The Boulder County Parks & Open Space Partnership Program engages businesses and organizations in stewardship projects. Our partner businesses and organizations care deeply for our county public lands. Partners participate in trails, forestry, plant ecology, weed management, facilities maintenance, and wildlife habitat projects. Being involved with the department in this manner produces a constituency that understands and appreciates the nurturing needed to care for over 104,000 acres of open space and 120 miles of trails.
Thank Yous & Welcomes
The department currently works with 50 partners in annual stewardship projects. Some partners have been involved in the program since its inception in 2008, including: Boulder Area Trails Coalition, Boulder Mountainbike Alliance, Boy Scouts, Boulder Trail Runners, Century Link, Corden Pharma, Mapleton Public Schools, NEO Tech, NetApp Solidfire, Redstone Cyclery, Singletrack Mountain Bike Adventures, Tetratech, the University of Colorado MBA Leeds Program, and Wildland Restoration Volunteers.
Many of our partner organizations have been involved for five years or longer, including the Alexander Dawson School, Alpha Phi Omega, Boulder Country Day School, the Defenders of Wildlife, Dell EMC, Google, New Vista High School, Qualcomm, the University of Colorado Program for Writing and Rhetoric, Volunteers for Outdoors Colorado, and Zeal Optics.
In 2019 we welcome AES Distributed Energy, Analytic Partners, the Boulder High School Mountain Bike Team, and Genscape, Inc. to the program. This year we also welcomed a new type of partner to our program: citizen science groups who complete a variety of educational research and stewardship projects such as wildlife camera monitoring and data collection, fishing line collection, and dark sky data collection. New partners of this type include the Altona Middle School, Roarie Bummlers Homeschool, Westview Middle School, and Longs Peak Middle School.
2019 Highlights
Plant Ecology: Youth groups removed invasive plants and decaying coyote willow stands. Clearing these helps stimulate new willow growth, and strategically staging the cleared material creates native pollinator nesting habitats. Organizations helped plant prairie cone flowers at Peck Native Seed Garden. Volunteers did the arduous work of hand-cutting invasive, thorny black locust trees and staging them for chipping.
Trails: At Hall Ranch, volunteers built new drainage systems to address serious erosion issues. At Heil Valley Ranch, teams completed rock-armoring and built new trails to connect climbing turns on pedestrian/equestrian trails.
Buildings and Historic Preservation: Employees from local businesses worked on historic preservation projects involving the unglamorous work of staining and painting bathrooms, kiosks, and shelters at Walden Ponds Wildlife Habitat, Carolyn Holmberg Preserve at Rock Creek Farm, and Heil Valley Ranch. Some fortunate groups helped paint the railroad train cars at the new Corral Trailhead at Heil Valley Ranch. We very much appreciate our partners that are willing to help with all types of projects whether the work is exciting or not.
Grounds: Grounds projects have included fencing work on the Longmont-to-Boulder (LoBo) Trail and planting projects at Heil Valley Ranch and the Agricultural Heritage Center at the Lohr McIntosh Farm.
The success of the Partnership Program would not be possible without the talented and energetic volunteer coordinator team which includes Ari Addes and Mike Rutter in Recreation and Facilities and Carrie Cimo, Shane Milne and Amanda Hatfield in Resource Management.
To see a list of our partner businesses and organizations or for more information about how your organization can partner with us, please visit www.BoulderCountyOpenSpace.org/partners. We greatly appreciate every partner and all the work that has been accomplished through their efforts!
