White River National Forest

White River National Forest is a National Forest in northwest Colorado. It is named after the White River that passes through it. It also contains the Flat Tops Wilderness Area, largely considered the birthplace of the U.S. Wilderness Area system.

The following ski areas are located inside the forest:

  • Arapahoe Basin
  • Aspen Mountain
  • Aspen Highlands
  • Beaver Creek
  • Breckenridge
  • Buttermilk
  • Copper Mountain
  • Keystone
  • Snowmass
  • Sunlight
  • Vail

The Maroon Bells, a famous collection of Paleozoic sandstone and mudstone peaks near Aspen.

The forest contains 2,285,970 acres (3,571.8 sq mi, or 9,250.99 km²). In descending order of land area it is located in parts of:

  • Eagle
  • Pitkin
  • Garfield
  • Summit
  • Rio Blanco
  • Mesa
  • Gunnison
  • Routt
  • Moffat counties.

The forest is managed from Forest Service offices in Glenwood Springs. There are local ranger district offices in Aspen, Carbondale, Eagle, Meeker, Minturn, Rifle, and Silverthorne.

Read more about White River National Forest:  Wilderness Areas

Famous quotes containing the words white, river, national and/or forest:

    “Knowing that you shall feel,
    about the frame,
    no trembling of the string
    but heat, more passionate
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    and fiery tempered steel.”
    —Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

    “Other roads do some violence to Nature, and bring the traveler to stare at her, but the river steals into the scenery it traverses without intrusion, silently creating and adorning it, and is as free to come and go as the zephyr.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Success and failure in our own national economy will hang upon the degree to which we are able to work with races and nations whose social order and whose behavior and attitudes are strange to us.”
    —Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)

    “The moose will, perhaps, one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns ... to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this!”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)