By Cassidy Storey

In Durango, the shift from Summer to Autumn brings warmer layers out of the closet, plans for desert season, and a rush to behold the aspens before their leaves fall. At the San Juan Mountains Association (SJMA), it also signifies the end of our summer stewardship crews. As the first spots of gold splashed across the highest aspens in the San Juans, SJMA’s front-country Ambassadors wrapped up a summer of outreach and stewardship throughout the San Juan and Uncompahgre National Forests as well as the Alpine Loop.

With one year of Ambassador work under our belts, we began this season optimistic for a second successful summer. We employed a crew of eight to engage with the public on “Leave No Trace” principles, responsible recreation in a variety of ecosystems, and protecting the magic of the San Juans, all while improving environmental conditions and removing hundreds of pounds of trash. Thanks to support from the Rocky Mountain Restoration Initiative (RMRI); county, state, and federal government; and support from SJMA members and corporate sponsors, we were lucky enough to welcome back five Ambassadors from the 2021 season and add three new stellar individuals to cover trails from Blue Lakes to Ice Lakes, Vallecito to Lizard Head, and many popular places in between.

The small but mighty team of Forest Ambassadors made nearly 14,000 public contacts, hiked about 1,200 miles, naturalized or cleaned 150 fire pits, and packed out over 400 pounds of trash! At the same time, our Alpine Loop Ambassador single-handedly removed more than 1,000 pounds of trash from the high alpine tundra and spoke to over 1,000 OHV users about the importance of staying on the trail in the high country where damage manifested by motorized vehicles could take many years to regenerate.

But why do these numbers matter to the average public lands’ enthusiast? Think of it this way: every time you visit an iconic trail in the San Juans and your trip is not tainted by human and pet waste, poorly-draining trails, excessive trash, overgrown vegetation, or messy campsites, there is a good chance an SJMA Ambassador had something to do with it. If you don’t notice our work, it means we’re doing it right and contributing to a safer and more enjoyable public lands experience.

The Oxford Dictionary defines an “Ambassador” as a person who acts as a representative or promoter of a specified activity, and, in our case, there’s more to the job than just time on trail. You may have encountered one of our Ambassadors in a variety of settings. Representing SJMA, RMRI, and our federal partners, the crew led volunteer cleanup events, provided visitor information in Durango and Silverton, hosted interpretive walks, and attended many community events to share messages on forests, wildlife, water resources, and recreation opportunities across the mountains. We can’t thank this team enough for sharing their passion for public lands in our neck of the woods.

While our stewardship programs slow down for Fall, we have big plans for Winter. The San Juans are a year-round destination, so we’re preparing to bring back our Snow Ambassador program for a second season. In 2021, SJMA’s Snow Ambassador stationed at Molas Pass reached hundreds of visitors about avalanche safety, winter ecology, and how to “Leave No Trace” as a winter recreationist. Stay tuned to our website or social media for updates on this year’s Snow Ambassador as well as snowshoeing interpretive hikes and other winter events.

By Corbin Reiter

With Moab two hours to the northwest, Telluride an hour to the southeast, and Durango several hours further south, the West End is easily accessible to many recreationists seeking new terrain, but it remains off the beaten path for now.

“The West End” refers to a collection of communities in close proximity along the western slope of the rockies and includes Norwood, Redvale, Naturita, Nucla and Paradox. Telluride is by far, the most recognizable community in the West End. Most people that visit the area don’t look much farther than this well-known, long-standing, highly developed recreation hub.

The desert trails and climate found around the West End presents a unique recreation opportunity for the area, and is an area that has a growing community of recreators that are invested in a more remote and high-skill recreation environment. With temperatures getting colder, the warmer climate of the West End means longer access to trail systems for biking, hiking, and off-roading after the more mountainous areas to the east are restricted by snow. It also means that residents of the West End have more opportunities to get out and do some stewardship and education programs that ensure that this part of Colorado can remains protected and well-managed even as more people find their way to the area.

Serving as San Juan Mountains Association’s community outreach specialist this summer in the West End, I have had the opportunity to put together events to help improve some of the public spaces in the area. In August, SJMA partnered with the Norwood ranger district to host a planting cone pickup event that removed plastic waste from the forest. This event included Forest Service and SJMA staff as well as volunteers from the area that chose to spend time contributing to the health of local public lands. Together, those present filled dozens of garbage bags with plastic planting cones that had outlived their usefulness and were polluting the Forest.

As the Community Outreach Specialist for the SJMA in the West End, my goal has been to connect with the organizations and people that are already invested in the West End. This has presented a range of opportunities from creating volunteer opportunities to expanding the reach of Forest Service programming.

