Organization forms for forest health, protecting water, and exceptional outdoor recreation

Wet Mountain Valley Outdoors (WMVO) held its first community meeting at Lange Hall on August 6. A crowd of about 100 people showed up for the kickoff of the WMVO community engagement process to learn about how this process will work, what will make it effective, and to brainstorm some initial ideas for a community vision of what is valuable and worth preserving and improving about the culture, environment, and economy of the Wet Mountain Valley.

The presentation team, headed by Westcliffe resident John Van Doren, went through preliminary results of the WMVO online community survey and listened to feedback from the audience. In a sit-down with the Tribune after the event, Van Doren explained WMVO and how it came about.

WMVO, a new nonprofit organization that grew out of Trails for All, is part of a regional partnership initiative that was signed into state law in late 2020. Originally funded through the Colorado Department of Parks and Wildlife, (CPW), there are now 21 partners in the initiative, covering about 80 percent of the state.

“We submitted an application to become a partner and submitted a grant application at the time,” Van Doren said: “It’s a lengthy process involving a lot of outdoor organizations. The purpose of the initiative is to create and fund organizations on the ground that can plan and implement the Colorado Outdoors Strategy through local events. The first thing that needs to be done with that is community outreach – trying to understand and work with the community to form a long-range vision and identify projects that community sees as important for private, ag and public lands.” 

Van Doren said that WMVO had received a grant for a little over $126,000, which is intended to help the organization arrive at and implement a community-derived plan for what he termed “North Star objectives” such as forest health, watershed preservation, long-term sustainability and “exceptional outdoor recreation”: “The Rainbow Trail is a good example – it needs a maintenance audit. A lot of our local trails were designed for cattle and sheep to get to grazing land, not recreational use. There’s not enough money to keep them adequately maintained. The Rainbow Trail is not in a wilderness area, so motorized vehicles are allowed, and there are sections that are now dangerous for those vehicles – we need to address that.” 

An organization called Civic Canopy had been hired to help with community outreach, including the survey, whose representatives were present at that first meeting. “GOCO has committed $50 million over the next five years to fund implementation of projects,” Van Doren said. “WMVO’s first task is to create action teams to identify projects – then we go back to a bigger room of people to say ‘What do you think?’”

He noted that WMVO might not be the organization funding all the projects: “We’re putting together a network of stakeholders – we might funnel money to the Forest Service, Trails for All, the county for wildfire mitigation.” One such project, mentioned by several community members at the first meeting, was the toxic algae blooms in Lake DeWeese. “Nobody wants that,” Van Doren said: “but we don’t have an adequate understanding of where this pollution comes from – money for a clean-up project might go to the county to identify pollution sources, such as from fertilizer use. You need research – no one rancher or farmer has the money to solve the problem.” 

Van Doren said that WMVO was establishing a “core team” of advisors from organizations ranging from the US Forest Service to the Cattlewomen’s Association, as well as elected officials such as Custer County Commissioner Lucas Epp, Silver Cliff Mayor Buck Wenzel, and Westcliffe Trustee Bob Fulton.

The online survey results, Van Doren said, are “the first tool to identify projects, such as wildfire mitigation and forest health – not to direct decisions, but inform the public about known problems.” Members of the Civic Canopy team shared some of the results of the survey at the August 6 meeting. It posed questions such as how often people get outdoors, what they value about the community, what concerns they had about the community, and ideas for improvement of the outdoor environment

More monthly community meetings designed to elicit input are planned until the end of this year: “The best case scenario is that by March, 2026, we will have a community long-term vision: a set of values that we all agree on, a list of projects that the community sees as important, and a draft of a plan to execute those projects,” Van Doren concluded. 

With regard to some of the initial skepticism about the WMVO project voiced by members of the crowd at the August 6 meeting, Van Doren was unfazed: “You need to have everyone come to the table, even if they never are part of the project, because their voices need to be heard.” 

–Elliot Jackson