Deanna Belch Telluride Ski & Golf Envionmental Programs
By Deb Dion

When Dorothy's canine pal Toto yanked back the curtains, the Wizard of Oz was demystified: There stood a little man, operating the whole show with levers and knobs. If you peel back the hype that surrounds the environmental programs at Telluride Ski & Golf Resort (Telski), you will find the granddaughter of a coal miner manning the controls: Deanna Belch.

Belch is small but dynamically energetic with the year-round glow of a person who spends a lot of time outdoors. She claims to be shy, but her words flow fast, and even her hair explodes into an array of curls, as if it, too, is overflowing with energy. Like the wizard, Belch makes her magic behind the scenes. From pushing the resort to recycle and use biodegradable utensils at its restaurants to implementing a retrofit of the lighting in all of its facilities for more energy efficiency, she does her best to “green” the company. These changes may seem small, she says, but they have a multiplied effect when made by a large consumer such as the ski area.

When she joined Telski in 1998, she was part of a team to restore wetlands that had been damaged by construction of the golf course. As a result, the revegetation project was required by a mandate from the Environmental Protection Agency. That project has been a success, and the wetlands are again naturally filtering water that flows through the links. Belch then implemented a monitoring program to ensure that waterways emerge from the course perfectly clean and set up bluebird nest boxes to enhance the course's wildlife habitat. “The wetlands were working,” says Belch of her early work at the resort, “so I branched out into a lot of other things.”

From helping with the company's efforts to restore the wetlands poured forth Belch's true calling: environmental education programs. Belch was able to incorporate outdoor education into the resort's operations, starting with holding Earth Day celebrations and taking kids for school field trips to wetlands sites. After meeting with local educators and realizing the need for a place to teach visitors about Telluride's environment, she established a summertime interpretive center at the top of the gondola that saw over 7,000 visitors its first year. Soon thereafter, Belch's outreach at Telski grew to include educational snowshoe tours at the top of Lift 10, where visitors can learn about the unique fen (a bog or marsh) studies in Prospect Basin and identify the animal tracks of the mountain's many winter residents, including the recently reintroduced lynx. This educational element comes naturally to Belch: Her father is a professor and her mother was a schoolteacher for 35 years.

Belch then called on her friend Lissa Margetts of Telluride's Rocky Mountain Ark wildlife rehabilitation center to bring three wildlife presentations to the resort each week, introducing residents and visitors to native locals, such as porcupines, owls or river otters. Belch loves animals and is thankful for the Ark's program. “I don't like the fact that the animals don't have a voice,” says Belch. “So much money is made from the environment, how can we not reinvest in it?”

Belch doesn't just speak for the animals-she also gives a voice to the environmental movement. Shortly after graduating from Penn State in 1989 with a BA in liberal arts, she wrote scripts for and filmed children's science and nature videos for a production company out of Sun Valley, Idaho. She continued with the film medium next at Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, where she worked on an education project for an endangered sea turtle-the Kemp's ridley, the smallest species-which was also the subject of a series of children's books she wrote for the local schools. More recently, Belch interned at High Country News, a regional environmental publication out of Paonia.

Though free time for Belch is as scarce as moose sightings in Colorado, the stint in Sun Valley fostered a love of Nordic skiing, an activity that seems only natural for a naturalist. She enjoys spending time at her home in Rico, which, perhaps in a tip of the hat to her origins, is an 1892 mining cabin that she restored in 2001. In Rico, she occupies a seat on the planning commission and writes for the town newspaper. Her hobbies include crafting pillows and clothing from elk and deer leathers, photography, exploring nature, swimming and playing golf.

Ski town life isn't new to Belch. After growing up in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, she has called both Aspen and Sun Valley home, but her roots are now firmly planted in Telluride. “I'm super happy to be here,” she says. “I'm high on Telluride.”