Episode 1: The Origin Story Podcast Transcript

Tina, I'm excited about today.

Melissa, me too. We've been waiting a long time, we've been talking about this for a long time. Some may say 50 years.

This is it, the beginning of the Boulder County Parks & Open Space Podcast, Voices of Open Space. I'm Melissa Arnold, the host of today's first episode, The Origin Story, and I'm here with my guest and colleague, Tina Nielsen. Today, we're going to talk about the origin of our department and how we're celebrating our 50th anniversary. Today, we're traveling back in time to uncover the roots of a legacy that has shaped our community for over 50 years.

Well, Melissa, you and I have worked together for a long time, not quite 50 years, but we have worked together for a long time. You and the real estate division, me and the planning division.

At one point, we shared a cubicle.

That's right.

I was just getting my career started.

I was working part-time with a toddler at home. So yeah, it was a long time ago.

So this legacy that we're going to be talking about today, what is this legacy of Boulder County Parks & Open Space?

It's so much. Today, we have almost 108,000 acres of open space. We have over 120 miles of trails. 25,000 acres of our lands are agricultural lands that are leased by over 60 different agricultural tenants. It's forests, it's fields, it's water rights, it's trails, it's wildlife habitat. It's so much more.

Well, let's pause for a moment before we delve deeply into all of that, and let's invite our listeners in and set the stage here. So first, geographically, where are we? Where is Boulder County?

Yeah, so Boulder County, Colorado, is a county that straddles where the Great Plains crash into the Rocky Mountains. Our county goes from 5,000 feet all the way up to over 14,000 feet at the summit of Long's Peak on the Continental Divide. So we're along the front range of Colorado, in the southern Rocky Mountains, and, because of that extreme change in elevation, we are extremely diverse in our ecological land. In fact, the shortest distance from 5,000 feet to over 14,000 feet occurs right here in Boulder County, and it's only 25 miles as the crow flies. That creates this incredible diversity of different plant communities and wildlife habitats, and we've got globally rare plants and all kinds of things that just make us a very unique and special place.

Absolutely. So now we've used the word open space a couple of times now, and this seems a little bit like a term of art, but there's a definition here. So for people who may not have heard that, what is open space?

Thanks for asking. It is a term of art. We just take it for granted because we're used to it, but open space is actually defined in the Boulder County Comprehensive Plan, which is our guiding document for land use decisions. It's defined as land intentionally left free of development, which may be or may in the future be of a desire to own or buy. Open space is one of the tools laid out in the Comprehensive Plan to shape urban development, and the County Comprehensive Plan has three big goals, one of which is to keep development within towns, within urban areas. It's to preserve agricultural lands and to preserve and protect environmental values like the plants and animals that are here because of the incredible biodiversity that we have.

Yeah, and so what's interesting is that you talk about this urban shaping around municipalities and how this open space really seems to create a buffer between the cities within Boulder County.

Right, so many places along the front range of Colorado, and I'm sure other places in the country that people can relate to. Towns just grow together. There's no physical separation, so you might not even realize when you're driving and you pass into a different town. But here, thanks to the intentional planning that we've done, we do have community separation, and that's an important thing in our community.

And more than the community separation, I imagine there are other aspects of open space that are important to people, other things that enhance the quality of life.

Well, absolutely. I mentioned 120 miles of trails. So, for people who want to get out and take a walk, take the dogs on a walk, run, mountain bike, ride horses, we have all kinds of great places to do that. In fact, if you just want to go and commune with nature, take a picnic, or take a wellness break, you know you can do that. And some people just like knowing that it's there, that plants and animals have a place and space to thrive. And then, of course, our farmers who farm land and grow food locally, you know, that is of incredible value.

Thank you so much for that description of open space. That really helps to understand what it is we're talking about. So now that we've set the stage, let's go back. Let's talk about how we got here today.

Yeah, great question. I do want to just pause for a minute and say, here we are celebrating our 50th birthday, the last 50 years, but we can't really talk about how we got to where we are today without acknowledging a painful part of our history of colonization, where the land was stolen from the indigenous Native American populations. So any comprehensive history of land in Boulder County is not complete without recognizing that the Arapaho, the Cheyenne, and other indigenous communities lived here and continue to live here today. You know, I've heard that up to 50 different Native American communities had ties to Colorado, many of them right here in Boulder County. So we in Boulder County want to acknowledge the legacy of colonization. It's a painful, painful history, caused great harm to indigenous communities, and as a department, as a county government agency, along with many others, we are doing a lot of work to educate ourselves and to understand what that legacy is, as well as outreach and relationship building in order to heal some of those harms that we are able to be here today because of.

