The cliff chipmunk is one of Colorado’s rarest recorded mammals. Open occurrence databases hold only 10 records for it here, all from the far northwest corner, where the animal reaches the very edge of a range otherwise centered on the desert Southwest.
A cliff specialist at the edge of its range
True to its name, this chipmunk lives on broken rock. It scrambles over canyon walls, boulder piles, and pinyon-juniper slopes with a speed that leaves little chance for a photo, feeding on pinyon nuts, juniper berries, seeds, and insects. In Colorado it is confined to the canyon and sagebrush country of Moffat County near the Green and Yampa rivers, the northeastern tip of a distribution that stretches south through Arizona and New Mexico.
A genuinely scarce animal here
With so few state records, the month-by-month pattern says more about how seldom anyone sees the animal than about when it is active. This is not an artifact of thin coverage alone. The cliff chipmunk is authentically uncommon at this margin, and NatureServe ranks it S2, imperiled, within Colorado even though the species is secure across its wider range.
Telling it apart
Look for a gray chipmunk with muted, washed-out stripes rather than the crisp black-and-white banding of Colorado’s more common chipmunks. That grayish, faintly marked coat, paired with a fondness for vertical rock, is the best field clue in the corner of the state where it turns up.
Full species profile
