Mission

Conduct five flights with local students to engage the next generation with Colorado wildlands and watersheds and educate on land management practices and the importance of environmental stewardship.

We flew above the Piceance Basin in Western Colorado, an area rich in natural gas, a valuable resource used for indoor heating, cooking, and other industrial purposes. Mineral extraction has been central to Garfield County’s economy for many years, however extracting this fossil fuel comes with environmental tradeoffs. The scale of extraction can be difficult to conceptualize from ground level, but from the air, we clearly saw some of these impacts, like the spider web of access roads that dominates the Colorado River Valley landscape from Rifle West to the Utah border and beyond. There are also impacts we don’t see as clearly, like carbon released into the atmosphere that contributes to climate change and in turn drought and changing weather patterns that are becoming more noticeable in Western Colorado.

If you were excited about what you learned, we encourage you to share photos and your flight experience with others. We can help you do a presentation to your school or to the Buddy Program. Let us know - EcoFlight would love to support you in your studies and furthering your peers' knowledge.

Click for photos from the flights.