Since starting this summer as executive director of the El Paso County Parks Department, Janna Tidwell has kept a pair of hiking boots in her car. 

“When I’ve had some down time in between meetings, I’ve just gotten out and gone and looked around,” she said. 

All around to beloved places the county oversees: from the wetlands and plains of Fountain to the south; to the hills running north of Palmer Lake and west of Manitou Springs; to the pines of Black Forest and colorful rock formations of Paint Mines Interpretive Park far east.

“The natural resources in each of these areas are extremely different,” Tidwell said. “And also, the demographics of who lives around them and their needs are also very different. So something I feel that’s very important is to be mindful of that and engage those communities.” 

It’s something she’s been doing since her hiring was announced in June. At the time, staff was gearing up for the county fair ー something else Tidwell’s department oversees, along with the El Paso County Extension and 4-H program, which the new director is passionate about, having grown up on a New Mexico farm. 

Her appointment amid the bustle of the county fair “afforded me this great opportunity to understand all the abilities of our staff and how well they work together,” Tidwell said. 

As they must, local outdoor advocates have long observed, while working for a department stretched financially as much as geographically.

County commissioners have ordered a “comprehensive asset inventory and condition assessment” ー a computerized view of the Parks Department’s trails, nature centers, playgrounds, sports fields, courts and other infrastructure. Tidwell led a similar assessment as parks director in Addison, Texas, where she spent the last nine years.  

The idea is “to make data-informed decisions,” she said. “It’s going to help us facilitate those decisions and how we take care of what we have first. And then how do we start to add new things into our system and plan for the stewardship of those assets?”

Preserving open space in a growing county “is very important,” she recognized. “I think that’s something I saw, living in the (Dallas-Fort Worth) area, how growth can really start to erode your natural resources.” 

Her last post in Addison was “extremely different than El Paso County,” she said. “It’s almost dead center in the DFW metro. It’s very urban, very dense, very built out.” 

She described herself as “missing that natural resources component” she had worked in as a landscape architect. With her two sons in college “and realizing I could live anywhere at this point, it seemed like that was the obvious step ー to move to a place where I could take my career and expand in that (natural) area,” she said. 

It was unspoiled nature that inspired her career. Back in New Mexico, the family farm was on the edge of a plateau “where you could get down and get really immersed in the natural environment,” Tidwell recalled. “That’s where you normally would find me as a kid.” 

She’d later be found at Texas Tech University, where she earned a master’s degree in landscape architecture. She was drawn to the idea of “creating places of community,” she explained ー places where people with differences could connect with each other and nature. 

As a consultant, she spent about 20 years designing such places. “They kind of become your children,” she said of those projects ー only to be left with a land manager. “I started looking at, What can I do that would have more of a long-term investment?”

With El Paso County, she’s learning about no shortage of legacy projects. 

One: advancing the Paint Mines’ 2024 master plan that calls for geology-protecting barriers, new parking, signage and more. Another: expanding Ute Pass Regional Trail, with a new segment out of Cascade announced earlier this year. And another: improving accessibility at Rainbow Falls in Manitou Springs, which has been reached by paid, privately operated shuttles while local officials have worried about parking. 

Around Black Forest, worries have also surrounded the proposed Fox Run Nature Center. The multimillion-dollar project was put on hold last year. 

“Was the timing appropriate? And have we done our due diligence in hearing from the community?” Tidwell asked. 

She expected more conversations to be had. She counted “improving our communication” in general as “a big opportunity.” 

“Because I think that we have a lot of great resources that not all of our residents realize are here,” she said. 

She was reminded of a recent visit to Fountain Creek Nature Center, where she overheard a group of moms with their kids. “We had no idea this was here,” Tidwell heard one say. 

They all sounded excited to return. “That just warmed my heart,” Tidwell said.