back then, I wasn’t aware of the plan to develop Marble into a major ski resort. Or the push to dam the Crystal River and send its waters out of the valley. I didn’t realize the environmental devastation Mid-Continent Resources had wreaked on Coal Basin and the resulting pollution that flowed into Coal Creek and the Crystal.

The coal trucks that sped down 133 were merely a loud distraction and a topic of complaint by some of the grown-ups. The black water that flowed out of the faucets after a storm was fascinating, an anomaly that confirmed our belief that Redstone was a place unlike any other.

Since those days, my older, hopefully wiser view of the world has only confirmed that uniqueness, as well asmygood fortune in having experienced Redstone’s quiet 1970’s self.

Luckily, others also consider this their favorite place in the world, and by 1972 had committed themselves to the stewardship of the river and mountains and trees and the quality of life the Crystal Valley uniquely provides us.

Those folks became the Crystal Valley Environmental Protection Association, a vibrant group of environmental advocates who were and still are committed to fighting ongoing threats thatappear inthe Crystal Valley.The beginnings were as grassroots as couldbe.

CVEPA lore describes the kitchen table meetings of Esther Fogle Neal, Lloyd Blue and J.E. DeVilbiss who gathered to strategize opposition to a threat of a major development in the upper Crystal Valley. Estimates vary, but many believe the Marble Ski Area would have resulted in a town close in size to Grand Junction. Certainly, residential lots would have stretched from the Darien ranch on the west to Beaver Lake on the east, and plans were in place to build hundreds of condos and hotels as well as an enormous amount of retail and office space.

The original three soon found support from Leo Pascal, Bill Jochems, Paula Mechau, Karin Lindquist and others who cared about the impacts such an inappropriate development would bring, and CVEPA was born. The founding task of the gutsy group was to battle developers and a largely quiescent Forest Service, and involved energetic advocacy and a tough outer shell as others mocked their work. However, their efforts paid offwhen in 1973, a combination of concerns about geologic instability, water and air quality, wildlife habitat, and title problems in lot sales resulted in bankruptcy for the developers and the end of the plan.

As the only environmental watchdog group in the Valley, the need for CVEPA’s continued existence soon became clear. A plan to provide water for the oil shale industry in Garfield County, known as the West Divide Project, would have placed dams on the Crystal and diverted its water out of the valley. The 310 foot tall Placita dam would have flooded Redstone and much of the area beyond. CVEPA successfully fought this congressional action while also fighting for minimum stream flows.

The black water after a rain that so fascinated me as a kid came compliments of Mid-Continent Resources’ mining activities up in Coal Basin. CVEPA worked to bring attention to the pollution that impacted both Coal Creek and the Crystal for years. After the mines were shut down in 1991, CVEPA’s persistence, with the help of Steve Renner of Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety, meant the subsequent reclamation of the area took place in a meaningful way after the original bond proved inadequate.

CVEPA was also behind the original effort to obtain Wild & Scenic status for the Crystal which is one of the last free-flowing rivers in Colorado. CVEPA participates in the revived community-based effort underway now, that seeks to protect 39 miles of the river from dams and diversion of water out of the Crystal River drainage.