BRIGHTON —All the people taking root in Brighton has caused drastic expansion throughout the city. , home and retail over the city’s edges, and now its parks and to keep up.
Barr Lake State Park will break ground this fall on a $1.5 million renovation and building addition that will more than double the size of its 33-year-old nature center after several years of planning and progressively mounting need.
“The increase in visitation that we’ve seen is because of the population increase around Barr Lake — Adams County, Brighton, Commerce City, Hudson and Lochbuie are all growing,” said Michelle Seubert, manager of Barr Lake State Park. “And because of that, Barr Lake continues to be discovered. This expansion will give us much-needed space for a classroom where we can teach the kids and give them that initial spark before we take them out into the park.”
In 1998, park officials tallied 75,280 annual visitors to Barr Lake. Last year, there were 115,440. The average annual increase in the last 15 or so years has been steady, between 5 percent and 8 percent.
The nature center was built in 1982. It is a 2,651-square-foot wooden building that houses the park’s information desk, its souvenir store, employee meeting space and the discovery room — a makeshift museum space with live and stuffed animals in every corner, which is currently used as a program day classroom.
The bathrooms were built in 1977 and are in a separate building next to the center.
The expansion will add almost 3,200 square feet of space for a new education center, a dedicated volunteer room and a brand new, single entrance to the building. It will also bring the bathrooms inside, add a partial wraparound sundeck and spruce up the existing interior.
The state park has received $615,000 from Great Outdoors Colorado and state lottery money, and it was just awarded an $880,000 Adams County Open Space grant this year for the project, which is slated to break ground in September and be finished next spring.
Seubert said she does not expect the year-round education programming at the park to be affected by construction at all, and the nature center will remain open the entire time.
“The nature center is open every day of the year, seven days a week and none of that will change,” Seubert said. “The new education center is going to give us the opportunity to hold our classes and workshops in a dedicated space so that other (park patrons) can come in the discovery room. And last year we had over 12,000 volunteer hours, so that added space for them is going to be huge.”
The discovery room is actually more than the temporary education room right now, said Larry Zanetell, a Great Outdoors Colorado seasonal employee who has been working at the park and leading education programs there for about 11 years.
“Right now we can’t use the nature center’s discovery room when there are (employee) meetings going on because that’s shared space,” Zanetell said. “We still want most of our (exhibits and nature stations) outside anyway, but everyone will have better access to the displays inside with the addition of this space.”
On May 29, Zanetell took a group of 17 fourth-grade students from Vista Peak P-8 Exploratory in Aurora on a field trip around the nature center and a part of lake, introducing them to the Barr Lake ecosystem and peppering their brains with interesting tidbits about trees, weeds, raptors and microbial critters.
“My daughter and I came to Barr Lake for the first time a few weeks ago during one of their nature night programs, and then she started doing the free archery classes that they offer here after that,” said Sharyl Bragg, 34, an Aurora resident and chaperoning parent on the field trip. “We’re new here, but I think an expansion of their education center is absolutely wonderful and it’s definitely something that my family and I would check out.”
Megan Mitchell: 303-954-2650, mmitchell@denverpost.com or twitter.com/Mmitchelldp
Barr lake state park:
Where: 13401 Picadilly Road, Brighton
When: Park Hours: 5 a.m to 10 p.m; Nature Center Hours: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays, and weekends 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Info: (303) 659-6005 or visit
