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Boulder Creek CZO is a research enterprise to develop understanding
of how erosion and weathering control the architecture and function of the Critical Zone, the weathered, hydrologically active near surface environment. The headwaters of Boulder Creek encompass widely varying erosion histories (see Flier) —glacial scouring, slow post-Laramide denudation, and recent base level lowering—so that the effects of these on weathering can be explored. The field sites also span climate and ecological gradients from lower montane to alpine tundra. The Boulder CZO team has established research watersheds in each erosional regime (see Sites tab). Characterization of depth to bedrock, character of weathered materials, microbial ecology, stream water inorganic
and organic chemistry, and meteorological parameters is underway. Field sites are on City of Boulder land, Boulder County Open Space, and U.S. Forest Service land, and share some overlap with the Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site, and the Southern Rockies-Colorado Plateau domain of the National Ecological Observation Network (NEON).
A description of a horse journey down Boulder Canyon in the 1870s:
The creek never slackens. Amber and white and black in the arrested spaces, it whirls under the bridges and round the corners, doubles on itself, leaps over and high above a hundred rocks in a rod, breaks into sheafs and showers of spray, foams and shines and twinkles and glistens; and if there be any other thing which water at its swiftest and sunniest can do, that it does also, even to jumping rope with rainbows.
And I must not forget that there are gardens all the way down….
Bowlder Canyon (download pdf) in “Bits of Travel at Home”, by H.H. Jackson, published 1878 by Roberts Brothers, Boston
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