Thank you to ACES members, partners, volunteers, and community for a great summer!

Click below to enjoy a slide show of photos from the summer. 

With Spring around the corner, gardeners are dusting off their gloves and shovels and prepping for the growing season. In honor of this time of preparation, ACES is celebrating gardening this month at the Hallam Lake Visitor's Center and Nature Preserve.

Aspen, Colorado, October 27, 2015 — Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES), a Colorado-based science education nonprofit, has developed an interactive online tool Forest Forecasts, which illustrates future forest change under best- and worst-case climate change scenarios. The tool utilizes innovative technologies to display detailed views of current forests that utilize cutting-edge climate models to generate high-resolution portrayals of what Western forests are likely to look like in the future.

Wow! The Wild & Scenic Film Festival event at the Wheeler was so much fun! It was amazing to sell out this event in its first year, and in doing so, raise significant funds for our Tomorrow’s Voices program.

November brings ACES Ed deeper into fall programming, as we work with students up and down the Roaring Fork Valley in our classroom and field science programs. We are looking forward to winter programs, including snow science programs on Aspen Mountain, winter adaptation studies at Hallam Lake, and launching our integrated Forest Health education curriculum in our in-classroom lessons.

Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES) would​ like to extend a hearty “thank you” to our valley-wide community for making the 13th annual Harvest Party at Rock Bottom Ranch a huge success!​ With nearly 1,200 people in attendance (all via car-free transportation), we were thrilled to host families and friends from Aspen to Rifle. 

ACES is proud to announce its participation in the first Colorado Environmental Education Leadership Council. This council, made up of regional sub-councils, will work with the Colorado Department of Education to consult and advise on methods to effectively implement the Colorado Environmental Education Plan (CEEP.) 

Willard was loved and respected by our community and his recent passing has caused us to reflect on his excellent life. Willard was known for his big bear hugs and quick wit, but also for a life dedicated to investing in the future of his community. Many in Aspen knew him for his service at the volunteer fire department, but we at ACES knew him as an educator, a mentor, and advocate.

It is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of Dr. Richard Beidleman.  Dick, as we all knew him by, taught at ACES for about three decades, living at the Hodgson Professor House at Hallam Lake during the weeks he was teaching. With the same ease as he made life lists of birds, he also made a Professor House list for me every summer. It was basically a list of things that needed my attention and I believe Dick made such lists most everywhere he went – he just cared that much about the places where he worked and about the natural world he inhabited.