The sound of buzzing chainsaws permeates the crisp mountain air at the Cal-Wood Education Center, as the managers of the forests mitigate the surrounding stands of trees. From the ashes of the fires of 2020 came the firm knowledge that fire mitigation helps to allow the trees to survive the fast-moving fires that break out.

Angie Busby knows this. As the land manager at Cal-Wood for the last fourteen years, she has prepared for and fought the fires that have broken out at the nearly 1200-acre education facility. While last year’s fire was the largest recorded in Boulder County, it was not an isolated incident, and the land manager at Cal-Wood has been an integral part of preventing more blazes from causing catastrophic damage throughout her tenure at the top of the mountain.

“We do average about one heat strike fire a year,” she said, “Usually we can get it contained, get a line around it before Left hand even shows up.”

According to Busby, “I have multiple roles here,” she said, “Primary role is land manager. I’m also the volunteer coordinator, medical fire officer, fire restoration specialist and the greenhouse manager, and educator.”

It is for these reasons that make her such a benefit to the community at Cal-Wood, as well the surrounding areas. One example is the firewood that is harvested during the mitigation efforts coordinated by Busby and her longtime partner, Pat Kutcher, which help to provide heat to many of its neighbors, and residents of the surrounding mountains.

The most recent project that she has successfully completed is a greenhouse on the Cal-Wood campus. Sitting on a hill just across from the fishing pond is an impressive greenhouse that, since its completion, has helped to educate students that visit Cal- Wood. It also provides fresh produce and herbs to the kitchen on-site, and creates a composting and vermiculture system for food scraps that the kitchen produces. This is all done at an altitude of 7800 feet, which is a notoriously difficult task for residents attempting to grow food at high altitude.

“We built this greenhouse two Thanksgivings ago,” she said, “it was funded by Great Outdoors Colorado, and it was a $25,000 grant. The structure itself cost $15,000; these are pre-COVID prices. $10,000 was the beds and the dirt and all the materials, everything that wasn’t associated with the actual structure. And the fencing; we did elk, moose, bear, and the top two lines are hot… so this is a whole other project associated with that.”

The solar-powered fencing that she installed to keep the animals out, surrounds the entire structure and creates space on the exterior of the greenhouse building which allows for an outdoor squash and melon area, another array of raised beds, solar-powered irrigation, and the compost and vermiculture systems that are incorporated into the overall flow design.

Busby is intent on making the neighboring community of Jamestown an integral part of the greenhouses operation and learning outcomes. “My plan is to…get Jamestown more involved in the process, as in elementary students coming up to grow stuff, learn about stuff,” she explained, “I’d love to get some kid art in here. There’s not a sign yet, so I’d love to get the kids at Jamestown Elementary to do that.”

She also hopes to conduct community classes that relate to the greenhouse, to include, “apothecary classes, how to grow a garden, how to build structures like this, canning classes, herbal medicine classes, bear proofing your garden, composting and vermiculture” she said, “I’d love to do community classes for Jamestown, but with the fire we’ve put that on the backside.”

Although Busby has not conducted classes like these in the past, she feels like this is an opportunity for future development. She explained that one of the goals is to produce food for the neighboring town of Jamestown, and that she’s learning what that means as the seasons pass, and conditions change.

“The first year, 2020, I didn’t realize how much smoke affected our growing season because it was smoky every day,” she said. “This year I planted, expecting the outcome from last year (2020) and I got ten-fold increase in vegetables, because we didn’t have a smoky summer.”

After the successive seasons of year-round production, she has gotten an idea of how much the kitchen at Cal-Wood can use for their program. Her next step is to develop a strategy for getting produce to Jamestown. “I would love to give a box of produce to Jamestown Elementary every Friday, to go home with the kids. And then anything left that Cal-Wood’s not using, Jamestown’s not using, I drop off at the food donations on Saturday.”

As Cal-Wood moves past the fires of 2020 and starts to develop new programs and systems, Angie Busby has started to develop a greenhouse program that she sees as a bright future for the neighboring communities, as well as the visitors to Cal-Wood.

Cal-Wood is located at 2282 County Road 87 Jamestown, CO 80455. You can find out more about them on their website at https://www.calwood.org/ or by calling (303) 449-0603