2025 Program Year in Review
Silver City Watershed Keepers continues to protect waters and educate youth
2025 has been a successful year for the Silver City Watershed Keepers program. Through education, advocacy, community engagement, and environmental monitoring, we have continued our mission of protecting the Silver City watershed. This year, we provided environmental education in schools, camps, and community events, engaged citizen scientists in ecological monitoring, and organized volunteers at cleanup and restoration events. Through these efforts, in collaboration with community partners, we have engaged community members of all ages in better understanding and caring for the waterways and landscapes that sustain us.
In 2025, we delivered environmental programming to over 400 students in Silver City, the Mining District, and Cliff/Gila. Throughout the year, we also visited local schools and libraries to provide environmental education. With the Frontier Food Hub’s Journey Through the Food System program, we visited Hurley, San Lorenzo, Bayard, and Central elementary schools to teach students how water availability and quality impacts our local food system and how we can balance the water needs of agriculture, home use, and our environment. We also provided lessons at the Frontier Food Hub’s Rooted and Rising Camp to teach 6th-8th graders about food webs, including how humans, invasive species, and different agricultural practices can alter connections between species and environment. In April, we joined La Plata Middle School’s Earth Day celebration to teach students about native species in the Gila, their habitats and food sources, and the potential threats they face. We also worked with Youth Conservation Corps teams from Aldo Leopold Charter School to work on stream restoration and tree planting projects along San Vicente Creek and also discuss ecological monitoring techniques that students will employ in their capstone projects.
An educational program highlight was our 4th annual Nature Discovery Summer Camp. We were able to host two week-long, outdoor summer camps for 36 local 4th-6th graders. Campers spent 30 hours exploring the outdoors, from Big Ditch Park along San Vicente Creek and the Bayard Public Library’s outdoor garden space to the Mogollon Box Outdoor rec area and the Gila River Farm along the Gila River. Our lessons were led by an outstanding team of environmental educators, local experts, and guest scientists. Our camp counselors, local youth aged 17-22 also lead small groups and taught lessons, helping them grow their outdoor leadership skills. Campers discovered local biodiversity, learned about the connections between land, water, wildlife, and people, and were empowered to steward the environment they call home.
Our camp was all the more impactful given that the Trout Fire was ongoing during the camp. Although we had to alter some of our plans, such as cancelling our visit to the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site and Mimbres River, we were able to have meaningful conversations about air quality, the ecological impacts of wildfire, and post-fire flood risks. We would like to thank the Lineberry Foundation, University of New Mexico INSPIRES program, Martyn Pearson and Alex Olson Memorial Fund, and the City of Bayard for their generous support of our 2025 camps. And we are excited to share that we have secured an Outdoor Equity Fund grant from the New Mexico Economic Development Department’s Outdoor Recreation Division that will help fund our 2026 Nature Discovery Summer Camp!
This year, we also continued our ecological monitoring efforts and engaged our local community in citizen science projects. We conducted four quarterly water quality monitoring events along our urban waterways, Pinos Altos and San Vicente Creeks. We found that these waters complied with the state’s water quality standards, never exceeding dangerous levels of coliform bacteria. Despite the regional drought, these riparian areas harbored populations of native fish, insects, birds, and mammals. In April, we hosted Silver City’s first annual City Nature Challenge, engaging citizen scientists in in-person events and on-line species identification. We made hundreds of observations and had a lot of fun. You can read more about our CNC results here.
Not to be underestimated, we also engaged with the community on nature hikes and during community events. We hiked San Vicente Creek on World Water Day in March and during GRIP’s San Vicente Creek Restoration Celebration in October, as well as hiking Cherry Creek during Latino Conservation Week with Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy. With our Pick It Up – Toss No Más program, we coordinated 10 community cleanups and removed nearly 4 tons of litter from Silver City’s landscape. We joined with GRIP’s other programs to table during Continental Divide’s Trail Day/Earth Day event in Gough Park, Latino Conservation Week presentations at the Bayard Public Library, the Mimbres Harvest Festival at San Lorenzo Elementary, and the Tamal Fiesta at Fort Bayard. During these events, we were able to have conversations about air quality, point-sources of water pollution, the benefits of trees in our urban spaces, and education opportunities.
We look forward to continuing our work in 2026. We will be expanding our environmental education curriculum, collaborating with more local organizations, continuing our restoration work, monitoring local waterways, coordinating community cleanups, engaging in more community events, and as always, spreading the love for the waterways that have shaped Silver City’s history and will sustain our future.
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