Supporting the beauty, value and function of our urban waterway since 2022.
We strive to improve wildlife habitat and support the beauty of the Coal Creek corridor.
Mission
Friends of Coal Creek exists to support the beauty, biodiversity and resilience of Coal Creek and its home communities.
Vision
Friends of Coal Creek envisions a different way to live with nature that emphasizes support over consumption and can be accomplished through a collection of small efforts. We are building the Coal Creek Pollinator District, which strategically knits together small islands of habitat on commercial property, marginal lands, and private home gardens to create a network of habitat from the foothills above Golden to the plains in Erie — the creek’s entire run. We believe beauty is a critical piece of the effort, especially when beauty comes with ecosystem services and carbon sequestration. We can change the place we live, play and work 300 square feet at a time.
Strategy
Community
Coal Creek sees thousands of yearly visitors through Golden, Superior, Louisville, Lafayette and Erie, Colorado. Our goal is to engage the creek’s many users to create a community around the creek, its accessibility, recreational opportunities, natural beauty, and wildlife.
Wildlife
Water is critical to all life and Coal Creek is one of just a few creeks that run through our towns, forming a rare and vital habitat corridor for wildlife to live alongside our fast-growing High Plains cities. Coal Creek is our best and most concrete chance to appreciate such life.
Water
Water is precious in the American West. Coal Creek provides natural beauty, but also irrigation water for farming and a drainage pathway for the cities that line its shores. As both nourishment and drainage, Coal Creek forms the basis of life here.
Advocacy
The future starts today. By building a community around Coal Creek, we can determine the best way to preserve the future of our High Plains oasis for wildlife and natural beauty. This can only be done right by welcoming and included all voices.
Beauty
Through our Photographer-in-Residence and Writer-in-Residence programs, we bring the creek’s beauty deeper into your life and open up new ways of seeing, appreciating, and living the natural beauty that surrounds us.
Connection
Whether you use the Coal Creek corridor for walking, cycling, birding, photography, or simply see it as you pass by, we all have a part in the life and future of the creek. Friends of Coal Creek seeks to foster connections between neighbors, wildlife and home.
Leadership
Casey Lyons, founder & director
Casey Lyons lives in Lafayette with his family. Though an experienced outdoorsman, his advocacy for Coal Creek came out of an interest and appreciation for the complexity of life that lives in our urban area. He believes in Coal Creek’s tangibility as a way to offset the abstract and overwhelming nature of our climate problems. He is a certified crew leader with Wildland Restoration Volunteers and a restoration master volunteer with Butterfly Pavilion. Prior to Friends of Coal Creek, Lyons was executive editor of Backpacker magazine in Boulder, where he won numerous writing and editing awards. Lyons’s favorite place on Coal Creek is the area near Flagg Park in Lafayette.
Board of Directors
Amy Droitcour, chair
Amy and her family live in a house with a view of Coal Creek, and she walks along the Coal Creek Trail daily. Her passion for planting well-chosen native flora to preserve ecosystems and biodiversity brought her to Friends of Coal Creek, where she started volunteering in spring of 2022 and joined the Board of Directors in 2023. In her professional life, she uses her doctorate in engineering to develop sensors at startup companies in the medical device and energy industries and is an experienced grant writer. She has learned a lot about working with groups of kids in 5 years as a Girl Scout leader. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time outdoors skiing, gardening, camping, and hiking. Amy’s favorite memory along Coal Creek is the time when she stopped while biking her kids to school to look at a great blue heron, which proceeded to catch a mouse and eat it for breakfast only a few feet away!
Airy Peralta
Airy is a Ph.D. student at CU Boulder’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department. Her research interests are broad but mainly focused on the effect of natural and anthropogenic factors on endangered or at-risk species populations. Currently, she is studying the microclimates in which American pika live, how they decouple from regional climates, whether they will persist as human-aided climate change advances, and how the changes, if any, will affect Colorado’s American pika populations. She lives in Lafayette near Coal Creek and serves on her HOA board. Airy dedicates some of her free time to gardening with native plants to improve sustainability at her HOA. She enjoys camping, hiking, and, more recently, snowboarding.
Art Reisman, secretary
Art Reisman founded the Tech optimization company Apconnections in 2004, famous for their Internet optimization appliance the Netequalizer. He lives in Boulder County with his wife of 17 years. He has three grown children and two grand children. In his spare time Art enjoys, birding, gardening with his wife and wearing brightly colored shoes.
Artists-in-Residence
Steph George, artist-in-residence
Steph George is a local Colorado artist who finds inspiration in observation; cultivating a curiosity to capture explored worlds while working with sustainable materials to build accessible fine art collections. A Bachelors in Fine Art from the University of Colorado with an art historical emphasis sparked a passion for conservation and appreciation of our landscapes. After living in Lafayette for over a decade and falling in love with the South Public Road Trailhead, expressing the importance surrounding urban waterways developed from Coal Creek’s beauty and ability to connect communities. Instagram: @stephgeorgeart
Jeff Goldberg, photographer-in-residence
Jeff Goldberg is Friends of Coal Creek’s first photographer-in-residence. He lives in Boulder and has been doing nature, portrait, and action photography for 25 years. He has seen an anaconda up close, watched a jaguar feed, and been within 25 feet of a mountain lion (though he didn’t see it). Jeff’s photography takes him all over the world. View his portfolio.
Erin Robertson, writer-in-residence
Erin Robertson has lived in Boulder County for 29 years, and is the founder of BoCo Wild Writers where she teaches outdoor nature writing classes. Her poetry has been published in the North American Review, Cold Mountain Review, Poet Lore, Deep Wild, and elsewhere, and has been performed by Ars Nova Singers and The Crossing choir. Past honors include being a guest artist hosted by the U.S. Consulate in Kazakhstan, Voices of the Wilderness Artist in Residence at Koyukuk National Wildlife Refuge in Galena, Alaska, Boulder County Artist in Residence at Caribou Ranch, and awards in the Michael Adams Poetry Prize and Columbine Poets Members' Contest. Erin earned her Master of Science in Museum and Field Studies from CU studying botany and environmental interpretation, and worked as a conservation biologist advocating for endangered species in the Rocky Mountain West for 9 years. Her remarkable husband, two sons, parakeet, and pup teach her about wonder every day. Website: erinrobertson.org
Scientific Advisor
Lauren Magliozzi
Lauren Magliozzi is a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder, pursuing her doctorate in Environmental Engineering through a joint program with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Her research has focused on studying the impacts of the Marshall Fire on Coal Creek. Lauren greatly enjoys mentoring and leading field teams of undergraduate researchers as they collect data together along the creek. Outside of academics, Lauren enjoys cycling Colorado's beautiful trails, tending to her garden and little flock of chickens, and generally reveling in the outdoors whenever she can. Lauren's favorite part of Coal Creek is in the recovering burned area by the Mayhoffer-Singletree trailhead in Superior. About Lauren.