Growing up in Arvada and embarking on family camping trips, Tammy Angel would always have a sketchbook on hand.

“My thing was to always draw pictures,” she said. “Look around and catch fish and draw pictures.”

Now Angel is helping to craft the future of this state’s wilds and also those of Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota.

She is the U.S. Forest Service’s new acting forester of the Rocky Mountain region, encompassing 22 million acres of national forests and grasslands.

The third-generation Colorado native and 1989 graduate of Colorado School of Mines has spent the past three years as a deputy forester in the region, tasked with managing budgets, grants and multiple uses of lands from recreation to extraction. She previously worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife and National Park services.

Angel’s “acting” title, putting her in charge of more than 2,000 employees, could last anywhere from a couple of months to many more, she said.

“It’s an opportunity,” she said. “It’s being able to demonstrate leadership at a different level. … Being able to coordinate with the Washington office and making sure that we are doing what we need to be doing in this region.”

Wildfire mitigation tops priorities, she said, recognizing the trend long warned by scientists and grimly represented in 2020: longer seasons brought on by extended drought and bigger, more devastating blazes due to several factors, including mismanaged forests and an expanding wildland-urban interface.

Beetle infestation resulting in more vulnerable timber is another emerging issue, Angel noted, “and the rising costs of much-needed landscape and vegetation treatment.”

The Forest Service is focused on combining money and staff with adjacent land-owning agencies and working collaboratively on “large-scale restoration projects,” Angel said. “Not just smaller areas that have been typically done in the past.”

Another priority, she said, is “striving for balance” between recreation and conservation in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. During the unprecedented boom on public lands, managers enacted measures such as permits and fees and have hinted at more on the way, predicting the period inspired a permanent, broader base of outdoor enthusiasts.

Addressing this and fire is about “really trying to navigate towards a new normal in our region,” Angel said.

She mentioned the Great American Outdoors Act as posing another objective. While the law creating historic funds still wades through bureaucratic waters, the Forest Service has listed more than 100 maintenance and development jobs slated for Colorado lands.

“We’re trying to make sure we have appropriate staffing to enact those projects,” Angel said. “It’s still, I’m gonna say, a work in progress.”