An official website of
by Priscila Santos Urteaga
Hi there! My name is Priscila Santos Urteaga and I’m an International Student from Mexico, currently in my last semester at Colorado State University (CSU) in the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources department. During the summer, I was lucky enough to be part of the SPARK Internship program through the CSU Career Center. For my internship assignment, I got matched with the Center for Collaborative Conservation and officially began my work as the Colorado Forest Collaboratives Network (CFCN) Event Coordination Intern in June 2024!
The CFCN benefits and supports place-based forest collaboratives in Colorado by connecting them to information, resources, and each other, and by telling their stories to make their value and needs understood.
As part of the SPARK program, I received a professional development stipend, which I used to attend a Colorado Forest Health Council meeting and visit a local collaborative in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. I learned all about the great work the Middle Colorado Watershed Council is doing, and I would like to highlight them in this post!
The Middle Colorado Watershed Council (MCWC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to addressing water-related challenges and safeguarding water resources for various uses, as well as for the environment, within the watershed extending from Glenwood Canyon to De Beque. Their mission is “to evaluate, protect and enhance the health of the middle Colorado River watershed through the cooperative effort of watershed stakeholders”. The MCWC’s origins date back to 2009, and they have grown and made a lot of impact in the time since.
During my visit, I had the pleasure of speaking with Paula Stepp, the Executive Director of the MCWC. In this post I’ll discuss a few of the main things we talked about: Grizzly Creek Fire Water Monitoring, the Silt Preserve, and a Q&A portion.
Paula started our chat by telling me all about the MCWC’s recent projects, one of them being Post-Fire Water and Weather Monitoring. After multiple drainages burned in the 2020 Grizzly Creek Fire, MCWC worked with stakeholders along the river (including the town of Glenwood, the Colorado Department of Transportation, and the National Weather Service), to get funding for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to put rain gauges in 7 different locations in the Canyon. These gauges helped with storm warning/storm watch during the couple of years post-fire and got the Canyon shut down when there was flooding and debris flows.
While the stream gauges and canyon shut-downs helped improve human safety, increased debris flow and sediment in the river impacted every water treatment plant that pulled their water from the Colorado River. The towns of Silt and De Beque particularly were heavily impacted. As it moved downstream, sediment came into No Name Creek in Glenwood Canyon. Typically, residents at Glenwood Springs are ready for clean water, and yet the measurements showed the quality of the water had been hugely impacted.
So the MCWC partnered, again, with USGS to do both synoptic and continuous water quality monitoring from 2022 through 2024. Now, any time a weather event happens, it triggers alerts to downstream plants, giving them advanced notice to help mitigate the immediate impact. While this doesn’t completely work in towns that can only be shut down for a couple of hours due to water storage capacity, it’s still great to have some kind of warning system in place and provide Glenwood Canyon with better notification.
Next, Paula and I visited the Silt Preserve, where she showed me around and told me all about the project.
When the town of Silt purchased this property around 2018, Aspen Valley Land Trust worked with the town to put some (or most) of it into a conservation easement. The town of Silt receives a tax incentive for conserving the land for open space and agricultural use. Close to the Preserve’s parking lot, there’s a non-profit farm called Highwater Farm. As a non-profit farm, the town of Silt loans them the land to use. They provide education about farming and growing food, have a number of volunteers, disperse through Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), give vegetables away to programs that feed people with lower incomes, and sell produce at farmer’s markets.
On the other side of the land is where the wildlife preserve is. There has been a lot of work done clearing invasive species from the Preserve to get it back to its natural habitat, as well as building trails and fences. There are several ponds in the Preserve, each providing different species with habitat and cover.
After Paula told me all about the MCWC and some of their projects, we ended our talk with a Q&A.
When working with partners, how do you make them stay engaged and involved with it?
Avoid relying on email: it’s difficult for people to really get to know you that way. Don’t be shy about picking up the phone! Being present, whether in-person or over the phone, encourages people to engage with your initiatives.
In-person meetings: try to arrange for people to meet in-person whenever possible. Use virtual meetings only when absolutely needed.
What do you do to get the community engaged and involved?
What are your tips for collaborative conservation groups who are just starting out?