Thank you so much for talking about that, Tina, and bringing it in today's conversation. It's really important that we anchor our conversations around history to time and memorial as we begin to look at how our Open Space program came to be and how it is we're celebrating our 50th anniversary this year.

Well, I am grateful that the county that we both work for really centers its work in racial equity.

Yeah, absolutely. I agree. So, let's take the listener back in time. There's a real story here that I'm sensing about the hard work that took us to where we are today. That's what we're going to delve deeply into in this episode. How did the seed of open space get planted? How did we get to where we are today with all this protected land?

Well, we didn't always have protected land. Let's roll the clock back to the late 50s. The city of Boulder nestled right up against the flat irons. Very scenic. I'm sure people are familiar with the city of Boulder, home of the Sea U-Buffs, the county seat of Boulder County. There was a development proposal to build a hotel resort on Enchanted Mesa.

What is the Enchanted Mesa?

Enchanted Mesa is just above the city of Boulder. It's where the Mesa Trail is now. People may be familiar with that. Well, it's the Mesa between Chautauqua Park and Encarve. People know those landmarks. But anyway, it's a beautiful trail now. There was a proposal to put a resort and hotel up there. Some local citizens got wind of this and were very alarmed at the thought of the mountain backdrop getting developed in this way, getting developed at all, honestly. They formed a citizen group called Plan Boulder County. That stands for People's League for Action Now. They brought an item to the election and asked people of the city of Boulder, in an election, and got past something that was called the Blue Line. The idea was that above this imaginary line, which was at a certain elevation along the western edge of Boulder, no water services would be provided. And it passed. And so that hotel development proposal fizzled. It went away. And I think Plan Boulder County really just started that to energize the citizens, and they started, they went from there, and they've gone on to advocate for many different policies and elections. But at the same time, the government agencies were quite interested in it; they started doing studies to analyze the options for land conservation. So the Regional Planning Commission, which was the county's land use committee, hired a consultant to do a study. And that was, I believe, in 1964, or 62, I'm sorry. It was in the early 60s. And so the conversations are really getting going in the early 60s. Boulder had been kind of a sleepy town, but IBM came in, and of course, the university was there, the national labs were there, NCAR and so on, NIST, well, it used to be called the National Bureau of Standards. And so a lot of people were moving there, the population was growing, and of course, with more people comes more housing. That's not a bad thing, but people were alarmed about where this housing is going to go and what lands are going to be used for that. So this conversation started happening.

Yeah, and what I'm really impressed with here is that you were saying that the community members really were behind all of this action, and that it did cause some of these protections to be put in place, but it was the community really driving this.

Absolutely. And it's a really important point. It's something that takes the support of the people who live here. 1959, the Blue Line, which was 100 years, actually, after gold was discovered, and there was the gold rush and the silver rush that came that brought a lot of hard rock miners to Boulder, and then the farmers to support them, and so on. So, just as an aside, that happens to be the year I was born. So, I came to Boulder in 1959 as well.

Well, since we're going to do that, but coincidentally, 1975, when the department was born is the year I was born, too.

There you go.

See, disclosure of ages there.

Right. So, just kind of rolling through the early 60s, a lot of work was done to understand what the values of land were, and some regional planning. Of course, we know that where urban development happens is usually along creek corridors and where high-value habitats are. And so, where the people want to be is also where the animals want to be. And we live in a very arid climate, and water is very important. So, in 1967, the city of Boulder decided to have an election to see if citizens would vote to tax themselves to conserve land. And they called it the Green Belt. This was the first time in the nation that a community went to the polls and voted in favor of taxing itself.

In the entire country. Wow, that's remarkable.

Yeah. You know, politically, what they did was they combined it with a road improvement tax as well. So, it was partly for the Green Belt and partly for roads. It's probably a smart way to do it back then. And it passed. But I do want to say that even before that, way back in 1899 or 1898, the city of Boulder residents passed a bond to purchase a ranch, which was where Chautauqua Mountain Park is. So, that was actually the first time, but that was a bond, it wasn't a tax.

