Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge
protected area near Denver, Colorado
The Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge is a 15,988-acre (24.981 sq mi) National Wildlife Refuge located adjacent to Denver and Commerce City, Colorado, in the United States. It is approximately 8 miles (13 km) northeast of downtown Denver. The refuge is on the grounds of the former Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a United States Army chemical weapons manufacturing facility. The site was designated a national wildlife refuge in 1992 by the United States Congress, and underwent a costly environmental cleanup in order to remove pollutants. The refuge is managed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. More than 330 species of wildlife inhabit the refuge, including raptors, deer, raccoons, coyotes, white pelicans, black-footed ferrets, black-tailed prairie dogs, and bison.
Previous uses
The Rocky Mountain Arsenal (RMA) was built in 1942 to manufacture chemical weapons. A portion of the site was leased to private industry in 1946 for petroleum production and agricultural and industrial chemical manufacturing. When the American chemical weapons program was shut down after the Vietnam War, the RMA served as a site for dismantling and disposing of these weapons. The Shell Oil Company also used a portion of the site in the 1980s to produce pesticides.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge” is protected area near Denver, Colorado. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Rocky, Mountain and Arsenal, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “protected area near Denver, Colorado” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7355870. VIAF identifies the subject as 315527632. The Library of Congress control number is no2019124927. Authority coordinates are 39.833, -104.842. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1992, 1942 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.