1% For Open Space: Giving Back
This article appeared in the Crested Butte News Summer Guide
It’s what many who come here crave. Access to the outdoors. A place to breath a little. When you look towards Paradise Divide, the view is clear all the way to the mountains. You look through a wetland of willows and a ring of thick spruce forest. From there, are spacious emerald clad meadows peppered with fuchsia paintbrush, pale bluebells, and a wide-open sky. Cliffs. Rugged knife-edge ridges leading to airy summits. Open space is where many come to get away from it all, to forget big city woes or just the small, added annoyances of any old day.
When you look at a map of Crested Butte, you see a tiny community encircled by National Forest. Beyond that green halo, the valley contains five wilderness areas: The Raggeds, West Elk, Fossil Ridge, Maroon-Bells Snowmass, and the Collegiates. Crested Butte has something unique. From this town, you may walk out of your back door with your pack on your back. You may walk up to the end of Whiterock, hook a left into the aspened trails of the Woods Walk, through the meadows and forest of the Lower Loop. You can take a left into the Oh-Be-Joyful creek drainage and into the Raggeds Wilderness area. From there the land is yours to roam. You can climb 13,000-foot peaks, 14,000. You can take the long way around to Aspen.
It all begins with the open space purchased through grants from the 1% for Open Space program. When you take a guided tour with the Wildflower festival to the Woods Walk, 1% donations went to preserve that tract of land. When your family goes mountain biking for the first time on the Lower Loop, 1% helped make that possible. You may lumber over Kebler Pass, or up the popular Washington Gulch road to get a peek of treeline at Paradise Divide, and you will have driven through land that has 1% money in it. The ride of the Rec Path from Crested Butte to Mt. Crested Butte, camping by the Gunsight bridge before your bike to the pass, researching in a meadow just south of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. These lands and more total over 1,300 acres of land the 1% for Open Space program has helped purchase so that visitors and inhabitants of the Gunnison Valley could enjoy these sights and activities for a long time to come.
Open space has both aesthetic and ecological value in its stream corridors, wetlands, forests, and sage meadows. It provides habitat for birds, such as the bald eagle, and potential habitat for endangered species like the lynx and boreal toad. It protects our cultural land – that which has been farmed and ranched for generations and is so important to this valley. It is the home for hiking, biking, viewsheds, and research land.
The 1% for Open Space program is a voluntary 1% donation on top of products and services when you visit the 60 participating local businesses. Real estate offices, retail stores, doctors, restaurants, and lodging establishments have all agreed to put their time and effort into collecting these voluntary funds for the program. Once collected, the 1% for Open Space grants this money to requesting organizations for the preservation of land in Gunnison County. So far, the program has had the privilege of assisting such non-profit organizations as the Crested Butte Land Trust, the Gunnison Ranchland Conservation Project, and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. 1% is proud that it is now approaching the million-dollar mark for money collected for the preservation of open space.
So when you buy a pair of socks in Crested Butte, or a hamburger, or lay your head down on a comfortable pillow, your purchase, like Crested Butte, can also become quite unique. You have the opportunity to give something back to a place that gives a lot. A beautiful view. A deep clean breath. A place to nest. A sense of peace.