Update from Conservation Director Brian Bergeler

Hello Colorado Mountain Club members,

My name is Brian Bergeler, and I am the new Conservation Director for CMC. I have been with CMC since August of 2023, previously serving as the Stewardship Manager for our Conservation Department. I am remotely based in Salida, “The Heart of the Rockies,” centrally located in the middle of OUR Colorado public lands. I grew up across the street from an expansive state park and know first-hand the impact that quality public lands can have in forming personal values and a deep-rooted connection to our natural world through conservation, stewardship, and recreation. This devotion to public land is what led my career path to the CMC Conservation Department. Conservation has been a core pillar of CMC since 1912, and our organization continues to be a valuable partner in stewardship efforts across our great state today.

I wanted to take this opportunity to share some updates and inform our membership of recent successes, present challenges, and future opportunities. Seasons of change come in life and these transitions are often accompanied by adjustments – both positive and negative. Moving from winter to spring, many of you are exchanging your skis for hiking boots and looking forward to warmer adventures ahead this year.

As most of you know, our public lands are currently undergoing a dramatic shift in resources and management – to put it lightly. Our public lands are abundant in Colorado and where most of us recreate, whether it be a National Forest, neighborhood park, or anything in between. Recent actions on our public lands and public land management agencies are impacting the places we cherish and recreate in negative ways.

As an organization that places tremendous value on the places we recreate, I encourage you, the members of Colorado Mountain Club, to engage in productive efforts to protect, steward, and conserve our public lands. This is a time for us to unite and speak cohesively as a club in defense of our public lands and public land managers. If we lose our public lands, we will not get them back. If our public land management agencies continue to lose valuable resources and staffing, our public lands will suffer. Without stewardship and conservation, where will you recreate? Where will you connect with nature?

Below are some ways to get started on protecting our public lands:

• Contact your local, state, and nationally elected representatives to let them know how important OUR public lands and our land management agency employees are. The messaging is working, but we must continue respectfully to make our voices heard. Let decision makers know that you don't want them to sell off public land and ask them to reserve staffing cuts to land management agencies.
• Send us firsthand experiences you have recently witnessed on public land and impacts to public land managers – we are in direct communication with Federal Agency representatives who are collecting this information to make future decisions. Fill out this form or send stories to conservation@cmc.org.
• Document impacts on OUR public lands by downloading the CMC Recreation Impact Monitoring Systems (RIMS) App to help CMC Conservation provide detailed information to our land managers on where resources are needed to combat issues and identify deficiencies.
• Volunteer, recreate, donate, recreate, participate, recreate…….repeat.

My tenure as Conservation Director started at a very precarious time, but I want to assure you all that I am engaged and ready to protect our public lands. Are you?

Brian Bergeler
brian@cmc.org
Conservation Director
Colorado Mountain Club