NEDERLAND — The stillness that draws many people out into the tree-lined hideaways of nature is also what repels others from stepping foot into the forested unknown.

Where some find calm, others confront fear.

A Nederland nature center that’s nearly 20 years old is creating a new space — part gateway to the outdoors, part refuge from Denver’s dizzying pace — in the hope of giving people a place to forge a relationship with nature.

And “rewild” themselves.

“When you tune into the sound of insects and the wind rushing through the leaves of the trees, it’s much more calming than honking horns and vibrating phones,” said Justin Gold, founder of Boulder-based company Justin’s Nut Butter and a major donor behind the new Wild Bear Nature Center. “And so I just think that just coming up here is almost just a portal that transports your body and mind into a more peaceful realm.”

The new center, which broke ground in May 2023 and will likely open by fall next year, will sit on 5 acres of Wild Bear-owned land on the edge of almost 3,000 acres of land encompassing both Mud Lake open space and Caribou Ranch open space. The peaks of the Continental Divide trace the horizon to the west, stretches of the mountains visible beyond a thicket of ponderosas, lodgepoles and aspens. The building under construction will offer more than a landing spot for visitors acquainting themselves with nature; it will also remind them of the importance of protecting the environment while exploring it, its developers hope. That’s why they have designed the building to produce more energy than it consumes, with 50 kilowatts of solar panels on the roof as well as south facing windows that will also create passive solar energy.

“Mostly, we’re giving back to nature,” said Jill Dreves, founder and chief vision officer of Wild Bear Nature Center. “We’re not taking from nature.”

The new center will also give back to the community, growing the nonprofit’s nature programming for students and adults and becoming home to a forest preschool, where kids will learn by trekking through the outdoors.

Dreves, a former elementary school teacher, has been the steady hand nudging the new nature center along since 2000, when voters approved construction of the center at its new site. Five years before that, she formed the nonprofit as a way to help kids and community members branch out of their day-to-day surroundings and ease their way into nature.

Frustrated by the rules and regulations of teaching in a public school — “restricted to a spelling test” rather than free to roam outside — Dreves wanted to give students a fragment of her own childhood. She grew up in the mountains of northern Colorado, where she remembers her days unfolding outside, riding her Appaloosa-Welsh pony, Blue Bonnet, for nine hours and sleeping in the barn with her at night. Her parents rarely knew where she and her sister were. Oftentimes, they snuck deep into the forest where they learned about insects and plants from an entomologist they met there.

“I really wanted to create a wild experience for kids where we would just go out in the wild and not be afraid and play in the river and pick up rocks,” said Dreves, who began her nature-based programming with eight students.

The Wild Bear students studied beedles they found under rocks. They painted with mud. They observed birds. All the while “noticing the patterns and the mystery in nature,” she said.

Those moments of slowing down while surrounded by nature have become all the more necessary now, Dreves said, as electronics confine people’s worlds to screens and as widespread fears of nature collide with a groundswell of isolation coming out of the pandemic.

Wild Bear Nature Center, she said, offers “an entry-level experience for people that just haven’t been in nature much.”

The organization, which has operated out of a downtown Nederland shopping center for the past 14 years, brings about 50 kids to the outdoors each day in the summer. The nonprofit also has school-year programs geared toward students in homeschooling and runs “a snow school” through which classes can learn about snow pack and winter ecology.

Additionally, Wild Bear regularly hosts nature events for families. Last year, about 25,000 visitors stopped by the current nature center to both check out exhibits and wander down area trails, Dreves said.

Jessica and David McElvain have “rewilded” their entire family through Wild Bear, including by sending their two young sons to summer camp and enrichment programs which have acclimated them to the wilderness and helped them better understand animal behavior.

The parents, who recently moved their family to Granby after living in Nederland for seven years, both turn to nature to exhale and clear their “mental clutter” — something they hope to pass onto their boys.

They’ve also noticed how quickly their sons absorb lessons out under the trees.

“It’s hard for kids to sit in a classroom and learn,” Jessica said. “There’s so many different neurological patterns and learning types, and it really seems like it helps the kids who need to sort of be a little bit busy in the background.”

Once the site of a dump, the nature center is now a lesson in preservation

The land that will house Wild Bear’s new nature center is stripped down to the basics, with an expanse of gravel leading to the first signs of the building, including towering concrete walls.

While it’s still mostly a blank canvas with the bulk of construction still ahead, the area is a significant improvement from four years ago, when mining trash, kitchen trash, shoes and even cars, washers, dryers, tires and refrigerators littered the landscape.

Dreves remembers 260 acres of land being “scarred” by people coming out to regularly dump their garbage in dispersed mining pits that eventually overflowed with trash.

Wild Bear Nature Center partnered with the town of Nederland and Boulder County to clean and restore the area, deploying volunteers across the land four weekends in July 2020 to pick up trash and retrieve abandoned vehicles and appliances. They filled almost eight roll off dumpsters with more than 30 tons of garbage, not including those vehicles and appliances, according to Dreves.

The final pieces of the nature center are beginning to fall into place. It’s taken more than two decades of fundraising, planning the building and its eco-friendly elements and holding onto a vision to nurture people back into nature.

The nonprofit has raised close to $8 million for the $13 million project and plotted out every inch of the building to help people better connect with nature or preserve it. The building will generate extra energy, which will be sent back to the grid for general consumption. During colder months, it will be warmed mostly  by solar-heated water traveling through hydronic tubes all through the insulated floor along with passive solar energy generated by south facing windows.

“This nature center is a model for how humans can build ecologically sound buildings in mountain communities into the future,” said Gold, the major donor to the project and its capital campaign chair.

The center will face east to greet the sunrise each morning and will house classrooms, a workspace and kitchen, an observation deck where visitors can view wildlife and a large community gathering space. An outdoor amphitheater will flank the building while a half-mile trail will cut through a few acres behind the center with small exhibits dotting the path for people to stop and learn about how humans can peacefully coexist with nature.

As people rekindle their relationship with the outdoors while exploring Colorado’s natural alcoves, Dreves hopes they also tame their trepidation of stepping deep into the unknown.

“The more you know,” she said, “the less you fear and the more you love and protect the Earth.”