Yampatika Pairs Moffat Students With BLM Trail Work

Steamboat Springs —The wind off Cedar Mountain has a specific bite to it. It cuts through the jacket, finds the gap in the zipper, and reminds you exactly where you are. On a recent morning, Moffat County High School students stood in that wind, shovels and rakes in hand, working alongside staff from the Bureau of Land Management. They weren’t just hiking; they were maintaining trails, clearing encroaching vegetation, and cleaning a picnic area. It was part of National Public Lands Day, but for the students involved in FFA, the School to Workforce Alliance, and special education programs, it was something more concrete. It was a reminder that the land isn’t just scenery.

This is where Yampatika’s work gets real. The organization, which focuses on protecting Northwest Colorado’s natural resources, operates on a simple premise: you can’t protect what you don’t understand. And you can’t understand it from a textbook alone.

Michelle Mahosky, Yampatika’s water education coordinator, puts it bluntly. She wants to get people “well educated as well as helping them to actually put their hands onto the soil.”

Mahosky is a fourth-generation Colorado resident and a former Montessori educator. For more than three years, she has coordinated water education programs that reach seven school districts, including those in Moffat County. Her approach is layered. Younger students start with the basics — the water cycle, distribution, and use. As they grow older, the curriculum shifts toward the harder, messier topics: water rights, water justice, and civic participation. It’s a progression that moves from observation to action.

The part everyone skips past is the career angle. In smaller communities, students often assume that if they want a job in environmental science or conservation, they have to leave. They have to drive to Denver or fly to the East Coast. Mahosky disagrees. She partners with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the U.S. Forest Service, and the BLM to bring speakers into local classrooms.

“Oftentimes, we bring in speakers of those professions to talk to the students,” Mahosky said. “We’re making sure they’re aware of how they can live right where they’re at and still have these awesome jobs.”

That matters because retention is the quiet crisis of rural workforce development. If young people think they must leave to find purpose, they do. Yampatika is trying to break that loop by showing them the work is right here, in the valleys and on the ridgelines they drive past every day.

The organization adjusts its programming to fit individual communities, recognizing that opportunities for outdoor experience vary wildly from one zip code to another. But the core mission remains constant: foster stewardship by creating personal connection.

Back at Cedar Mountain, the work was physical and unglamorous. It involved sweat and dirt and the slow, repetitive motion of clearing brush. But as the students packed up their tools, there was a different energy in the air than when they arrived. They had touched the land. They had maintained it.

Stand there long enough and you realize that education isn’t just about information transfer. It’s about belonging. Yampatika is betting that if you help a kid feel like they belong in the landscape, they’ll fight to keep it. The wind still bites at Cedar Mountain, but now, for a few hours, the students belonged to it.