It actually started years before that. There was an interest in conserving land.

People may be familiar with the whole Chautauqua movement, and we still have a vibrant Chautauqua in the city of Boulder. So, that's kind of a fun fact.

For anyone who doesn't know what Chautauqua is, would you just let us know?

Well, it was a movement that started, I believe, by some people in Texas. And Texas is a very hot and uncomfortable place in the summer. And so, people who had the means would go places that had better climates. And they ate communally and had lots of programs. And I think there was a big spiritual component to it. So, there's a big Chautauqua in New York that's still in existence, but many of them have folded.

Great. Well, that's interesting to know. So, take us back now to where we left off, where this tax pass is in the city of Boulder.

1967. So, that was a big milestone. And that same year, the county was also thinking about land conservation, and the county appointed its first Parks & Open Space Advisory Committee in 1967.

Let me ask you to just make sure we're clarifying. So, the city of Boulder passed this tax, and now we're talking about the county of Boulder. Let's just take a moment to distinguish the two, because I think sometimes that can be complicated, even for those of us who work within those governments, just when we talk about each of them. So, within the city of Boulder, we had this first passage of the tax, and that's the municipality. And then now, take us, we're talking about where we worked. Yeah, so say a little something about that.

Yeah, Boulder County encompasses, I think, 11 different incorporated communities. Boulder, the city of Boulder, is the county seat, and we created an advisory committee that was talking about some early planning efforts. The county hired a planner, and the planner was in the land use department. And then, the open space advisory committee was hired, they commissioned some studies, and they did a lot of public outreach. On the one hand, their studies were looking at what areas would have high habitat values or high agricultural values in the kind of places that we would want to conserve. At the same time, they went out, held neighborhood meetings, and talked to hundreds of people to get their input. If we were to do this, where would you like to see land conserved? They came up with a plan, and they presented it to the county commissioners. They said they recommended that there be an open space department within the county and that it shouldn't just be one planner in the land use department. And the county commissioners agreed, and the department was created in 1975, on January 1st. So that is the anniversary we are celebrating this year, when we became an official department. However, that was just the beginning.

Yeah. Right. Well, what a story to get up to that point. And yes, just the beginning. In 1975, they created the department, and what does that look like? What kind of funding does it have? What's the structure?

Well, we had big plans because the advisory committee had made that plan, but we didn't really have a budget or a means of going out and buying land. So we were pretty scrappy back then. I mean, I didn't work for the department yet, but I was still in high school. However, compared to the city of Boulder, which has a dedicated tax, the county had to be very creative. We were like the poor country cousins. We didn't have a dedicated funding source. So we made purchases on rolling options, for example, where we would say to a landowner that we could pay you a certain amount every year for 10 years. And some landowners were agreeable to that, believe it or not.

Well, do you have any examples?

Well, I'm thinking of our very first open space property, which we purchased.

Under the department.

After we became a department, it was Ernie Betasso who sold us his ranch. It's now known as the Betasso Preserve. One of the jewels of our system. Ernie did not have any children, Ernie and his wife, and his wife had passed away, and his heirs, his nieces and nephews, weren't interested in inheriting the land. He had been approached by a number of developers who were interested in purchasing, and they would show him their plans of carving it up and putting in, you know, fancy homes, and he was just not interested. He struck a deal with the county and agreed to let us purchase it over a period of 10 years. And so we did that. But again, we didn't have a funding source. In fact, one year, we didn't have enough money to pay him. One of our commissioners had to go up to him, you know, hat in hand, and say, we don't have the money this year, and Ernie was like, no problem, we'll catch up next year. And did they? Yeah. And the other cool thing was, even though we were only buying one-tenth of the whole ranch each year, we leased the remainder of the parcels for a dollar a year so that we could go ahead and start building the trails and the trailheads and the infrastructure to allow people to start using it and enjoying it.

What a great example of generosity, and really, a landowner should be able to have that foresight as well. To have trust in such a small early department, and today, that's one of the most visited parks that we have.

Exactly.

People just love it.

