This was not a typical summer season for the White River National Forest, but thanks to unprecedented efforts from local organizations, visitors may not have noticed.
The U.S. Forest Service did not hire seasonal workers to manage the influx of crowds, but it did offer incentives for employees to quit. Funding shrank and uncertainty grew. Outside groups stepped up to cover a wide range of federal responsibilities, including law enforcement presence, trail maintenance, trash pickup and toilet cleaning.
“At least on a temporary basis, we were able to keep up pretty high standards,” said Karin Teague, executive director of the Independence Pass Foundation and an organizer of the Public Land and Water Forum. “That’s the lemonade from the lemons.”
The forum is a group of 21 Roaring Fork Valley organizations that formed in early May and quickly put together an awareness campaign, including a video, a website, and signage encouraging public land users to recreate responsibly and understand the root causes of the lack of services now provided by the Forest Service.
Going into next summer, local Forest Service staffing and service levels are not expected to recover, and members of the Public Land and Water Forum are planning how to respond long term. The group plans to join forces with the four-year-old Roaring Fork Outdoor Coalition (RFOC), a group of land managers focused on balancing recreation and conservation throughout the Roaring Fork watershed. Pitkin County Open Space and Trails heads up the coalition’s work, collaborating with six local governments, two federal land-management agencies and Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
The Public Land and Water Forum this spring is expected to be absorbed into two new RFOC subcommittees, one focused on stewardship and another on education and engagement, according to Jami McMannes, communications and outreach specialist with Pitkin County Open Space and Trails. Those subcommittees will help steer media campaign decisions around public-lands issues and provide guidance for stewardship projects, using data collected by the RFOC over the past two years.
The Public Land and Water Forum is continuing to meet following a brief off-season hiatus and is working to develop a messaging strategy for the winter after a successful summer campaign, McMannes said.
“So many organizations came together so quickly around an issue that was really important to the community,” she said. “We did get attention and response to an awareness campaign, and showing success with an awareness campaign is a big win.”
The forum quickly raised about $32,000 from member organizations, including ACES, Pitkin County Open Space and Trails, the city of Aspen, Independence Pass Foundation and the Aspen Chamber Resort Association. The group hired Rachel Brenneman, a local communication strategist, to create a public awareness campaign that ran from early July through mid-September and included print ads, digital media, and a video that appeared on social media and at the Aspen-Pitkin County Airport, as well as signs, flyers and posters. There were also multiple stories about the group’s work in local media.
The digital campaign appeared on screens nearly 200,000 times, and the forum’s organizers say this helps with the group’s primary goal.
“Our goal is to make sure people know that this is happening, because a lot of it has, as much as possible, been kept out of public view,” said Adam McCurdy, forest and climate director at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, which is also an organizer of the Public Land and Water Forum.
Since January, employees of the White River National Forest have been tight-lipped about their workplace, and media requests were often met with general statements from regional or national offices rather than local personnel, while public records requests and other requests for comment have languished.
The Public Land and Water Forum stepped up to fill that communication void, pushing messaging about toilet closures and lack of drinking water at the Maroon Bells Scenic Area. Members also feel it’s important to keep the local community up to speed on wide-ranging federal actions, including a recent Trump administration rule that could remove protection from many wetlands and streams nationwide.
“One of the most challenging things that we’re dealing with is both the speed and volume of changes that we’re seeing,” McCurdy said. “We feel like we need to be able to educate about these different things that are happening, and the consequences of what is happening.”
Partners step up to protect the forest
Officials with the White River National Forest did not comment on the effectiveness of the Public Land and Water Forum specifically, but they did acknowledge the role of local collaboration.
“The White River National Forest has long relied on partnerships to help us manage recreation,” public affairs officer David Boyd wrote in an emailed statement. “With fewer seasonal employees in 2025, these partnerships are especially critical, particularly in the Aspen-Sopris District at Maroon Bells and Independence Pass.”
By the time the federal government shut down Oct. 1, nearly half of the Aspen-Sopris Ranger District’s staff had left. The busy district started the year with 27 employees, was not allowed to hire summer seasonal workers and now has 15 personnel remaining. The White River National Forest said in a statement that it was moving forward with “hiring fire and fire-support seasonal employees” for next summer, but new hiring is not planned for other seasonal jobs and positions of many year-round employees who have left.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, [the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service] is being transparent about plans to optimize and reduce our workforce,” says a statement provided by the White River National Forest. “ … USDA is committed to maintaining the personnel and resources needed to continue to support USDA’s mission and will make it a priority to allocate personnel resources as needed to meet mission critical functions going forward.”