The Norwood Ranger district office and SJMA have worked together in the West End to put together youth education opportunities through local libraries. Throughout the summer, the Forest Service hosted five youth education events that introduced concepts regarding sustainable stewardship, using public lands, and education about public lands in the area. The Wilkinson Library in Telluride provided the first venue for this series, hosting four separate youth education events. Norwood’s Lone Cone library also hosted a youth education event and had the second highest attendance out of any library education event hosted this summer.

Going into the fall, the Norwood Ranger district office is continuing its youth education programs. As the school year starts, we are engaging with Fourth Grade classes to continue to engage local kids in outdoor education. As part of this program, students will attend a series of events that are sponsored by the Forest Service, and once the students attend enough sessions, they will receive a parks pass and a
free Christmas tree.

The West End is an area that has been quietly nestled among other recreation powerhouses. It has massive potential to be a local hotspot that serves high-skill recreators looking to push their skills in a new area, but SJMA is helping to ensure that the next generation of residents understands the value and importance of caring for those public lands well even as it becomes discovered.

San Juan Mountains Association’s seasonal stewards have reached the final third of their summer stint. While I hear anecdotal updates from them throughout the season, it’s the time of year when I begin to look more closely at their impact throughout the San Juan Mountains – from Navajo Lake in Montezuma County to the eastern reaches of the Weminuche Wilderness, and from Blue Lakes to Junction Creek. 

San Juan Mountains Association (SJMA) has two seasonal stewardship crews – the Wilderness Stewardship Crew and the Forest Ambassadors. The Wilderness Stewardship crew is in its third year. Supported, in part, by the community through SJMA’s Wilderness Fund, this season we have a crew of four who work with the San Juan National Forest Wilderness team. They are clearing trails, collecting data for the US Forest Service which provides necessary information on future management plans, and conducting education and outreach to backcountry users. 

The Wilderness crew spends most of their summer in the Weminuche Wilderness, but they also spend at least one or two hitches in other Wilderness areas in the San Juans. During their weeklong hitches, they clear downed trees along trails, laboriously using crosscut saws since chainsaws are not allowed in Wilderness areas. At the start of this summer, they worked diligently to clear more than 150 trees from Needle Creek to provide easier access to Chicago Basin. On a hitch on the Rio Grande side of the Weminuche a couple of weeks ago, they cleared more than 300 trees from Archuleta Creek and South Fork trails. 

While SJMA’s Wilderness Stewardship crew works in the San Juan’s backcountry, SJMA employs a crew of front country stewards, too. SJMA’s Forest Ambassadors’ primary objective is to educate public land users on recreating responsibly and “Leave No Trace” principles in order to provide a better, safer experience for all users and to protect our public lands so that they remain a gem for generations to come. 

Forest Ambassadors work at some of the most popular trailheads over the weekends to interact with as many people as possible.  This summer, the Forest Ambassadors are focused on a dozen locations throughout the San Juan and Uncompahgre National Forests. 

Their rotation includes Ice Lake and Blue Lakes, two locations that have forever been changed by social media’s reach.  At each of these locations, SJMA Forest Ambassadors interact with an average of 125 visitors daily, and on some days, they easily surpass more than 250 engagements. 

SJMA also tracks the preparedness of the recreationists for all of the trails that we monitor. It’s no surprise that the average readiness at Ice and Blue Lakes, in particular, is lower than average for all the trails we monitor. Forest Ambassadors routinely talk with visitors arriving in the afternoon as the monsoons roll in, ill-equipped with footwear and gear. These interactions allow Forest Ambassadors the opportunity to instruct recreationists in how to better prepare and prevent potentially dangerous situations. 

The one pervasive issue that plagues all of our seasonal crews: trash. Whether it’s dog waste, human waste, wrappers, or trash bags deposited into port-a-johns or vault toilets, our stewardship crews contend with trash on a constant basis. Oh the stories they can tell! If there’s one thing you can do to help your public lands, it’s to pack out all trash. 

On a regular basis, our staff are buoyed by their interactions with many public land users.  Repeatedly, we see that many people simply don’t know the common principles of “Leave No Trace.”  We have heard from quite a few people who have been pleasantly surprised to find their favorite trails in good shape despite increased us, and most people our crews interact with appreciate the work we are doing.  

SJMA’s stewardship crews work hard because they are passionate about protecting our unsurpassed public lands, and they want to ensure that all of us can have safe, enjoyable experiences for years to come.  If you cross paths with one of our crew, take a minute to thank them – or better yet, sign up as a San Juan Volunteer and shadow them for a day.  I guarantee that you’ll look at the lands you love to play on with a little more appreciation and knowledge.

by David Taft

Carl Sagan once mused, “who are we, if not measured by our impact on others”, and as members of a thriving community and a dynamic ecosystem, we all have impacts on our surroundings and society. In the context of public lands, which are so essential to our economy and sense of place, these impacts can vary wildly from restorative to devastating. Ultimately, we all must strive to understand the negative impacts so that we can design effective solutions to maximize positive impacts.