Yeah. So here we are in the later 70s, the Boulder County Comprehensive Plan got adopted and again, it laid out the foundations for what is open space, what is it used for, you know, the urban shaping, the ag land preservation, the environmental values.

And when you say ag land, you're talking about the...

The agricultural, yeah, the farms, the farms and ranches. Yeah, exactly. It's something that's a little bit unique about our program because not every open space program has a well-developed agricultural program the way we do. Yeah. So that's an important part of our program. So anyway, we decided that, well, we need a funding source, and let's go to the voters and ask them if they'd be willing to pay a sales tax. So we did that in 1978, and it failed. And that was pretty devastating. We kept doing what we were doing, and we tried again 10 years later in the 80s, and it failed again. It was very close.

But I imagine that the residents of Boulder County found, were finding some value in open space and probably also seeing some quick development happening in the area at the same time.

That's right. I think what started to happen was that with the population growth, people were starting to see some of the farmland get divided up and developed. Some of the views were starting to get spoiled, I guess you could say, with rooftops, and the sweeping vistas were, you know, people started to realize they weren't necessarily going to be there. And so this decade, from 1975 to 1987, saw huge population growth throughout the state of Colorado. In fact, one of our governors, Dick Lamb, he got a lot of airplay when the Olympics were going to be in Colorado. In 1976, it was a proposal, and he said, We're going to ask the people of Colorado to vote to see if they wanted it or not. And it was voted down, because people, you know, he said, people are going to see how great it is, and they're all going to want to come here. We're not ready for that. He was the one who famously said that our entire Front Range Corridor from Fort Collins on the north, all the way down to Pueblo on the south, is just going to be one continuous urban corridor. So he was pretty visionary that way. Some of what he said has come true, but not in Boulder County.

Wow. Isn't it interesting to be able to see that back then, when it might have seemed like, in some ways, that land was always going to be, there'd always be some land available and open? So you walked us through the beginning of the Parks and Open Space Department, and the struggles of trying to finance some open space purchases and going to the people, having that vote not go through twice. And that brought us to the late 1980s.

Correct.

Okay. So what happens then? It sounds like we didn't give up.

They didn't give up. And the trends were starting to become just much more apparent. Some people say that the development of Superior was important.

And what is Superior?

Superior is a town south of Boulder. There was Old Town Superior.

South of the city of Boulder.

Yeah, thank you for that clarification. South of the city of Boulder. It was a small town, Old Town Superior, surrounded by rolling grasslands and a lot of prairie dog habitat. It got developed into a pretty large community, and it's a great community. We're not here to say development is bad, but it did open a lot of eyes to the fact that we can't assume and take for granted that these rolling hills and grasslands will remain that way. And so the people who are working on it they developed a really clever campaign using an owl. They had this idea that an owl symbolizes wisdom, but it's kind of the right shape for a yard sign, and they just had three words, open space, yes. And that Hootie owl was designed by a woman named Joanne Duffy, who was a fine artist. She also ended up working in the transportation department, helping create our regional trail systems. She was very much responsible for the Rock Creek-Cole Creek Trail, but she was a very talented artist and created a lot of line drawings for various publications that we had. Hootie is just so beloved to us. Hootie? Hootie the Owl.

I think I've seen that owl around today, too.

Yeah, we have a bunch in our office building.

Port Nikon.

Yeah. And a lot of other communities have used Hootie's in their own open space campaigns because it doesn't say Boulder. It just says Open Space, yes. So it's been adopted.

So, OK, so there was this development happening down by Old Town Superior, and people were starting to campaign to try to stop some of that, or at least try to buffer some of these communities and make sure we don't just grow all these communities together. And Hootie was created. And so then what happens?

Well, we had our third try in 1993 at the sales tax, our third attempt. And yes, the third time was the charm, and it passed. And that really set off an amazing explosion of acquisitions over the next 10 to 20 years. But for the rest of the 90s into the early 2000s, we were just buying land right and left. So the Hall Ranch and Hile Ranch were the first two. We had already been talking to them. You know, we already had purchase contracts and agreements. We were ready to jump, and we did. There were some hoops we had to go through. There was a lawsuit after the tax passed because someone thought we hadn't followed the correct procedures that satisfied the taxpayer's bill of rights.

People are watching, being careful.

