Earth Day celebration takes over Steamboat Resort base area Saturday
For Steamboat Pilot & Today

Jill Bergman/Courtesy photo
While Earth Day isn’t known for bombastic celebrations, there will be plenty of opportunities this weekend to get out of the house and celebrate Mother Earth.
From 10 a.m. to 1 p.m on Saturday, April 8, Yampa Valley Sustainability Council will host a celebration coinciding with the 53rd year of Earth Day, which is recognized annually on April 22. Sustainability leaders, nonprofits, businesses and municipalities will convene to share strategies for climate action at the base of Steamboat Resort.
“With sort of the doom and gloom that comes with climate change, I think it’s nice to share with people that we are doing a lot of things in our community to help move things forward,” said Kate Brocato, the communications director of the sustainability council “And they can get involved themselves, which I think is really empowering.”
Like last year, local artist Jill Bergman painted an Earth Day piece to mark the celebration, and posters of her painting can be bought at the event for $30, of which the proceeds will go toward the Yampa Valley Community Foundation’s Environment Endowment Fund. Stickers of the image will also be sold for $5.
Her last painting was a tribute to flora and fauna of the Yampa Valley, but this year’s piece, titled “Earth Day 2023,” has a much wider perspective that encompasses the entire globe.
“It’s good to remember that our home is connected to every other place on this big planet,” Bergman said. “What we do here makes a difference in so many ways. Sometimes we need to zoom out and see the whole picture.”
Bergman said she loves looking at satellite images and photos of earth taken by astronauts, and chose to fill in the continents with vegetation because spring is coming and she’s excited about the return of wildflowers and spring greens.
She created her painting using a linocut, first as black and white images that she later filled in with watercolor. While the posters are printed, she’s also selling hand-painted originals out of Pine Moon Fine Art, of which $100 from each sale will go toward the community foundation endowment fund.
Saturday’s Earth Day celebration is also a square on the Sustainability Bingo sheet created by Dusky Grouse Coffee, among others such as “plant an indoor herb garden,” or “line dry your clothes.”
Sustainability Bingo will go on for the entire month of April, and participants are encouraged to fill as many spaces as they can for a chance to win prizes. The flyers can be picked up from Dusky Mountain Coffee.
Then on Tuesday, April 11, the Rocky Mountain Sportswomen will host their first Conservation Trivia at Yampa Valley Brewing Company’s Hop House. The participation fee is donation based with an ideal amount of $20 that will go toward conservation awareness efforts and creating space for women of the outdoors.
The Rocky Mountain Sportswomen’s founder Elena Reynolds said she wants the proceeds to go toward funding larger trips and to grow the community of sportswomen in Routt County and across the country.
“It’s just nice to have some people to text and be like, ‘Hey, do you want to hit the river sometime this week?’ even if we don’t see each other very much throughout the year,” Reynolds said.
The categories for Tuesday’s trivia include Colorado-specific conservation questions, as well as questions about national conservation, public lands, wildlife and an audio round.
The event will run from 7 to 9 p.m. and donations can be made with cash at the door or online through the organization’s donation page on their website, RockyMountainSportsWomen.com/donate.

Support Local Journalism

Support Local Journalism
Readers around Steamboat and Routt County make the Steamboat Pilot & Today’s work possible. Your financial contribution supports our efforts to deliver quality, locally relevant journalism.
Now more than ever, your support is critical to help us keep our community informed about the evolving coronavirus pandemic and the impact it is having locally. Every contribution, however large or small, will make a difference.
Each donation will be used exclusively for the development and creation of increased news coverage.