"You can remove beavers, but if there's good habitat downstream on the Valley Floor, they'll be back," Dr. Rory Cowie of Alpine Water Resources told the Mountain Village Town Council this month, as KOTO reported on October 26. That line drives the whole draft Beaver Management Plan the town is now revising. Every tool in it, from a perforated pipe pushed through a dam to wire mesh on aspens, starts from the same assumption. Beavers are a permanent part of the Meadows and Prospect Creek, and the town's job is to manage the water around them.
The draft carries a September 1, 2026 cover date. Council reviewed it on October 15 without taking formal action. Staff are revising it and plan to bring it back on December 10, when Council will consider adopting it by resolution.
A Population Supplied From Below
In Cowie's account, Mountain Village's beavers moved uphill from Telluride. "After Telluride purchased the valley floor for open space there was a progression of beaver expansion because beavers were no longer extricated from the valley floor," he said, according to KOTO.
The plan's own history fits that account. It names the Meadows wetlands along Prospect Creek as the first place in Mountain Village with significant beaver activity, and it dates the increase to around 2008. It describes beavers in the Meadows over the past 10 to 15 years, in a stream network that also includes Prospect Gulch and Skunk Creek, with smaller streams linking pocket wetlands.
Town staff say the pressure has been building recently. "Over the course of the past couple of years, it's become more of an issue, the conflict zones," Lauren Kirn, the town's sustainability and grant projects manager, told KOTO. "We've seen more beavers in our area. We've seen additional challenge with trees being cut down by them, and water flooding into infrastructure and things like that."
Because the Valley Floor keeps supplying beavers, trapping a family out of the Meadows mostly makes room for the next one. That is why the plan spends most of its pages on keeping water where the town wants it.
Where the Plan Finds Them
According to KOTO, the plan lists more than 30 locations or pieces of infrastructure in Mountain Village that beavers could affect. Many of them are places residents pass on foot, by car or on skis.
| Location | What the draft plan records |
|---|---|
| Meadows wetlands along Prospect Creek | First area of significant activity, increasing from around 2008 |
| Meadows Pedestrian Bridge | A dam built upstream; the plan recommends considering a pond leveler |
| Prospect Creek culvert under Adams Ranch Road | Beaver activity on the downstream side |
| Elk Lake outflow spillway | Active beaver building material in the spillway |
| Telemark Pond | Suitable habitat with signs of past activity, none current |
| Ski-run culvert near the base of Lift 10 | Prospect Creek culvert listed in the inventory |
| Golf course and ski run culvert below a manmade pond | High beaver activity |
| Russel Drive | Damming around a vertical culvert intake; felled aspen nearby |
| A pedestrian walkway beside a wetland | Settling linked to bank undercutting and bank denning |
The map crosses ownership lines. Telluride Ski and Golf Company manages much of the open space and golf course infrastructure in the inventory, so the draft is written as a reference TSG can use too, not only Town crews.
A Pipe Through the Dam
The main tool in the draft is a pond leveler. It is a pipe run through the dam, with a screened, caged intake, that caps how high the pond can rise while the dam and the beavers stay in place. One is already working. In 2025 a beaver dam beneath a TSG golf cart path bridge flooded the bridge. A pond leveler installed there in November 2025 has kept water moving and held the upstream pond at an acceptable level.
The draft pairs levelers with culvert protection, selective tree wrapping, GIS mapping and monitoring. Tree wrapping is deliberately limited. The plan calls for wire mesh on chosen high-value trees and leaves the rest of the forage for beavers to eat and build with. Residents may remember this approach from the free "Beavers & Branches" wetlands and tree-wrapping workshop the town and Cowie held in the Meadows in June 2025, which Telluride Inside... and Out covered.
The details matter. An earlier exclusion fence at a Prospect Creek culvert clogged and collapsed, and the plan traces the failure to fence openings narrower than four inches. These devices also need upkeep. The plan calls for annual inspections of pond levelers, preferably after spring runoff or a large storm, and twice-yearly maintenance on most flow devices.
Why This Winter's Dams Stay Until Spring
The draft adapts a three-step decision process from Colorado Parks and Wildlife's 2026 Beaver Conservation and Management Strategy:
- Is there an actual conflict? A beaver being present is not enough. The plan's list of real conflicts includes blocked culverts or spillways, water backing up onto trails or roads, bank denning in structurally important slopes, and the loss of trees the town wants to keep. Without a conflict, the answer is monitoring or prevention.
- Can the site sustain beavers? The test is enough vegetation, a floodplain wide enough for ponds with little infrastructure nearby, and reliable water. Sites that pass get non-lethal solutions when one is workable. The draft notes that poorly chosen sites are often the work of young beavers setting out on their own, and that spring runoff may drive them off without any help.
- Pick the approach based on the risk to property. On unsuitable sites where a dam threatens infrastructure, the options are removing the dam, then translocation if the beavers rebuild, plus vegetation management and culvert fencing.
The timing rule is the one that matters this time of year. The plan advises avoiding dam removal from October through March whenever possible, because beavers then have little chance of building a new pond and food cache before winter. Relocation follows CPW translocation guidelines, which the plan says generally allow it from June through August, depending on elevation and other factors. In early November, that means the plan's default for a dam is to leave it standing until spring, unless the risk at that particular site justifies taking it out.
What Council Asked to See Before December
Councilmembers questioned how the plan would be used, more than its premise. Councilmember Pete Duprey said he did not want a plan that only applies after a problem appears. He asked staff to work proactively with property owners and to identify "where our areas of risk are, regardless of who owns it," as KOTO reported.
Public Works Director Scott Pittenger made the case for going slowly:
"Culvert protection is awesome, but it's not something that you want to put out willy nilly around town, because when you do get these big runoff events, all of sudden, all of your culverts are plugging up at the same time, or all these mitigation devices are getting slammed and it's a whack-a-mole for our crew trying to protect infrastructure that may not need it."
Cowie plans to add a risk score and cost estimates to the revised draft so the town can rank conflict areas. Those additions answer both concerns. A score tells the town where to act early, and a cost estimate tells crews where a device is not worth installing.
Cowie also made the case for wetlands in his presentation. "If people like wildlife, wildlife in Colorado likes beaver ponds and wetlands. 75% of all our wildlife uses these wetlands," he said, per KOTO, and he listed drought storage, delayed snowmelt runoff and better water quality among the benefits. The draft's stated values include treating beavers as a keystone species and restoring beaver wetlands.
Telluride Is Writing Its Own
The Valley Floor connection works in both directions. The plan notes that the Town of Telluride is developing its own beaver management plan at the same time, and KOTO reports Cowie is working on that one too.
In Mountain Village, Council's next regular meeting is at 2 p.m. on Thursday, November 19, and materials usually go up on the Town Council page the Friday before. Written comments received by noon on the Thursday before a meeting go into the official packet. The revised beaver plan is expected back for possible adoption on December 10. You can read the full October 15 draft now, including the infrastructure inventory behind the table above.
Wetlands, culverts and open-space edges shape how a Mountain Village property works from one season to the next. If you want to talk through how the beaver plan's inventory relates to a specific parcel or HOA, O'Neill Stetina Group is glad to go through it with you. Schedule a Private Consultation.
