Rocky Mountain Arsenal: From Chemical Weapons to Wildlife Refuge
Colorado
Just eight miles northeast of downtown Denver, on land that had been prairie farms, the United States Army quietly built one of the most dangerous industrial sites in the country. The Rocky Mountain Arsenal was constructed in nineteen forty-two, commissioned in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, on nearly twenty thousand acres of Adams County farmland.
Its purpose was chemical warfare. The Army produced mustard gas, white phosphorus, napalm, and other agents here throughout the Second World War, selecting the location for its inland position, its flat land, its proximity to labor, and its closeness to Stapleton Airfield. When the war ended, production declined but the site did not go quiet. The Army leased part of the facility to Shell Oil, which used it to manufacture agricultural pesticides into the early nineteen eighties.
Decades of weapons and chemical manufacturing had poisoned the soil and groundwater so thoroughly that the Arsenal was placed on the federal Superfund National Priorities List in nineteen eighty-seven. The cleanup that followed cost approximately two point one billion dollars, split between the Army and Shell, and took fifteen years to complete.
Then something unexpected happened. Even while the contamination was being addressed, wildlife had been colonizing the abandoned land. In nineteen eighty-six, a communal roost of bald eagles was discovered on the Arsenal grounds. The eagles were at that time still on the federal Endangered Species List. Their presence on what was arguably the most toxic piece of real estate in Colorado reframed the entire site.
Congress designated it a national wildlife refuge in nineteen ninety-two. Today nearly sixteen thousand acres of the Arsenal operate as exactly that, visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year, with annual visits now approaching one million. They come to see bison, deer, black-footed ferrets, and the bald eagles that first revealed what this blighted ground was quietly becoming.
