Texas billionaire Ed Bass persuaded four out of five Pitkin County commissioners this week to approve his plan of using a trackhoe to reshape the Roaring Fork River channel where it runs along his property above the North Star Nature Preserve. Bass’s team of river consultants said the stretch of river was mined for gravel in the early 1960s as part of the paving of Highway 82 up Independence Pass. Now loose gravel has piled up in the straight section of river two to three feet deep and formed a sand island below Bass’s land where the river curves left then right. "I believe that it was not only straightened, it was mined," said Matt Weaver of the river restoration firm Five Rivers Inc. about the stretch of river along Bass’s land. "It was manipulated intensely with heavy equipment." Now Weaver and Mike Claffey of Claffey Ecological Consulting Inc. plan to use a trackhoe in the river to shift rock and dirt in the channel.

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