Exactly. So, our ability to spend the taxes that were collected was delayed. The Nature Conservancy got involved and helped us out with a bridge loan and some things like that. So, you know, interestingly enough, it wasn't even after the tax got passed, it wasn't immediately smooth sailing. But those illegal questions got worked out. And then we were able to, yeah, Potasso Preserve, you know, was already done. Rock Creek Farm and Walden Ponds were already done.

And when you say already done, you mean?

Before the tax.

Right, right. So, we did have those open space parks before that. Right.

But then, after the sales tax passed, we were able to go and buy all that great land in the foothills. I said something earlier about the highly biodiverse lands where the plains meet the Rocky Mountains. And we have such incredible biodiversity there. So, the Heil Ranch and the Hall Ranch were very important because they were under private ownership and didn't have a lot of public use. So they hadn't been very disturbed. And it gave us that incredible ability to go in and do the surveys for the natural resource values. Figure out how to maximize the visitor use experience. Where to put the trails to ensure that people had a great experience, but also in a way that didn't disturb the highest value habitat areas, and it was amazing we were able to do that because other programs, for example, the City of Boulder, a lot of their trails, they inherited them. So they didn't have that ability to do that planning from the ground up. So that's a very unique opportunity that we had.

And you've talked a lot about the county purchasing land for open space that would be managed under the Parks and Open Space Department. From what I understand, there are a significant amount of lands that have remained in private ownership that have conservation easements on them, and that's also part of Boulder County's open space portfolio.

That's right. Yeah, exactly. And of the nearly 108,000 acres of land that we have...

Like today.

Today. I think about 40% of them are actually still privately owned, and we hold what's called a conservation easement on them, which means that the development rights are... have been purchased off of them, basically.

Or restricted or... Yeah, and that's interesting too, because one of the things, as you were reviewing what open space is, I noticed you named a lot of things in there, a lot of values, and recreation and access was one of those, but there were a lot of other things that open space embodies. And so it seems with the conservation easements, you get a lot of that conserved scenic quarters, watersheds, wildlife habitat, and all that.

Right.

Still. So for people who might not be ready to sell necessarily. I guess what I'm seeing is it's a nice way to have continued to protect land.

Correct.

Without needing to always buy it.

I should mention that one of our early directors, Carolyn Holmberg, who was my first boss when I started working here, she unfortunately passed away in 1998. But she was the department director from 82 until her passing. And she was an incredible woman. And one of the incredible things that she did was that she could talk to anybody. And she was instrumental in helping us develop relationships with the agricultural community. And she developed a trust with farmers who weren't necessarily eager to trust the government. And she was able to develop those communities. So, Rock Creek Farm was the first real plains property that we bought. And it's right...

And when you say plains, you mean geographically?

Yeah, out on the plains.

Exactly.

And it was the first property that was a significant agricultural property, and it came with water rights. So that was the first property that we bought water rights with. And today, our water rights portfolio is incredibly valuable.

And just briefly, for anyone outside of the Western water rights world who might be listening, what are you referring to when you say water rights?

We operate under the riparian water law, first in time, first in rights. So the people who were early settlers here stuck their stake in the ground or in the water, I guess, and they established a legal right to the water. Anyone who came after them had to wait till they had used whatever they needed before the next person could get another, you know, their share. So, you know, it's kind of an ancient doctrine that doesn't really work so well in this day and age anymore for a variety of reasons.

Sounds like at least a way for ranchers and farmers to ensure that they can get water on the land to irrigate.

Correct. Yeah, exactly.

Thanks for just taking a minute to explain that.

We do have an amazing network of ditches that crisscross our lands. And today, many people on our agricultural staff sit on ditch boards and are very involved with the water. Water in this environment is, what's the saying? Water is for fighting.

Water is for drinking, and, no, whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting. Oh, boy.

We did it.

Right. So, Rock Creek Farm was the first agricultural property purchased on the Plains.

Yeah.

And Carolyn Holmberg was instrumental in that.

Right. Thanks to that start. We also hired somebody who was part of a family of multi-generation farmers, Luke Stromquist. And then he had these connections and these relationships, and was able to take that forward. And now we have purchased many, many lands from multi-generation farmers as well as newer ones.

