Genesee Park Bison Herd
Near Idaho Springs, Colorado
Look to the hillsides along Interstate Seventy here in Genesee Park, and if the timing is right you will see bison. The herd has grazed on these slopes since nineteen fourteen, when the city of Denver acquired animals from Yellowstone as part of an effort to pull the species back from the edge of extinction. By the late eighteen hundreds, herds that had once numbered in the tens of millions had been reduced to fewer than one thousand animals on the entire continent.
The original Genesee enclosure covered about one hundred sixty-five acres, then was expanded to four hundred sixty-five acres in nineteen eighteen to prevent overgrazing. DNA testing has confirmed the Genesee animals carry genetics of the original wild herds, making them scientifically significant. The park itself is the first and largest of the Denver Mountain Parks system, covering about two thousand four hundred acres in the foothills.
Denver later added a second bison location at Daniels Park to the south in nineteen thirty-eight. The overlooks just off the interchange in both directions are designed for exactly this: pull off, step out, and watch animals that very nearly did not survive the twentieth century graze on a mountain meadow above the highway.
