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WEEK OF JUNE 6, 2024
VOLUME 97 | ISSUE 27
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Underneath Washington Park lies a hidden past Plutonium found in Indiana Street air filters near Rocky Flats Boulder Commissioners reconsider trail project BY RYLEE DUNN RDUNN@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
der Washington Park is so similar, it suggests that the park’s work crews may have unknowingly turned up some ancient bones around the turn of the century when they excavated the park lakes and graded the land. “Most of Denver is underlain by dinosaur-bearing Cretaceous rocks,” said paleontologist Kirk Johnson, who directs the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Johnson dug up many a fossil during his 22-year tenure at DMNS, before leaving Denver to helm the Smithsonian.
A recent discovery of plutonium in air filters on Indiana Street near Rocky Flats has given Boulder County Commissioners pause as they appear to reconsider involvement in the Rocky Mountain Greenway Project trail system. The Greenway project began in 2016 as an effort to connect three National Wildlife Refuges — Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Two Ponds and Rocky Flats — through an interconnected trail system. The project calls for the installation of an underpass connecting Rocky Flats to Boulder Open Space through the Rock Creek Corridor and an overpass to connect Westminster trails to the Greenway. When gale-force winds hit on April 6, chemist and DU Professor Michael Ketterer and retired FBI agent Jon Lipsky — who led the 1989 raid of Rocky Flats that eventually led to the plant being shut down and designated as an EPA Superfund site — set up air filters in three locations nearby to conduct a study on the contaminated soil’s activities in high winds. Ketterer said he has taken air filter samples near Rocky Flats a handful of times, but that the high wind event of April 6 drew special interest because dirt was visibly moving in the air. “We both observed large, rapidly moving suspended dust clouds extending from ground level up to
SEE UNDERNEATH, P2
SEE PLUTONIUM, P7
A view of the southeastern corner of Washington Park, near Denver South High School. BY KIRSTEN DAHL COLLINS SPECIAL TO THE DENVER HERALD
Denver’s beloved Washington Park, with its lakes, gardens and meadows, is turning 125 this year. But park regulars may not know this green 160-acre expanse as well as they think. Just below the surface lies a hidden past. Where triceratops trod
Dig two or three feet down, and you’re in the late Cretaceous era, 65 million years ago, said James Hagadorn, curator of geology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. According to Hagadorn, Wash-
ington Park sits atop an ancient, 18-foot-thick layer of sedimentary rock dating from a time when triceratops browsed the Denver area, munching on tropical foliage. “This sediment is the top layer under the park,” Hagadorn said. He explained that it’s nearly identical to the tilted layers visitors flock to see at Dinosaur Ridge in Morrison. The famous footprints that made Dinosaur Ridge a national landmark record the migration of many dinosaurs, including duck-billed plant-eaters and ostrich-like carnivores, along the beach of an ancient sea. Since the sedimentary layer un-
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PHOTO BY TIM COLLINS
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