Boyd noted the extensive work of partners such as the Forest Conservancy, Independence Pass Foundation, H2O, Pitkin County, ACES, Roaring Fork Mountain Biking Association, Wilderness Workshop and Rocky Mountain Youth Corps.
The Forest Conservancy, a nonprofit corps of volunteers that started helping with staffing at the Aspen-Sopris Ranger District in 2001, provided more than 8,300 service hours at the Maroon Bells Scenic Area alone, Boyd wrote.
Volunteers with the Forest Conservancy logged a total of 15,992 hours in the field, up from 13,147 in 2024, according to executive director Marcia Johnson.
“Our volunteers contribute more than time on the trails and at the Bells — they make a visible difference,” Johnson wrote in an email. “In 2025 alone, 140 active volunteers logged nearly 16,000 hours, dismantled 49 fire rings, packed out over 500 pounds of litter, hiked more than 6,000 miles, and maintained a daily presence at the Bells.”
Boyd also noted that volunteers with the Forest Conservancy also stocked trailheads with WAG bags, which are used to safely pack out human feces from the backcountry.
Using Independent Sector’s 2024 valuation of volunteer service for Colorado, Johnson said Forest Conservancy volunteers provided $618,290 worth of in-kind service. Monitoring for fire rings and engaging with visitors was particularly important during the summer’s extreme drought.
“The most common interaction during fire bans is simple but powerful: ‘No fire use,’” Johnson said.
Pitkin County’s new backcountry community response officer, Lynn Sanson, who filled a position at the sheriff’s office that was created in response to federal staffing shortages, also helped with messaging during the summer’s fire restrictions.
Sanson said he believes in the idea of conservation through connection, and his role was to educate backcountry visitors about how to recreate responsibly.
“For us to be able to find a way to help people connect on some level, they grab that and they feel some ownership, and then they feel some stewardship,” Sanson said.
As a county law enforcement officer patrolling federal lands, Sanson did not have jurisdiction to issue citations for federal laws. He could write tickets for illegal fires but said he never had to.
Pitkin County’s Board of County Commissioners recently approved funding for two backcountry community response officers next summer, as commissioners expressed their wish for additional presence in the backcountry seven days a week.
H2O, the company that runs the scenic area’s reservation system, also provided staffing that “allowed us to keep the Bells operating effectively,” Boyd wrote.
H2O employees worked at the ranger station along Maroon Creek Road, as part of an agreement that the company made with the White River National Forest in 2024, according to H2O CEO Ken Murphy.
“That would have been disastrous if they hadn’t planned that,” Murphy said.
With many partners working extra to support the Forest Service, Murphy said the summer was a success, with surveys showing that visitors had “remarkably positive experiences.” He noted that most visitors do not see the Maroon Bells as overcrowded, with only 12.3% of respondents marking a 4 or a 5 on a survey that asked for a ranking on a 1-to-5 scale of how crowded the area was.
“We did awesome because everybody picked up slack and worked incredibly well together as a team,” Murphy said, referring to the many partners involved in the Maroon Bells experience. “But could we keep going at that pace? No way.”
Teague and the Independence Pass Foundation share concerns about the sustainability of asking partner organizations to fill gaps left by Forest Service cuts.
Boyd noted that the Independence Pass Foundation “removed trash, monitored Lincoln Creek, and cleaned and stocked seven toilets along Independence Pass.”
The toilets, in particular, hit a nerve in the community. The Independence Pass Foundation teamed up with the Aspen Chamber Resort Association and the Aspen Historical Society to pay for the cleaning and stocking of toilets. The contract covered cleaning and stocking toilets five days a week, and Teague said individual donors also stepped up to help with that effort. Volunteers also covered the additional two days a week of cleaning and stocking.
“Our community really stepped up with volunteer hours and donations to different groups, but how long are donors going to want to pay for all the toilets on the pass?” Teague said. “That’s a big ask, and not one that they should be expected to pick up. These are our public lands and they should be paid for by our federal government.”
McCurdy, who also sits on the board of the Independence Pass Foundation, said another key Public Land and Water Forum goal is “to fill in the places where there’s potential for long-term ecological damage.”
That’s why the toilets matter.
“If those bathrooms are locked, and they have to go to the bathroom, they’re going to go somewhere,” McCurdy said.