Well, I really appreciate hearing that because you commented on how Boulder County was unique in its open space properties and that we have a lot of agricultural lands. And so that was really neat to hear some of the way in which we got there.

Yeah.

And Carolyn being an instrumental part of that.

Can I just tell a quick story about Rock Creek Farm, please? Because one of the things that people may not realize is that we have a Raptor Rehabilitation Center at Rock Creek Farm, the Birds of Prey Center. And they lease their facility from us for, I'm not sure, I think it might be a dollar a year, but I'm not positive. And they take in raptors that people might find injured or have gotten hit by a car or flown into a fence. And they will rehabilitate the raptor, and they have an education program where they'll take the birds that aren't able to be re-released into the wild and use them for educational programming. And I think it's just a very fun side thing that we're able to do, and it's right there at Rock Creek Farm.

Well, and what a great illustration of how open space is so much more than even what we just have said in this particular episode and we'll be exploring in the future.

I wanted to mention, you know, we were very busy buying up open space, but another tool that was employed. So I don't think I've mentioned Ron Stewart's name yet, but Ron Stewart was a county commissioner, and after Carolyn Holmberg passed away, he became our director of the Open Space Department. And he is definitely an important figure in our development. He was extremely visionary and guided us through the years of rapid growth and development. And one of the things he did as a county commissioner, in addition to guiding the Open Space Department, was he developed something called the Consortium of Cities, where he worked with elected officials and staff from each of the communities within the county to have agreements about what are the rural preservation areas and what are the urban development areas for each community, which made it so much more easily, collaborative, easier for us to go out and negotiate with landowners, because they weren't trying to compete or have communities compete and drive up land prices. Because it was very clear, you're within an urban boundary or you're not. You're outside or you're not. And if that was clear, then it really facilitated the planning and implementation of open space purchases. And it was accomplished under his leadership. And those agreements were 20-year agreements. I think most of them have expired by now, but at this point in time, we've largely accomplished the vision around towns.

Yeah, that's really great to hear how he facilitated those partnerships that Boulder County developed and still has with a lot of these municipalities, with all the municipalities incorporated into the county.

And another thing I should mention is that six of our communities within Boulder County have their own open space programs with their own tax funding mechanisms that they've gone to their own voters to support them. So it's a real thing here in Boulder County.

Well, yeah, I started in the city of Boulder and went into Boulder County, and then a lot of the other incorporated towns and cities have done the same. Yeah, interesting. So, you mentioned Ron Stewart as one example of a visionary who helped to create the open spaces we know them today. Are there any other nods to individuals that you wanted to... I know there are probably so many, and I wouldn't want to leave anybody out.

I'm really glad you asked that question, because there are so many, and it won't be possible to name them all. I do want to mention, and I think this is a very interesting little nugget story, the Parks and Open Space Advisory Committee. So when it was created, Ron Stewart served on that committee, Carolyn Holmberg served on that committee, Claire Levy, current County Commissioner, served on that committee, Annie White served on that committee, Annie White and her husband, Gilbert, donated a beautiful land that they owned on Four Mile Canyon Creek. It was one of the only creek corridors in Boulder County that had not had a road built alongside it. And they ended up donating that. And one of the fun things about that story that's so heartwarming is that, like I said, Annie White was on the Parks and Open Space Advisory Committee. Meanwhile, her husband, Gilbert White, was a world-renowned geographer. He was a professor at CU. He had gone, I believe he went to Harvard, and he had taught at the University of Chicago. And they ended up moving to Boulder. He taught at CU. He was one of the first people to talk about floodplain development and to realize that you shouldn't have development along floodplains. That's not a great idea. And so the fact that they donated Formel Canyon, you know, the Andy White property to us, there's just something so rich about that.

That and just another gesture of generosity. That's really incredible to hear.

