Nick Coltrain

nickcoltrain@coloradoan.com

Rolling seas of green grass, bright blue skies, stark black tire piles.

When it comes to the prairies of Northern Colorado, we all love the first two.

The third is a reality for a ranch property near Livermore.

An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 tires, spread across 17 different piles, litter the Roberts Ranch property, which is a conservation easement in Larimer County. The family that owned the land wanted to preserve it and protect it from development. It has since gone into an estate, with a likely future in a charitable trust, ranch manager Zach Thode said.

The tires were first dropped there in the 1970s. The idea? Use them as a bulwark against erosion from irrigation runoff on the property.

Then word got out that the 17,000 acres were open for tire dumping. Or, as Stephen Gillette, Larimer County's solid waste director, put it, "something didn't go as planned."

Old black rubber is as much a part of the landscape as the rust-red dirt it rests on. For now, at least.

Larimer County recently accepted a grant of about $495,000 from the state to pay for the cleanup of the decades-old tire piles. If a wildfire roared through the area and the tires caught fire, it would make for an environmental disaster of toxic smoke and liquid run-off pouring from a hard-to-extinguish blaze.

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That's a dramatic scenario — Thode says the gulches that house the tires make a random wildfire ignition unlikely. But there's another public health concern with the dumping grounds: Mosquitoes love it.

"The main thing is disease and mosquito habitat," Thode said. "Each tire holds water and it doesn't go away."

Sally Ross, the Laramie Foothills steward with The Nature Conservancy, noted the added irony that the tires don't actually help with erosion control and, by preventing the growth of native plants, actually exacerbate issues. The fine, silty soil in the area is naturally erosion-prone, she said.

The Nature Conservancy, an international conservation group that holds the conservation easement and is charged with the land's preservation, has been involved in the planning effort for the tire removal and will help with restoration, Ross said.

"It's a natural area with a lot of ecological value, and we'd like to see anything that takes away from that removed," Ross said. "But also, to prevent erosion in the long term, (the tire removal) is a necessary action."

This tire removal effort will be the second whack at the problem. A couple of years ago, the state awarded a $100,000 grant that led to the removal of about 22,000 tires, all of which were more organized than those that remain.

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It's unclear how many tires this most recent grant will remove, county officials said.

Kerri Rollins, open lands program manager for Larimer County, said chains and cranes will likely be the key to hauling tires from the various ravines and properly disposing of them via a registered agent. Old tires can be mulched into playground flooring and used for landscaping, among other applications.

Even after the nearly $500,000 removal effort, few think the property will be tire-free.

The few hundred thousand tires that can be spotted are those that are easiest to remove; the rest are mostly or fully buried in the soft dirt. With the difficulty in removing them, Thode is doubtful they'll come out in the near future.