About the Project

The North Fork Scrapbook Project seeks

to protect the unique qualities of our community,

its public lands and other agricultural, cultural and natural resources,

through sharing the stories that are lived here.

The original North Fork scrapbook is a real scrapbook in a large three-ring binder.  It was compiled as a ‘Visual Comment’ to the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) when that agency first proposed leasing public lands in Colorado’s North Fork Valley for oil and gas drilling and fracking.

This digital scrapbook, like its more traditional parent, sets out to tell the story of the North Fork’s public lands through the people and communities that interact with them daily.

The North Fork today includes Colorado’s largest concentration of organic farms and orchards, ranches, dairies, and wineries; and is the state’s only rural federally-recognized winegrowing region.

The affected public lands that the BLM has tried to lease for oil and gas drilling, fracking and development, surround and lie in the middle of it all.  These lands, already heavily utilized by the public, are critical to the well-being of present-day North Fork communities.

The North Fork Scrapbook Project serves as:

• A “living archive” of the images, stories and events that illustrate a community which finds meaning in the landscape.  It seeks to capture the spirit of the unique composition of lands in the North Fork–the interwoven fabric of public and private, BLM and homestead, farm and uplands, fields and ‘dobes–and the ingrained value of a shared landscape to the people and place.  It is a dynamic history that supports resource protection for our future.

The North Fork Scrapbook Project is a community-based effort, made possible with support from the Citizens for a Healthy Community.