A ray of mid-May Gothic sun cut through a light snow shower in 2025 as I visited RMBL research scientist Ian Breckheimer, PhD, and Western Colorado University Paul M. Rady School of Computer Science and Engineering students just north of the Visitor Center. The Rady team had partnered with RMBL since 2024 to identify and create technologies that fit the needs of RMBL scientists.

Rady students were setting up the first prototype drone launchpad to help RMBL scientists understand what tree leaves experience in the forest canopy, in order to understand the role of evapotranspiration in forecasting streamflow. Now, over a year later, on a late June day in a much-drier Gothic, Breckheimer imagines partnerships extending from the Rady School to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories to companies like Airborne Snow Observatories. Such partnerships are vital to forecasting snowpack, wildfires, wildflowers, and streamflow, empowering decision-makers (also key partners) with sharper foresight for a more resilient West and world.

“The strength of RMBL over the past century has been in bringing researchers together across disciplines to answer major scientific questions,” Breckheimer says. ”Now, we hope to be more deliberate in finding new collaborations to enhance the social impact of our science.”

In the past year, RMBL has embarked on a global journey to grow partnerships that enhance RMBL field science with complementary scientific disciplines and emerging technologies, extend public awareness and impact of RMBL science, and bring diverse ways of knowing to how RMBL fulfills its mission of sustaining “our quality of life by accelerating discoveries about the ecosystems that replenish the world’s air, water, and food supply,” far beyond our 2028 centennial.

Enhancing Field Science

The new RMBL 365 has been key to such partnerships. In March, RMBL hosted scientists and leaders partnering with us on a million-dollar NASA grant to reflect and plan on how to use remote sensing to improve drought responses in the Gunnison Basin.

Reflecting Breckheimer’s philosophy of welcoming new community partners into interactive RMBL research, his team has launched a number of ways to interact with our scientific findings:  a Data Hub, complete with a Wildflower Bloom Forecast and a RMBL Knowledge Commons.

A June visit from faculty and students in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Aerospace Engineering Sciences Program highlighted the growing potential to combine satellite technologies, remote sensing, and RMBL’s unparalleled long-term ecological datasets. The collaboration could create powerful new tools for tracking and predicting environmental change. RMBL Executive Director Dr. Jeni Blacklock commented, “The most exciting scientific breakthroughs happen when people with different backgrounds come together around a shared purpose. By connecting engineers, ecologists, hydrologists, data scientists, and community partners, we can better understand the Earth as a living, interconnected system and accelerate scientific discovery through collaboration.”

Extending Public Awareness

RMBL 365 has also allowed us to open doors to the local community more than ever. Our monthly “RMBL Reads” partnership with Townie Books and the RMBL Visitor Center has featured books that inspire RMBL staff members and scientists. Since January, we have discussed books on Jane Goodall, the craft of wood heat, the personhood of rivers, the existence or nonexistence of fish as a distinct group, and the nature of fear. 

RMBL Reads will continue to invite the community in partnership with Townie Books each month, while our “Après Science” lectures will continue to invite the public to wrestle with the regional implications of RMBL findings, such as two packed-house presentations from Dr. David Inouye and Breckheimer this past winter — fulfilling the RMBL 365 promise of year-round scientific discussion.

Beyond Gothic research and 365 collaborations, our partnerships have reached far beyond the valley. This past March, Communications Manager Suzanne Ennis and I joined colleagues from the Telluride Institute at the Seventh Global Meeting of the United Nations Mountain Partnership in Andorra. Over fifty global nations shared mountain-based research from all continents, discussed best practices in translating science into resilience for mountain communities, and signed the “Andorra Declaration” calling for global mountain communities to cooperate in meeting UN Sustainable Development Goals and to offer wisdom on ecological health, cultural heritage, and economic prosperity for all communities downstream. 

At the UN meeting, we connected with scientists, government leaders, and environmental advocates working at the source of major watersheds — from Kenya to Chile to France to Tajikistan. Since then, Dr. Pato Moreno (Chilean-based UNESCO Chair in Mountain Heritage and the Biosphere) requested a RMBL visit to discuss partnerships and to conduct research (welcoming all RMBL researchers to her field station in Chile). In May, RMBL officially joined the UN Mountain Partnership.

According to a UN document entitled Why Mountains Matter, “mountains cover about 27% of the earth’s land surface and host 25 of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots. Mountains supply freshwater to an estimated half of humanity.” Sixty percent of all water consumed by humans — in the food-energy-water nexus — starts in mountains. 

Telluride Institute leader Tucker Symkowicz recalled a particularly compelling comment at the UN meeting from Dr. Hugo Mantilla-Meluk, Colombian director of the Center for Highland Studies at the University of Quindio, who “reminded us that while mountains have frequently been used as boundaries, they are actually places of connection that require and benefit from collaboration, sharing, and respect.” RMBL has also begun planning with Telluride Institute a series of conversations among mountain-focused nonprofits in the region — at RMBL 365 — about the relationship between science and community decision-making on the Western Slope. 