Boyd acknowledged other long-standing partners such as ACES, which leads interpretive tours at the Maroon Bells Scenic Area; the Roaring Fork Mountain Bike Association, which helped to clear trails in the Sunnyside and Lake Christine burn areas; and Wilderness Workshop, which helped with trail repair in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness.
But even with groups willing to help, Teague said the long-term view is important — and bleak.
“It’s really important to emphasize that we can keep toilets open and keep them clean, but we don’t have the decades of experience and history and boots-on-the-ground experience that the Forest Service has,” Teague said. “They know these lands and have decades and decades of experience that’s really irreplaceable.”
But many workers who had accrued those decades of experience left the Forest Service over the summer.
Priorities going forward
As winter arrives, McCurdy said since so much of local winter recreation, namely skiing, happens on highly managed ski resorts, the responsible recreation messaging will take a bit of a backseat.
“We’re still looking at potentially using that messaging in heavily used backcountry areas and areas with snowmobile traffic,” he said. “But we’re really shifting to reminding people that they are on public lands the vast majority of the time they’re skiing, and that these lands don’t steward themselves.”
The Public Land and Water Forum will merge this spring with the Roaring Fork Outdoor Coalition, which since 2021 has brought together local open space and recreation officials, federal public lands managers and Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
The RFOC was formed after Gov. Jared Polis signed an executive order in 2020 that called for more cross-jurisdictional planning around recreation and conservation in the state. Polis’ order also called for funding, and the RFOC hopes to capitalize on state grant programs to carry out some of the work that the Public Land and Water Forum started this past summer.
The RFOC had applied for a $350,000 grant to be paid over three years through Great Outdoors Colorado and Colorado Parks and Wildlife that has been earmarked to support five to 10 stewardship projects, as well as provide volunteer staffing for the Aspen-Sopris Ranger District. On Friday, officials announced that RFOC has been awarded an $87,000 one-year grant; RFOC will continue seeking funding opportunities.
The Forest Service has completed construction to significantly update the Aspen-Sopris Ranger District office in Carbondale, but it is not open to the public.
“The Forest Service is set to open its new Aspen-Sopris Ranger District office with no staff to sit at the front desk. There’s no staff at the office in Glenwood Springs,” said Carly O’Connell, senior planner and landscape architect with Pitkin County Open Space and Trails, who is leading much of the RFOC’s work.
The RFOC is working to set up a volunteer staffing program for those offices because “this position affects all of us,” she said. “If there’s no one answering the phone, there’s really no forward face of so many of the public lands that the Forest Service provides access to.”
McMannes said another initiative for 2026 is a valleywide educational campaign that focuses on “responsible recreation and how to provide support where funding and resources are lacking.” This effort will continue the work that the Public Land and Water Forum began last spring.
O’Connell and McMannes are looking to secure other grants and maintain a steady funding stream for projects that meet the goals of the Public Land and Water Forum.
“What is really encouraging about all of this is that we’re pulling together funding from various partners to address a lot of items in a more strategic way going forward,” O’Connell said.
Much of the strength of the Public Land and Water Forum was in the group’s ability to quickly pull together funding and projects; the new structure is aimed at long-term strategy. It will also make use of the data that the RFOC has collected over the past two years regarding conservation and recreation across the Roaring Fork Valley. That data includes an extensive report on biodiversity across the watershed that identified key locations to focus on conservation and several surveys about recreational use and perceptions of crowding.
“We want to figure out a way to be more proactive to some of these issues in the future, rather than reacting and trying to pedal backwards to find funding to ad hoc requests,” O’Connell said.
As the Public Land and Water Forum shifts to what members hope is a more sustainable funding model — and one that is more strategic in identifying key projects — many leaders remain deeply concerned about the root issue. No amount of local organizing and grant winning will replace the work of experienced, trained federal land managers working on the lands that they oversee.
“Even if we have a change in Washington, getting back to fully staffed with people who have experience, that’s going to take a lot of years,” Teague said.
This story has been corrected to reflect that the Roaring Fork Outdoor Coalition was awarded a one-year grant of $87,000 from Great Outdoors Colorado and Colorado Parks and Wildlife. The original version of the story stated that RFOC was awarded the three years of funding totaling $350,000 it had initially applied for.
This story, and Aspen Journalism’s ongoing coverage of challenges facing local public lands, is supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Pitkin County supports Aspen Journalism with a grant from the Healthy Communities Fund.