Keynote Speaker Kicks Off This Year's Lyceum Series

Date: January 21, 2008
Contact: Kyle Patterson, 970-586-1363

2008 Lyceum Series Explores Learning Lessons:
Management Decisions of the Past and Future

Saturday, January 26, 7:00 p.m. at the Beaver Meadows Visitor Center in Rocky Mountain National Park, Dr. Ellen Wohl presents Inheriting our Past:Rivers as Reflections of Landscape History

Kicking off this year’s lyceum series on Saturday, January 26, is Dr. Ellen Wohl, Department of Geosciences, Colorado State University. Rivers integrate landscapes. Rivers are influenced by a wide variety of factors, from precipitation carried between hemispheres to sediment released from a nearby construction site. Rivers also integrate the history of change within a drainage basin, from advances and retreats of glaciers, to 19th-century timber harvest and 20th-century flow regulation. Because of their central role in the landscape, rivers can be used to examine how historical attitudes and patterns of resource use shaped the world we live in today, how changes in our attitudes influence the way we use resources today, and how our actions will likely shape the world. Rocky Mountain National Park includes the headwaters of the Colorado and South Platte Rivers, two rivers of central importance in the western United States.  The park provides an appropriate setting in which to examine how rivers reflect landscape history.

Dr. Wohl received her BS in geology from Arizona State University in 1984 and her PhD in geology from the University of Arizona in 1988. She has been on the faculty at Colorado State University since 1989. Dr. Wohl’s research interests focus on the physical processes and forms of rivers, and particularly mountain streams and bedrock canyons. She has conducted field-based research on every continent but Antarctica, but much of her research focuses on the mountain streams of the Colorado Front Range. Dr. Wohl states “I am especially interested in how people interact with landscapes and influence rivers.”

The park’s 2008 Lyceum theme is “Learning Lessons: Management Decisions of the Past and Future.”  As Rocky Mountain National Park's centennial approaches, it is a good time to explore decisions made in the past, face the issues of today, and look forward to the future. How do real people make real decisions about real problems in the entire Rocky Mountain Region, as well as in Rocky Mountain National Park.

The Keynote Speaker is sponsored by the Estes Park League of Women Voters through their generous donation to Rocky Mountain National Park’s Lyceum series.

The Lyceum schedule runs from January 26 through May 17, 2008.  Financial support for the lyceum series is provided by the park’s nonprofit partner, the Rocky Mountain Nature Association. Programs are free and open to the public.

For more information about Rocky Mountain National Park please call [phone].