This is the second episode of The Colorado Dream: Happy Birthday! The stories in this series are part of the KUNC podcast The Colorado Dream, airing on Mondays beginning June 29. The podcast is available for download wherever you may listen to podcasts and on KUNC.org.
On an early spring morning in the Poudre Canyon, environmental historian Liesl Carr Childers stopped beside a rushing creek and looked across a steep hillside.
“That one is a Jeffrey pine,” she said. “With the butterscotch-looking bark.”
Carr Childers, an associate professor at Colorado State University, was hiking this trail in Larimer County to help answer a mystery hidden in Colorado’s constitution.
The mystery dates back to 1876, the year Colorado became a state. Buried in Section 6, Article 18 of the constitution is a sentence directing lawmakers to “enact laws in order to prevent the destruction of and to keep in good preservation the forests upon the land of the state...”
“That is such an interesting thing to have in a constitution of a state,” Carr Childers said.
Colorado was the first state in the country to include forest protections in its constitution. Yet nearly 150 years later, few people know the provision exists – or why.
When KUNC asked historians, land managers and people who’ve spent their lives thinking about Colorado’s forests, about the clause, many had never heard of it. This includes Carr Childers and her husband, also a historian.
“But when we started talking about it,” she said, “some pieces unfolded that sort of surfaced as possible contexts for what might be going on here.”
The timing, she said, wasn’t a coincidence.
A changing view of forests
By the 1870s, people across the country were beginning to think about forests differently, because what they were seeing was alarming to them: tree stumps and barren hillsides.
“I think there’s this greater concern, or feeling, that American forests were declining,” Carr Childers said.
For decades, Americans had treated forests as an endless resource. But that assumption was starting to change, and Colorado was becoming a state right in the middle of that shift.
The period before Colorado became a state – the 1860s and early 70s – was defined by extraction. The Gold Rush transformed the territory, as thousands rushed West to find their fortunes. Timber was used to build the inside of mines and homesteader cabins.
“The term the Wild West is sort of in play here,” she said. “Where there's not as much regulation or oversight and certainly no coordination with the federal government or states. So people are taking what they want.”
At the same time, surveyors and explorers were beginning to document the consequences.
In 1873, they published one of the country’s first maps estimating forest cover across the U.S. The map was accompanied by a report. Together, they shared a warning.
Looking over a copy of the map, Carr Childers pointed to the Western U.S. and Colorado.
“The authors of this report were definitely concerned that we were pushing into a space of over harvest,” she said.
Only three years later, those concerns arrived at the First National Bank building in Denver, where 39 delegates deliberated over the text of Colorado’s constitution.
But how exactly did forest protections end up in the state’s foundational document?
One delegate’s idea
John Twitchell found some clues in historical records at the Colorado State Forest near Walden. A retired state supervisory forester, Twitchell spent years managing this landscape. Forestry, he said, is his lifelong passion.
But, like nearly everyone else KUNC interviewed, he had been surprised to learn that Colorado was the first state to include forest protections in its constitution.
“We were the first state in the union to have this in our constitution?” Twitchell recalled thinking. “Really”?
But then Twitchell dug through old documents at the State Forest. His research quickly pointed to one man: Frederick Ebert, a German immigrant, engineer and constitutional delegate.
Ebert likely brought ideas from Germany, he said, where forests had been managed according to scientific principals for years.
“A lot of our forestry knowledge was coming out of Germany,” he said.
After immigrating to Colorado, Ebert surveyed land for railroads. He drafted the first map of the Colorado Territory, later served as Denver’s city engineer and worked his way up in business and politics. He was elected to be a delegate for Colorado’s constitutional convention.
On the third day of the convention, he introduced a resolution to form a committee dedicated to forestry.
“Apparently, when he spoke to the group that was forming the constitution, he went at length about forestry, and all the stuff that could be included,” Twitchell said. “And it seems like they edited it down to a fairly short paragraph.”
The motivation wasn’t preservation, he said, but conservation.
“They wanted to be able to use wood to build the railroads, to prop up the mines and to build the schools and the buildings that a new state would need, and that would take a sustainable supply of wood,” he said.