RMBL staff have also joined the Protect Our Winters Science Alliance. This June, I attended the POW Leadership Summit in Glacier National Park, Montana. At the summit, I presented on the power of story to elevate data, including RMBL’s snow-based findings from the record-dry winter of 2026–27. Whether sharing a raft, a panel, or a meal with other POW members, I enjoyed building RMBL-POW connections with snow scientists, snow-based nonprofits, and major foundations and companies dedicated to addressing climate disruptions to persistent snowpack. They had all heard of RMBL and were very enthusiastic about collaborating with RMBL. Since then, POW and RMBL are exploring a major gathering of the POW Science Alliance Members at RMBL 365 to reflect on how better to empower POW advocates with accurate and compelling (and, when the evidence calls for it, quite complicated) data.

Convening Diverse Ways of Knowing

Partnerships translate RMBL science from rigorous peer-reviewed research into pragmatic public conversations about a more livable planet. Partnerships expand the collaborations and reach necessary for drawing new kinds of intellectual, social, and financial capital. Partnerships extend the “RMBL atmosphere” of Gothic and RMBL 365 beyond summer, filling our spaces with dynamic discourse and generating revenue for basic science at RMBL. Partnerships inspire new questions — or dynamic ways to explore continuing questions — here in Gothic. Finally, as we have seen over the years in endeavors such as Dr. Paul CaraDonna and Mark Dorf’s Art/Science Exchange, partnerships open space for diverse ways of knowing to come together at RMBL (don’t miss their event in the Majestic Theatre, July 10 at 8 p.m.).

In the past year, Western Colorado University disciplines encompassing biology, business, philosophy, music, environment & sustainability, history, and film have collaborated with RMBL on translating scientific research into higher education experiences. In May, eight Western professors from numerous disciplines stayed at 365 for a long weekend dedicated to helping busy university teachers meet their research, writing, and creative deadlines. Western Professor Kimberly shared that “RMBL 365 provided everything we hoped it would: a quiet, productive, welcoming, and deeply restorative space. Faculty from across disciplines made real progress on their work while also building community in a setting that could not have been more ideal.”

In early June, eight RMBL staff and scientists visited the Ute Mountain Ute Bear Dance in Towaoc, Colorado. Over the past two summers, Ute elders such as Regina Lopez Whiteskunk have visited RMBL to help us think about the enhanced inclusivity and intellectual curiosity that would come from welcoming Ute neighbors and Ute ways of knowing into RMBL more explicitly. In return, RMBL scientists visited the Bear Dance during a time in which climate change is disrupting the sacred plants traditionally needed for a successful ceremony. 

In early August, Ute Mountain Elders will come back to RMBL to share plant knowledge and to consider how to navigate the spiritual as well as the resource disturbances of the climate crisis. This is not just a partnership of plant knowledge and climate crisis understanding; this is a partnership of how humans, across cultures, know climate disturbance and how to address it.

Extending our conversations with Indigenous and Western science intersections, Peruvian Indigenous art-science advocate Patsy Craig is co-launching a new field station in Peru with local tribes, has already visited Gothic for advice, and plans to volunteer for RMBL the entire month of August 2026 to learn more (she’ll live in RMBL 365).

Getting Creative

On July 1, RMBL, Dr. Dan Blumstein’s marmot laboratory, and Irwin Brewing Co. will launch a new “Marmot Tears IPA,” raising awareness about RMBL research. Although summer 2026 research is not complete, the marmot population has dropped from over 150 to under 75 in and around Gothic since summer 2025. This is due to low snowpack taking away the insulating blanket of winter that keeps marmots warm in their burrows and the March melt causing vulnerability to predators due to early emergence. Yet on July 1, RMBL will lead a toast in Crested Butte’s Public House — a toast to the parts and processes of the natural world that sustains us, to the species with which we evolved, to the long-term research necessary for living well with fellow species and systems, and to the evolving and creative partnerships necessary to advancing RMBL’s locally focused and globally relevant ecology of place.

As RMBL board president Dr. Berry Brosi concluded, “Science doesn’t advance in isolation, and neither does RMBL. From large-scale collaborations with NASA to statewide initiatives with the Rady School and CU Boulder, all the way down to our tight local partnerships with Irwin Brewing and Townie Books, every relationship we build extends the reach and impact of the work happening in and around Gothic. Partnerships are how a small field station in the Rockies helps answer big questions — and how the discoveries we make here find their way back into the communities and conversations that need them most.” 

— John Hausdoerffer, PhD
RMBL Director of Story and Advancement

Top: Dr. Ian Breckheimer (foreground) and Western Colorado University Paul Rady School of Engineering student Jayden Omi