Announcing High Line Canal Project, 2025
It was on something of a whim that I made a late November visit to Platte Canyon Reservoir. I was nominally hoping to see a Yellow-billed Loon that had been there the previous week, but really I just needed an excuse to go somewhere I hadn't been in a while. As I headed up to the trail from the parking lot the official trail marker caught my eye, and I passively thought to myself how it would be fun to hike and bird the whole trail. By the end of my visit (no loon present), the idea had really taken root and I was starting to scheme.
One of the primary attractions of birding for me personally is how it functions as a body of secret knowledge. Although it's readily available to anyone who cares to pause for a moment and work out what surrounds them, it is in turn privileged only to the fraction of people who care to take such pause. History feels akin to this to me. The paper sources - the proverbial "historical record" - exists for people to examine sure, but people leave their mark directly on the landscape, and if you pay attention you can begin to identify signs of the past and learn something of their meaning.
The High Line Canal cuts a ragged diagonal from the farthest southwest corner of the Denver Metro to its far northeast reaches, and intersects with Denver and Colorado history all along the way. In only its first handful of miles, it encompasses places that embody not just the history of water in Colorado (and by extension, the west), but also ornithological, ranching, mining, military and industrial histories. Some places along the canal even go beyond to include Colorado prehistory. It strikes me that there's a whole narrative out there just lying trailside, twisting and turning along with the ditch if you know what to look for and how and where to dig.
And so my intention is to bird two or three segments of the High Line Canal as delineated by the High Line Canal Conservancy each month this year, taking stock of the places I pass, learning their stories, and sharing my notes here. You can look for notifications as posts land on Instagram. If you'd like you can subscribe for a monthly update via email, or bookmark the home page.
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