Future Conservationists in 2025

Over the past few years, Eagle Valley Land Trust has been growing and advancing its Future Conservationists programs. This arm of our community engagement efforts is focused on providing meaningful opportunities for youth of all ages to explore various topics in land conservation and develop a strong, lasting stewardship ethic. From elementary school students and middle school summer campers to high school interns, legal interns, and graduate students, our Future Conservationists programming serves as a stepping stone to a career in conservation. 

In 2024, EVLT teamed up with Eagle County Open Space and Natural Resources for a social trails mitigation project with third and fourth graders at Miller Ranch Open Space. The students, who were participating in Walking Mountains Science Center’s summer camp activities, dragged branches and logs onto unofficial, user-created footpaths, thereby decommissioning the trails and helping to reduce erosion and vegetation disturbance. The students’ feeling of pride and accomplishment was palpable, and they posed for photos with big smiles and flexed biceps. Their newfound awareness of the impact of social trails, and their sense of responsibility toward the land, are things they can take with them as they continue to grow as future conservationists. 

In 2025, EVLT formed a new partnership with Small Champions, a local nonprofit that offers adaptive recreation opportunities to youth with physical and cognitive disabilities. EVLT organized a field trip to Sweetwater Lake for over a dozen Small Champions youth and aides. It was a full day of horseback riding with AJ Brink Outfitters, boating on the lake, and a picnic lunch, and roundtrip shuttle transportation with Epic Mountain Express was included. High school intern Shelby Spiegel and legal interns Julyana Sanchez and Olivia Widman joined us for the day, one that all three of them described as the highlight of their summer internships with EVLT. This outing, which engaged both youth and emerging professionals, encapsulates the goal of our Future Conservationists programming: to inspire students at every level to love and protect the land. 

Also in 2025, EVLT facilitated an ethnobotany trivia game and plant scavenger hunt at Homestead L Open Space for kids in Homestead Court Club’s summer camp. The children, ages 5-12, worked in teams to correctly match native plants with their traditional uses by Indigenous peoples, including the Utes. Afterward, they explored the conserved open space in search of the plants they had just learned about. Through this program, EVLT helped connect local youth to our incredible native flora and the culture and legacy of the original inhabitants of this land.

Future Conservation Professionals

EVLT has been working especially hard to offer meaningful professional development opportunities for students in high school, college, law school, and graduate school. Since 2022, we’ve hosted five high school interns through the Environmental Leadership Program run by Exploremos. These rising juniors and seniors helped plan and facilitate EVLT’s community engagement programs and wrote about their experiences for our website, social media pages, and the Vail Daily. 

In the summer of 2025, EVLT employed a college intern to support our team with a wide variety of operations and fundraising tasks. We also welcomed two legal interns, who conducted valuable research on orphan conservation easements in our service area. This was the second year that EVLT has hosted legal interns. 

Also in 2025, we worked with a student in Colorado State University’s Master of Conservation Leadership program on a project to create Spanish-language programming on the Ute history and ethnobotany of Sweetwater Lake. This was EVLT’s third year hosting CSU graduate students. Past students identified opportunities for increasing equitable access to Sweetwater Lake and developed a multi-phase framework to guide EVLT’s engagement efforts with Indigenous communities.