Eagle Valley Land Trust celebrates the opening of new Conservation Center
Old structure struck board members as just right for nonprofit's forever home
Scott Miller/Vail Daily
For more than 40 years, the Eagle Valley Land Trust had been an organization without a proper home. After more than three years of work, that’s changed.
The nonprofit on Thursday unveiled its new home in Edwards at the former Wildflower Farm. The group’s new Conservation Center overlooks the Eagle River Preserve to the north, and New York Mountain to the south.
The building itself is a reclaimed log structure that was brought to Colorado from Tennessee. The building dates to the 1800s, with some of the giant logs dating to the 1700s.
Scot Hunn, the vice president of the nonprofit’s board, celebrated the center’s ribbon-cutting on his birthday. He said the center’s opening is a “huge deal.”
“It’s a three-year effort to find and acquire this building and so many people’s efforts to bring the building through a process to get the zoning approved and to design the improvements,” Hunn said. “It’s absolutely amazing.”
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At a small celebration before the ribbon-cutting, a quick outdoor affair due to the weather, Land Trust Deputy Director Bergen Tjossem said the organization’s former home, in leased space in the Edwards Riverwalk, was “bursting at the seams.”
Even the small staff “had to kind of shift between who was working remote that day and who (was) working in person.” Sharing space with other organizations “didn’t give us much of an identity,” Tjossem added.
In the new building, multiple things can happen at once, Tjossem said.
“We want to invite our partners here,” he said. That includes highlighting the work of the Eagle County Conservation District with some demonstration projects on the building’s north side, as well as collaborations with other organizations.
In her remarks to those gathered for the ribbon-cutting, board president Christina Lautenberg said it took a lot of discussion, debate and collaboration to find the group’s forever home. That home wouldn’t have been possible without all those gathered for Thursday’s celebration, she said.
The new Conservation Center will “increase the rate of conservation here in the valley,” Lautenberg said. “It’s going to help us break down barriers to responsible open space access, and it’s going to help foster collaboration and innovation in the conservation world.”
Gypsum resident Tom Edwards has been involved with the land trust since its inception. In his remarks, Edwards noted that the board had been looking at ways to perhaps buy or share land for possibly building a structure in perhaps five or 10 years. None of those ideas seemed to get very far, he said.
During that search, the Wildflower Farm came up for sale.
“I think it was love at first sight when the board members saw this building,” Edwards said. “It had the characteristics of a building that is part of the land and a building that in itself is a conservation property.”
