West Bijou Creek

Source: http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/ArchitecturePlanning/AboutCAP/ResearchCenters/CCCD/2012/RuralTechnicalAssistanceProgram/Services/Rural/ProjectSamples/Documents/Aurora_PCCBijouSiteMasterPlan.pdf
























West Bijou Creek is a 7,960 acre "campus" located south of Strasburg.  Part of the land is in Arapahoe county and part of it is in Elbert county.  The red lines on the above map are roads that will be built.  I don't think West Bijou Creek is nearly as wide as it appears on the above map.  I think it is mostly dry.  The map must show the streambed.

There are also other conservation easements nearby.  The West Bijou Creek Conservation Easement is a 1,363 acre working farm and the easement is owned by Arapahoe County Open Space and the Bradbury Bijou Creek Ranch which is 2,800 acres.   There is also the Middle Bijou Creek Conservation Easement, which is 12,578 acres.  "The Middle Bijou conservation easement is the largest easement in Arapahoe and Elbert Counties and is the largest easement ever funded in the United States".

What is interesting about the area is the KT boundary, which runs through the site.
The KT Boundary is a geologic layer found in places all over the world, but Johnson calls the example in the Bijou site “one of the best examples of the KT boundary known in the world.” The boundary is the result of a huge asteroid hitting Earth 66 million years ago.  “My finger is sitting on a layer that was at the surface of Colorado the day the asteroid struck Mexico. At the end of the day, it was particularly bad day on planet Earth … and when the smoke cleared some months later, all the big animals had gone extinct,” Johnson said.  Just a short distance away, in the soft rock of an outcrop, Johnson showed Whitehead evidence of what the world looked like after the dinosaurs disappeared.  “This hill is made of fossil leaves. There are literally tens of millions of fossil leaves in this one outcrop and as a result a place like this is fabulous for study about what happened to the world after the asteroid struck,” Johnson said. “We can count the fossils and built a real understanding about what the forest looked like here.  “Right now it’s shortgrass prairie, but 66 million years ago it was a subtropical forest and you would have found things like crocodiles and turtles and snakes. Imagine yourself more in Costa Rica than Colorado.”
--http://denver.cbslocal.com/2011/05/07/many-plains-surprises-to-be-found-in-bijou-valley/