Driving along Highway 82, most people’s eyes are drawn up to the high peaks of the Elk Mountains rising above the valley floor, skipping over the open fields and dry, sagebrush-flecked hills that dominate much of the Roaring Fork Valley’s landscape.
Rangelands — the grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, wetlands and deserts where domestic livestock or wild animals graze — are, in many ways, unglamorous places, says Retta Bruegger, a specialist in range management for Colorado State University.
“If we were to put up a picture of an Aspen forest or a high mountain scene, more people would say they would want to go have a picnic there than they would in a sagebrush shrubland,” she says.
But looks can be deceiving. Rangelands provide wildlife habitat, biodiversity and food security for billions of people through small-scale farming, ranching and herding. In the Roaring Fork Valley, they also provide most of the region’s recreation space, including the trail systems at Sky Mountain Park, Prince Creek, and Sutey Ranch.
Those services — ecological and cultural — are behind the recent United Nations decision to declare 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists.
Bruegger says the designation is an effort to raise awareness about rangelands and advocate for their protection. She was among the organizers of a recent film festival at the Crystal Theatre in Carbondale highlighting these landscapes, which cover 50% of the earth’s land surface — from the African Savannah to the Mongolian Steppe to the high desert of the American West.
There’s a reason rangelands tend to get overlooked. As European settlers moved westward, they were looking for land suitable for growing crops. “Everything else was somewhat ironically called ‘wild lands,’” says Sami Dinar, a rangeland management specialist with the U.S. Forest Service. “They were just not good for raising crops, and so they were thought of as barren.”
Although forests are prized for their ability to store carbon, Dr. Maria Fernández-Giménez, a retired professor of rangeland ecology and management at Colorado State University, noted that rangelands are more effective carbon sinks. Most of the carbon sequestered by rangelands is underground in the form of soil, where it’s protected from fires. Trees, however, store carbon in their biomass — their leaves, trunks and roots — most of which is above ground and more susceptible to burning.
But climate change is threatening rangelands and the rural communities that rely on them. According to researchers at Cornell University, changing weather and climate patterns had an even bigger impact on Mongolian herders’ ability to make a living than overgrazing, long considered the main cause of rangeland degradation.
Those impacts are also showing up on rangelands across the western U.S., says Bruegger. Hotter, drier conditions lead to more invasive species, increased flooding and erosion, and growing competition for scarce water resources.
But both Bruegger and Fernández-Giménez see hope in collective action — particularly the women from pastoral communities, who play an underacknowledged role in rangeland management. Over 400 women applied for 100 spots at the Global Gathering of Pastoralist Women event in Nepal this May. The gathering will give women an opportunity to discuss adaptation in their communities and ways to increase resilience.
Bruegger hopes that last week’s screening will help more people in the Roaring Fork Valley appreciate the rangelands that form the open spaces and mountain bike trails they love — even if most of them will still choose to picnic elsewhere.
