A micro cache along West Tollgate Creek trail.
Take a walk is a series of caches which promotes getting out and taking a walk. We are fortunate in Colorado to have an abundance of greenspace paths to enjoy. Area is somewhat shielded from nearby houses. Tall grass and throns could be present.
You see this silver plant, the Russian Olive, all over the place. It is an evasive species which is considered a list B noxious weed. Native to Europe and Asia, it was brought into the United States for ornamental and windbreak plantings in the late 1800s. The Colorado State Forest Service used to sell the seedlings at a minimal price to encourage landowners to plant this shrub, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommended it for windbreaks on the Great Plains. The hardy plant was often used for revegetation of scarred land, since it can survive in dry, windy places with alkaline or salty soils. By the 1920s, it was flourishing without any human help in Utah and Nevada, and it spread to Colorado in the 1950s. The main problem with the Russian Olive, according to the state agriculture department, isn't its use in windbreaks and rural landscaping. It's that the trees spread into riparian zones along rivers and creeks, where they're so hardy that they crowd out native species like cottonwoods and boxelders. That changes the food mixture available for wildlife, and those changes ripple throughout the environment. Russian Olives are not illegal to sell in Colorado.
Information taken from Colorado Department of Agriculture and Colorado Central Magazine article: Russian Olives are now a forbiden fruit.
Take a walk: Russian Olive
| Difficulty: 
| Terrain: 
3 
4 
3