The San Luis Valley

Colorado's San Luis Valley is a vast, high-elevation basin flanked by the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges. One of the most striking and unique features of this dry valley that gets fewer than seven inches of precipitation is its wetland system, fed from underground and rich with migratory birds and other wetland dwellers. An opportunity to protect the Valley's Mishak Lakes, a wetland within a desert, first brought The Nature Conservancy of Colorado into the Valley. We are now expanding our work to bring a broader benefit to the local economy and the communities of the Valley.

The San Luis Valley has tremendous scenic beauty, rich natural resources, rich history, and diverse ethnic roots, but these also are some of the poorest counties in the state. The Valley's economic health has become a significant local issue, and because local pride in the resources and beauty of the Valley runs high, community leaders have begun looking for ways to create economic opportunities that are compatible with protection of the Valley.

Local initiative and energy
The driving force behind our San Luis Valley work has been our local advisory committee. These volunteers have helped shape our activities by providing insight, advice and a lot of hard work to see that our conservation solutions respond to a range of community interests. The committee includes farmers, ranchers, government officials, private groups and citizens. Conservation is complicated work that depends on broad community support, and the San Luis Valley Advisory Group has taken the lead crafting equitable and creative solutions.

Mishak Lakes Preserve
Mishak Lakes, the Conservancy's 3,400-acre preserve near Saguache, is the largest, natural shallow wetland system remaining in the San Luis Valley and possibly in Colorado. The health of this wetland system depends on a complex relationship between precipitation and ground and surface water. 

Each year, spring runoff from winter snows high in the surrounding mountains feeds a huge aquifer roughly 100 feet below the Valley floor. This aquifer, topped by a series of blue clay layers, supplies water for Russell Springs and a number of artesian wells that feed Russell Creek, the principal water supply for Mishak Lakes. The preserve's dozens of shallow seasonal ponds typically dry out by mid-summer, but late-season rain can fill the lakes again in August. Although water levels may fluctuate dramatically from year to year, the plants and animals of Mishak Lakes are well adapted to these cycles. A mosaic of wetland ecosystems has developed in response to subtle changes in moisture.

Due to its isolation and its position between two mountain ranges, the San Luis Valley has fostered the evolution of species and subspecies that are endemic, existing nowhere else in the world. Mishak Lakes Preserve protects habitat for two of the valley's endemic mammal subspecies: the least chipmunk and Ord's kangaroo rat. These animals live in the surrounding dry greasewood flats and uplands, ecosystems that are, themselves, rare in Colorado.

Mishak Lakes provides habitat for a rich array of waterfowl and shorebirds, including the American avocet, greater sandhill cranes, Wilson's phalarope, and the imperiled white-faced ibis. Here scientists also have found a healthy population of the slender spiderflower, a globally rare wetland species that has disappeared from over 90 percent of its historic range.

Medano-Zapata Ranch
Read about Medano-Zapata Ranch...