The language in the constitution reflected that goal. It also revealed an early understanding of the role forests play in storing water for agriculture and other industries.
However, after Colorado became a state, it took leaders a number of years to push forestry forward. The legislature didn’t follow up with any policy until a somewhat-unrelated tax law in 1881. A few years after that came the Colorado State Forestry Association and a newly created position: the Forest Commissioner of Colorado.
Colorado also helped shape forestry at the federal level. It was home to only the second forest reserve in the country, which paved the way for the creation of the U.S. Forest Service in 1905.
But as a direct result, this little-known constitutional provision accomplished surprisingly little over time. Plus, most of Colorado’s forests would come to be managed not by the state, but by the federal government.
Outdoor recreation takes off
Today, Colorado’s forests face a different set of challenges than the state’s founding fathers imagined 150 years ago. Outdoor recreation has become one of Colorado’s largest industries, eclipsing mining and logging as millions of people travel to the Centennial state to hike, camp, ski and raft.
With more visitors comes more pressure on public lands. At the same time, the U.S. Forest Service lost hundreds of employees in Colorado last year alone, leaving fewer staff to maintain trails.
On a warm day in Roosevelt National Forest, Jeanne Corbin greeted hikers along the North Fork Trail, answering questions about camping regulations and trail conditions. Corbin isn’t a Forest Service ranger. She’s a volunteer with Poudre Wilderness Volunteers, a nonprofit based in Larimer County that helps the Forest Service protect roughly 650,000 acres in the Canyon Lakes Ranger District.
“People are just more likely to encounter a Poudre wilderness volunteer than a Forest Service staff member out on the trails,” Corbin said.
The organization began 30 years ago, when seasonal Forest Service employee Chuck Bell realized there weren’t enough people to maintain the wilderness areas he cared about. More than 100 volunteers showed up the first year.
Today, the group has about 300 members. It includes people who certify other members in using crosscut saws and others who lead hikes for children or patrol trails, answering questions and documenting conditions.
Another group of volunteers tackled a different task: clearing fallen trees from trails before the busy summer season.
Mark Snyder and his crew worked their way through a tangle of downed timber, carefully cutting branches and using crosscut saws to remove logs blocking the trail. The organization cleared thousands of fallen trees in the first few months of the year.
“If there's too many trees snagging up on people, they're going to walk around, create a social trail,” Snyder said. “The trail will braid, and that's what we are trying to prevent.”
Maintaining the trails protects both visitors’ access and the surrounding forest, he said.
“These are our public lands,” her said. “These lands belong to every American in this country, no matter if you're in Florida or in California or in Colorado. Our public lands are for everyone.”
A lasting legacy
Colorado’s founders viewed forests primarily as an economic resource they hoped to preserve for future generations. Today, caring for those forests involves balancing recreation, climate change, wildfire risk and growing public demand for outdoor spaces.
John Twitchell, the former state supervisory forester, said the work has become far more complicated than delegates to Colorado’s constitutional convention could have imagined in 1876.
Still, he believes the constitutional language reflects something enduring about the state.
“When I read it, it says, ‘Hey, this thing's important,’” Twitchell said. “The forest is important here. It's part of the nature. It's part of the character of Colorado, and we value it.”
150 years after Colorado became a state, he said, that value still guides how many Coloradans think about the forests.
Next episode
The Rocky Mountains are the state’s defining feature. At one time, they were also its biggest barrier. Learn more about the ingenuity and engineering marvels that altered the routes across Colorado – and the state’s identity.
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Credits
The Colorado Dream, Season 6: “Happy Birthday” is a production of KUNC News. The podcast is hosted, produced and edited by Stephanie Daniel. This episode was written and reported by Rachel Cohen. Additional editing by Sean Corcoran. The theme song was composed by Jason Paton. Michelle Redo sound designed and mixed the episode. Alex Murphy is the digital editor.
The audio of the Steamboat Springs advertisement was provided courtesy of the Colorado Snowsports Hall of Fame.
Special thanks to Kyle McKinnon, Leigh Paterson, Lucas Brady Woods, Emma VandenEinde and History Colorado. Tammy Terwelp is KUNC’s president and CEO.
