Neighbors try to save Boulder dog memorial at Coot Lake

BOULDER, Colo. (KDVR) — Community members in Boulder are working to rebuild and preserve a memorial created to honor dogs after the city did away with it in January.

Over a decade ago, Rick Baer pieced together something special along the trail by Coot Lake.

“Over the years, other people started adding rocks to it. We looked at it as a Boulder thing. It was really a sense of community, something the people could rally around. I mean, what’s better than a heart?” Baer said.

The hearts placed in a small heart shape certainly grew close to his heart, and over the years, he noticed the importance to others frequenting the lake.

“As we lost our dog out here, we’d put a rock and we call them spirit rocks, and they started growing over the years,” Baer said.

In January, Baer said he got calls from friends notifying him that the city had disassembled the memorial.

“They took away all the spirit stones and scattered the heart over the hill, and they really opened up a can of worms,” Baer said, adding: “They would scatter it, and people would gather the rocks they could find and put the heart back together.”

Boulder: We don’t want a ‘tug of war with the community’

Pictures shared with FOX31 show the space after the memorial was cleared and rebuilt several times. Some people carved messages in the dirt sharing their love for the memorial.

“We definitely don’t want to get into a tug of war with the community — that’s not part of the role of government to do that,” said Jonathan Thornton, senior programs manager for Boulder Parks and Recreation communications, adding: “We just want to make sure these are spaces for everybody.”

Thornton told FOX31 that the city recognized the passion people have for this memorial. He said the parks department saved all of the dedicated stones with names on them when they took apart the memorial to give back to those memorializing their passed pets.

“We are humans too, we are people too, so we get the intent behind this. But we have to make sure it is something comanaged and created so that we can work on it together to make sure it is a memorial to benefit all of the community,” Thornton said, adding: “We want to make sure it doesn’t start to become permission for other groups or other community members to create their own in other spaces. Then they increase in size, whether it is a memorial, other community creation — that could just feel like a way for anybody to create something.”

Thornton told FOX31 they are in talks with Baer about working through the application process, hoping to collaborate on a creation in the future.