By Mark Samuelson
Fifteen years ago, everybody leaving town on Christmas Eve was crowding into old Stapleton International Airport, five miles from downtown Denver. Weather was frightfully cold…and as the Boeings went into their takeoff roll up two north runways, they crossed a ditch, its frozen waters lined with old tires and industrial refuse.

It was an unlikely setting for what developers like to call a “recreational amenity,” but that’s exactly what Sand Creek Regional Greenway has become–a 14-mile stretch of wilderness in the city, passing directly through the popular new community of Stapleton.

Volunteers from UPS pitch in last summer to pull invasive thistle and tamarisk from the route of the Sand Creek Regional Greenway through Commerce City.

Somebody living there today can climb on a bike (or a pair of snowshoes, this week) and travel seven miles west from Denver through Commerce City to the confluence of the Platte River; or east to Star-K Ranch in Aurora and beyond. From the point in time in 1995 when the old runways closed for good, the riverbank has been given an entirely off-road trail…ridded of the worst of its eyesore slabs of concrete and trash…and nested with parks and trailheads.

Watching over the recent part of the project was Katherine Kramer, who was working for Stapleton Airport on the DIA transition when the creek was just a ditch. Kramer, executive director of the Sand Creek Regional Greenway Partnership since 2003, followed previous directors in a hands-on approach…taking Congressmen, councilmen and planners on tours of the debris-strewn site, meeting with execs from refineries and shipping companies that lined the route, and donning boots with kids and corporate volunteers to yank invasive Russian olives and tamarisk from the banks, and to plant native trees.

“Cooperation between the three cities allowed us to transform damaged land into a high quality habitat,” Kramer told me. Users, she adds, can see eagles roosting along the route in winter…great blue heron and egrets in summer.

Meanwhile, a bigger vision is taking shape. While the Partnership adds trailheads to eastern Stapleton, Aurora planners are at work on a “Triple Creek” extension that would add another 14 miles, east from the Colfax Avenue terminus, all the way to Aurora Reservoir.

If you go…