BOULDER — If the cow bawling in the field below the Flatirons was human, she probably would have gotten bereavement leave.
Her mournful cries meant her calf was gone — likely in the belly of a mountain lion.
But she didn’t necessarily need to take time off, because her job was to eat, and eating she loved.
She was among the 48 cow-calf pairs brought to the grassy meadow above the Shanahan Ridge neighborhood near the National Center for Atmospheric Research building in southern Boulder, where in 2022 a wildfire, dubbed the NCAR fire, tore down the ridge at top speed because there was so much available fuel.
Most of it was tall oatgrass, an invasive species likely introduced with historical grazing in the Boulder area in the 1950s. Cattle ate it, expelled the seeds and contributed to the spread of the drought-tolerant grass, which can grow to 6-feet tall and chokes out all of the vegetation around it.
Tall oatgrass grows fast, dries out quickly and gobbles up all the resources other plants need — water, soil, sunlight. In doing so, it robs the area of beauty: In pictures taken before the cattle started grazing here, the brittle, brown grass is so tall it hides some people standing in the meadow.
Now, “it’s like walking through a Disney movie,” says Kelly Uhing, vegetation stewardship manager at the city of Boulder’s Open Space and Mountain Parks Department. Think swallowtail and painted lady butterflies flitting among wildflowers. Songbirds trilling arias. And “and an increase of wildlife munching on the vegetation,” including a flock of 50 or so wild turkeys that frequent the region.
The cow-calf pairs City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks uses to mitigate wildfire owned by Lynn Shanahan, whose family started ranching in the Boulder Valley in the 1800s. (Kira Vos, Special to the Colorado Sun)But the bigger benefit of having the cows around is their ability to help mitigate wildfires like the human-caused blaze that started at around 2:15 p.m. March 26, 2022, in the Bear Canyon Trail area south of the NCAR campus. It came within 1,000 yards of homes in the Table Mesa neighborhood, and forced evacuations of nearly 19,000 people as the fire burned 200 acres.
Firefighters were able to keep the blaze at bay because light wind speeds allowed crews to drop retardant from a fixed-wing airtanker to create a fire break above the homes.
But that fire, just three months after the Marshall fire, was yet another wake-up call to officials like Mike Smith, incident commander for Boulder Fire Rescue at the time, that fire season is now 365 days a year in Colorado.
Smith said there was one good takeaway from NCAR fire, though. It burned brush and pine debris on the forest floor that acted as kindling, increasing the likelihood that future fires would burn less intensely.
Max Karkut, assistant crew lead with the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks Division, closes a gate along a trail on Shanahan Ridge in South Boulder, May 15, 2025. Grazing cattle will be roaming the area from April through July, and signage on every gate reminds trail users to close the gates. (Kira Vos, Special to the Colorado Sun)Yet Open Space and Mountain Parks staff had also been working with local ranchers by that time, to reduce invasive weed species that could have fueled the NCAR fire even more, including in the Bear Canyon Trail area, said Phillip Yates, an agency spokesperson.
Uhing said “the fire was just racing downhill, but once it hit the grazed areas it slowed significantly,” and that after it was put out, “the burned area was scorched earth where we didn’t graze it, but where we did, it’s less scorchy looking.”
Even so, it hasn’t been entirely easy to convince the owners of the multimillion dollar homes abutting the Shanahan Ridge trail system, or some of the estimated 6 million people who use the Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks system annually, or those who think all fire mitigation is bad, that sharing the landscape with cows is beneficial.
“Some neighbors here and there aren’t very happy with what’s going on, because they don’t like the cow poops on the trail, or sometimes the cows can be loud,” Uhing said.
And in a few instances, dogs that were supposed to have been under their owner’s voice attacked calves, she added.
“But the department does a really good job with education and outreach to really explain to the public what we’re doing exactly and why we’re doing it and how we’re doing it,” she said. “And I think the majority really understands and appreciates it, and is respectful and supportive.”
The what, why and how of grazing mitigation
Cattle grazing for fire mitigation in Boulder County isn’t new. It’s been ongoing since 2014.
Open Space and Mountain Parks, or OSMP, manages 46,000 acres of open space within unincorporated Boulder County, on which a 162-acre trail system can be accessed by 37 trailheads. About 16,000 acres are leased to between 26 and 30 farming and ranching operations.
Agricultural use is listed as a “specific open space purpose” in the city charter as adopted by Boulder voters in 1986. And there are currently two cattle grazing projects tied specifically to wildfire.
One is “generally west” of the Wonderland Lake Trail in northern Boulder, where the focus is reducing grass height and thatch fuel loads to minimize wildfire risks. And the one on Shanahan Ridge is “an ecosystem-health effort focused on addressing and managing the tall oatgrass,” that also helps with fire mitigation.
Yates said two ranching operations in each project area partner with OSMP and that all of them have been in the region for multiple generations. Perhaps the most famous partner is the Shanahan family, who homesteaded their 179-acre ranch south of Boulder from the 1860s until the city of Boulder it for $8 million in 2019.
Cattle graze above a home on Shanahan Ridge, May 15, 2025. (Kira Vos, Special to The Colorado Sun)The Shanahans also used to own all of the land on Shanahan Ridge now managed by OSMP, Uhing said. And it is Lynn Shanahan who trucks his cattle up from the ranch, which he now manages, to munch the tall oatgrass on the 700-acre parcel below the Flatirons.
They’re happy-seeming cattle, with strong bodies and gleaming coats. They lounge in the fields of blue mist penstemon and bright yellow arnica chewing their cud. And once their grazing work is done, some of the calves become food for locals, some are shipped to the sale barn and some are sold online.
“It’s a really neat, unique situation we have within the city agency that we can work directly with the ranching community, especially when they historically brought cattle up in this area way before we owned it,” Uhing added.
Yates stresses these projects are just a tiny sampling of other wildfire-related ones happening across Boulder.
Some are focused on reducing risk and intensity, some on home hardening. Boulder Fire and Rescue does detailed home fire assessments. And dozens of other fire-related projects can be found in the city’s 2025 priority actions to reduce wildfire risk.
But the grazing projects are interesting because they highlight some biases people have about ranching and agriculture, as well as how the Shanahan Ridge project is helping the environment.
Kelly Uhing wrangles her truck down the bumpy dirt road that winds through the current cattle grazing area along Shanahan Ridge in South Boulder, May 15, 2025. Uhing, a vegetation stewardship manager with the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks Division, works closely with the cattle that feast on the area’s invasive tall oatgrass, which supports native plant restoration and helps reduce wildfire risk. (Kira Vos, Special to the Colorado Sun)“What’s good for the herd is good for the bird”
Grazing was one of the strategic wildfire resilience strategies identified in the Boulder’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan, which was funded by a local climate tax passed by voters in 2022.
But Ryan Middleton, OSMP agricultural program manager, says “there’s a learning curve, that we might be at the beginning of,” with teaching the public the value of having cattle on the landscape.
“With cattle there’s certainly a connotation that they’re kind of a global climate problem,” he said of the methane the cattle release while eating and digesting food. “And yes, they’re inherently going to be part of that problem, I suppose, because they’re farting and burping.”
But at the same time, “we’re seeing so much net benefit,” he said. “And the regenerative movement, if you will, is really illustrating how important livestock are to sequestering carbon and nutrient cycling. If you take that out of the system, we’re shot, as far as ecological productivity goes. So we’re trying to get that message out — that ‘it’s not the cow, it’s the how,’ and ‘what’s good for the herd is good for the bird’ — and figuring out ways to message that these livestock are providing a positive impact on the environment.”
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