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!

By Ana Siegel, SJMA Wilderness Crew Member

For the last two months, my office has been the burn zones, alpine vistas, cow-filled meadows, and log-strewn trails of the Weminuche Wilderness. As a member of the San Juan Mountains Association’s Wilderness Crew, I have the privilege of spending my work week immersing myself in, and helping to protect, this beautiful and unique landscape.

To understand the work we do, it is necessary to grasp the goals of the 1964 Wilderness Act: “Wilderness should be administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness, and so as to provide for the protection of these areas, the preservation of their wilderness character, and for the gathering and dissemination of information regarding their use and enjoyment as wilderness.”

Our aim as the Wilderness Crew is to facilitate the balance between easing visitor access to and enjoyment of this land, while protecting both the landscape and its character. Depending on the week, our focus is on either trail work or campsite monitoring. Most recently, we cleared a trail in the Rio Grande National Forest–using only non-mechanized tools, like crosscut and hand saws–allowing for easier foot and stock access to an alpine lake. Other weeks, we hike remote trails, collecting data on already-existing or new campsites, dispersing illegal campsites, and carrying out as much trash as we can fit in our packs. On the first hitch of our season, we carried out nearly 85lb of trash and abandoned supplies.

Most significant to me, is the way that these weeks in the field have deepened my own understanding of wilderness character. This week, two of our work days were cut short due to dangerous weather conditions; lightning strikes with almost immediate thunder claps prompted us to decide to return to lower ground and wait out the storm in our camp. Waiting for the storm to pass in my tent, I felt humbled by the power of this place and the lack of power that we have as visitors in wilderness. I think that reaches the crux of wilderness character: that feeling of ceding control, entering an environment where you are humbled by both the power and the beauty of the natural world, “untrammeled by man,” as the Act puts it.

As our crew experiences on a daily basis, this wilderness character does not always make our lives easy: it’s that feeling of willingly putting yourself in the position of being cold, wet, sore, and daydreaming about that piece of pizza you’re going to eat the very second you get back to town, while simultaneously being in awe of the place you’re in. Wilderness character is the now-infrequent experience of being at the whim of the natural world. In a society where we have predominantly controlled our environments for our own use, safety, and enjoyment, it is a welcome-challenge–refreshing, even–to relinquish that control.

The efforts of our Wilderness Crew to both improve access to and protect the Weminuche Wilderness ultimately contribute to the protection of this character. It’s a fine line to walk: visitors must travel with care in order to protect the landscape. But, I hope that the work we are doing allows future visitors the opportunity to experience the joy, challenge, and resulting empowerment that I have experienced during my time working here in the Weminuche.

By Julia Ledford, SJMA Forest Ambassador

I know what it’s like when the crowds find your secret spot. I’ve known waterfalls and powder stashes and pristine lakes that I could once visit without seeing another soul. But now, the secret is out. I’ve also been the one to stumble upon someone else’s special place and disrupt their solitude. Most likely, so have you.

I’ve known people that complain more about other people on the trail than they appreciate what’s around them, and I’d be lying if I said I’ve never fallen into the same trap. Let’s be honest, passing hordes of other hikers and hearing dogs barking or seeing toilet paper in the woods isn’t what we imagine for an ideal day in the mountains.

Being a Forest Ambassador has changed my perspective. I spend my days hiking in the places that many locals say have been “ruined” by mountain bikers or the sheer number of visitors. My job is to deliberately engage with all of these people with the goal of reducing our collective impact on the landscape. I have learned what an honor it is to share these incredible places with others, and to appreciate watching so many people smile at the same things that make me smile. Instead of rolling my eyes at the group of nine hikers approaching me on the trail, I welcome them to this breathtaking meadow of wildflowers and educate them on how to keep it that way. Together, we share the joy of being surrounded by such magnificence, and almost always, we learn something from each other. After all, understanding these places is the first step to protecting them.

The truth is, your secret spot won’t be yours forever. People will continue coming to the San Juans, so welcome them, enjoy every second of it, and of course, Leave No Trace.