Pete Westover, Founder and Partner, Conservation Works, LLC
Leah Martin Photography
Pete Westover says his appreciation of, and passion for, outdoor spaces traces back to a family vacation trip to, among other places, Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, or Rocky, as it’s called, when he was 12.
The park, which spans the Continental Divide, is famous for its grand vistas, high alpine meadows, and dramatic walking trails, some of them at elevations of 10,000 feet or more. And, suffice to say, the park made quite an impression on the young middle-school student.
“There’s bighorn sheep and mountain goats and all kinds of great wildlife and flora,” he noted, adding that he’s been back several times since. “The road goes well over 11,000 feet, so you’re up there among the peaks.”
Jim Lumley learned to appreciate nature’s beauty at an early age.
His parents, the late Mabel and Al Lumley, planted extensive lilac bushes on the family’s Pelham property, which for decades has been a popular visiting site for lilac lovers, picnickers and people who simply enjoy the variety of color. The property’s name says it all: Lilacland.
Lumley, who’s now 75 and has run Lilacland for about 30 years, was so inspired by the colors and light that he took up landscape painting as an adult, first as a hobby and then very seriously.
When he was about 40, he sold his real estate company and went to study in Cape Cod with Henry Hensche, a noted impressionist painter who in turn had studied with one of the first American impressionists, Charles Hawthorne, in the early 1900s.
1,000 Reasons to Explore the Uinta Mountains
Neatly tucked under the notch in the Northeast corner of Utah sits the Uinta Mountain range. This 460,000-acre wilderness area boasts over 545 miles of hiking trails and over 1,000 natural lakes, with more than 500 which support 7 species of game fish (Arctic Grayling, Brook Trout, Cutthroat Trout, Golden Trout, Mountain Whitefish, Rainbow Trout, and Tiger Trout). There are over 400 miles of small rivers and streams that form several major drainage basins feeding water into Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado.
Geography
Most major mountain ranges in the United States run North and South. These include the Rocky, Appalachian, Alleghany, Big Horn, Sangre De Cristo, and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. This North-South alignment is typically a good reference in keeping your bearings when exploring and hiking off-trail. The Uinta Mountain range extends for 100 miles across Northeast Utah and is unusual as this is the highest mountain range in the con