Mission

Partner with the Buddy Program to fly students in the LEAD Program over the Piceance Basin to learn about oil and gas on our public lands and how to engage in advocacy for our public lands.

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 dioxide and methane released into the atmosphere that contribute to climate change, and in turn, drought and changing weather patterns that are becoming more noticeable in Western Colorado.

Photos from the flights.