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West Slope Outdoors Alliance touts local projects, asks for county engagement
Summary
At a Montrose County work session on Feb. 23, West Slope Outdoors Alliance leaders said regional grants have funded early projects — signage, guzzler repairs and adaptive-trail assessments — and urged local participation in upcoming community meetings.
Chris Herman, chair of the West Slope Outdoors Alliance steering committee, and Megan Dutcher, the group’s coordinator, presented a regional recreation-and-conservation update at the Montrose County Board of County Commissioners’ work session on Feb. 23.
Herman said the alliance formed with support from Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) and the Bureau of Land Management and has secured four grants since 2022 that have totaled about $500,000. “We want to get our hands on as much of that $50,000,000 as we can, for our three counties,” Herman said, referring to the broader Great Outdoors Colorado (GoCo) funding pot regional groups are pursuing.
Dutcher outlined the alliance’s three pillars — stewardship, broad access and sustainable resource management — and described current “early win” projects funded through CPW and GoCo. “There’s essentially two buckets of funding,” she said, “the early wins, which are smaller projects to engage community members, and the larger grants we hope to pursue next round.” She said early-win work in Montrose County will include installing rollover gates on Paradox Trails to reduce impacts to agricultural fences, repairing and inventorying wildlife water “guzzlers,” and conducting adaptive-trail assessments to improve access for adaptive-bike users.
Commissioners and residents asked about volunteer capacity, data and mapping for guzzlers. Dutcher said mapping varies by jurisdiction and that some volunteers maintain local inventories, but there is not yet a single, complete regional map. A resident who said he had constructed guzzlers and hauled trash on public lands offered to help coordinate volunteer cleanups on the West End.
Dutcher invited commissioners and the public to upcoming Alliance meetings in Montrose and Nucla and to the group’s March 11 community forum in Montrose. Commissioners thanked the presenters and asked staff to continue conversations about coordination and volunteer engagement.
Next steps: the alliance will hold local outreach meetings in March and rotate monthly meetings through Montrose, Grand Junction and Delta; commissioners and staff said they would follow up to identify opportunities for county support.