Recent years have taught us profound lessons about what can happen when the balance starts to tip towards negative impacts. We saw this through the unexpected public lands boom of 2020, the desperate need for educational outreach throughout heavy-use areas, the Ice Fire, and the ways in which all of these impact the watershed, forests, trails and surrounding communities. Fortunately, the lessons learned from recent years have guided new and innovative approaches towards land management, invigorated partnerships, and spurred community members towards a level of engagement commensurate with challenges at hand.

This year at the San Juan Mountains Association (SJMA), we will be working closely with land management agencies and community partners to amplify the positive impact we have on public lands. As with the past two years, our Wilderness Stewardship Crew will be working throughout the Weminuche, Hermosa Creek, and Lizard Head Wildernesses. They’ll be educating visitors about best practices, clearing trails such as the Needle Creek trail, and performing monitoring to ensure future management is well-informed. You will also see our Forest Ambassadors throughout the San Juan, and, new for this year, the Uncompahgre National Forests. They’ll be promoting Leave No Trace principles, maintaining trails, and collecting user data to help us understand on-the-ground conditions. Our Alpine Loop Ambassador will also be patrolling the high passes, improving outreach capacity on these spectacular roads and offering help to the quarter-million visitors who tour this world-renowned amenity. Last year, SJMA ambassadors racked up tens of thousands of educational contacts, and they’ll be working hard this year to top last year’s accomplishments.

Our staff are only one piece of the puzzle towards maximizing positive impact in the San Juans. We’ve been a volunteer-driven organization since our inception, and this year will be no different. We have a raft of new (or returning) opportunities to give back, including getting out as a volunteer trail ambassador, spending a few days doing public outreach, learning how to clear downed trees with a crosscut saw. The tens of thousands of volunteer hours contributed each year to our public lands make all the difference, and we are here to ensure that community members have everything they need to give back in whatever way they can.

As we transition into our busiest season of the year, we encourage everyone to sign up for a volunteer day, give one of our seasonal staff words of support, and most importantly enjoy their time in the San Juans in a respectful and low-impact way. With another busy fire season to our south already, it will likely be a popular year to the San Juans, and we all need to do our part to protect the places we love. Visit sjma.org for more information on how to give back.

By David Taft

In his wildly popular 1968 book Desert Solitaire, Ed Abbey claimed that “we need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there.” Whether one seeks to explore the deepest depths of our greatest wildernesses, shoots a photo of the solemn peaks from the highway shoulder, or relies upon the water and clean air provided by their lush forests and lofty mountainous heights, we all benefit from the existence of healthy open spaces. More so than ever, in the midst of a devastating pandemic and in the aftermath of a catastrophic wildfire season, we can see how our wild places provide enormous value to our economies as well as the physical and emotional wellbeing of our society. 

We have a particularly clear view of the value received from our mountain forests in regard to water storage and purification as we watch the recovery in the Cameron Peak Fire zone. This fall, the downstream towns which rely on the Poudre River for water are spending $300,000 each day dropping mulch from helicopters in an attempt to prevent debris slides, allow for greater water uptake into the soil, and to keep sediment from polluting the water system. According to engineers this is a relatively small price to pay compared to the damage caused by debris flows into rivers and reservoirs, and the associated purification costs incurred to amend that situation. Considering that not only our small community, but eventually 20 million people in the Colorado River Basin rely on water from our local wildernesses, it’s easy to imagine just how integral this resource is to our society. 

In addition to the profound importance of healthy forests to our water system, there is a well documented and growing body of research indicating that access to open space is among the most significant factors in determining mental health outcomes. In Southwest Colorado we are fortunate enough to have millions of acres of open space within a short drive, walk, or bike ride, and it goes without saying that this is one of the greatest reasons for continued growth in our communities. A Dutch study of over a million residents found that access to open space has the second highest correlation with positive mental health outcomes of all the factors studied. This is exceptionally important during a pandemic in which the CDC finds increases of anxiety and depression incidences 3-4 times higher than in previous years.

Given these exceptional benefits of healthy open space to our society and economy, we must continue finding effective and creative solutions to protect them. This summer, crews from the San Juan Mountains Association educated over 15,000 forest visitors about Leave No Trace practices and wildfire safety, covered hundreds of miles monitoring trail and forest conditions, hauled out almost 2,000 pounds of trash, naturalized 300 illegal fire rings, and cleared over 600 downed trees from San Juan Mountain trails. Through these efforts, our staff have not only played a valuable resource in educating forest visitors about how to protect this immense resource, but also ensured that visitors and locals alike are able to benefit from their time in the mountains. Each year during the month of October, we like to take a moment to thank these crews for the work they’ve done, and encourage everyone to do so by ensuring the financial viability of this program. Visit our website at sjma.org to become a member and support these efforts, and thank our field staff next time you see them on trail for all their hard work!