I mean, since we're talking about gestures of generosity, there's another great story. So we have the Agricultural Heritage Center just west of Longmont. That was a little farm that we bought from a bachelor farmer named Shorty Lohr. He was a multi-generational farmer. He had relatives in this area. In fact, Larimer County has a farm that was bought from a cousin of his. And so he was an early farmer. And when we bought that land, he took half of the proceeds from the sale of that land and put it in a trust that was then given to us upon his death to create the Agricultural Heritage Center. So again, just another very generous and heartwarming story for the vision that people have. But you did ask about other people, and I mentioned several who have been on the Parks & Open Space Advisory Committee. There were other people, other county commissioners, like Josie Heath, who was a county commissioner early on, Jack Murphy, and Wally Toevs, so this is a great story. Walden Pond was a gravel mine; the county owned the gravel mine. Wally Toevs was a county commissioner, and it was really because of him that we had to turn this into an open space property. When the gravel mine is done, we'll reclaim it and turn it into some ponds. It was named after his name, Walden, and his nickname was Wally. I think it's such a great story again, and probably most people think that, oh, Walden Pond, it must be taken from the row, but no, it was taken from our county commissioner.

That is great.

He was a commissioner back in those times in the 80s.

Well, people really enjoy, like all of our open spaces, that one gets a lot of visitation as well.

It is one of our most popular parks, great for bird watching, and very accessible.

So many stories, so many people that have helped to bring Boulder County Parks & Open Space to where it is today. So fast forwarding to today, boy, we've had all these stories, we've had so many challenges, successes, wildfires, floods.

Oh, yeah. We were very busy in the 90s in the first decade of the 2000s, the aughts, buying land, planning for it, trying to open parks, getting people out there. And then we had, in the meantime, we had the Overland Fire in 2003, off of Left Hand Canyon.

Yeah, and this is in the foothills, not down in the plains.

And then the 2011 fire, Left Hand Canyon, again, the Callowood Fire 2021, 10 years later.

Some floods have come through and impacted the communities, as well as our parks, and our staff have had to respond to that and rebuild entrance roads. And, you know, these are also naturally occurring events, to a degree. So it's been a challenge to...

Yeah, we spent a lot of the 2010s to 2020 doing work to recover from natural disasters. The historic floods of 2013, where we got in three days more rain than we usually get in a whole year. And it was concentrated in a very small area and caused a lot of damage.

A lot of successes and challenges over the last 50 years. Well, our department is turning 50. And the theme for this milestone year is Rooted and Reaching, celebrating 50 years of conservation and community in Boulder County. This is just the first episode in a series of episodes that we'll host throughout the year. We would love it if you all would join us for future episodes, where we'll cover a variety of topics from what it takes to manage these open space properties and our parks. We'll hear from members of the community about how they interact with open space and enjoy open space, with some of the restoration work we've done that we just sort of touched upon with fires and floods. Stories from our volunteer naturalists. And that program, the Volunteer Naturalist Program, was created 50 years ago as well.

That's right. That started in 1975. And I want to mention, thank you for that reminder, that the Master Gardeners also started in 1975. So yeah, people might not realize that we're a big tent and CSU Extension is under our tent. Yeah, and so the Master Gardeners are part of that.

Yeah, and we have a large staff as well, and a lot of people who will be sharing their stories.

Yes, I'm so excited for that because I really feel like our staff are the super heroes behind the scenes, and people don't always see them, but the work that they do is so important, and it's going to be a great opportunity to share some of those stories.

Well, we just shared some compelling stories of our roots, and so please join us for these episodes that we're going to be doing to talk about how we're reaching for the future and beyond this into the next 50 years and beyond.

Can I just mention to you that we've got various programs happening throughout this year and the rest of this year? So here we are in the spring of 2025, and there will be pop-up birthday parties at Trailheads and fun things for people to learn about. We've got a web page, and on that web page, if you want to see those cool maps showing how the land is turned from, you know, on the map into green spaces, it's a really fun map to see.

From before and after the sales tax, in particular.

It's a very fun animation. You can click on it to see that.

Yes, and I'm glad you mentioned that. I want to make sure everybody knows where they can go to learn about these events and find out when they're happening, and some of them might need tickets. They can go figure that out. And that'll be on our website, boco.org, forward slash open space 50, boco.org, forward slash open space 50. Tina, thank you so much for talking with me today and sharing your stories and your vast knowledge of this department and the work that everybody has contributed to, the staff, the leaders, and the residents. I really appreciate your insights, and it was fun. It was really fun talking to you.

It was so fun. Thank you, Melissa.

More to come. We hope everybody sticks around and listens to future episodes. We're glad that you joined us today. And I also want to thank Longmont Public Media for the use of this recording space. And we invite you to please follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.