Wild Bear Nature Center at crossroads
By Lucas High
BizWest / Prairie Mountain Media
Just months removed from a fire that destroyed its Nederland headquarters and just months away from opening a new facility that’s been years in the making, Wild Bear Nature Center is welcoming a new leader.
Trish Krajniak — an attorney, mom, Nederland resident and former Wild Bear board member — is the nature center’s new executive director, taking over leadership from WBNC founder Jill Dreves, who stepped away from day-to-day operations last year.
An Illinois native, Krajniak and her family moved from the Denver area to Nederland about a year and half ago. “We had been looking for years to move to the mountains,” said Krajniak, who grew up visiting her grandmother in Nederland, “because I wanted to start a forest school” for children.
“I am a lawyer by background, but ever since law school I was really dedicated to education law and policy,” she told BizWest. After working as an attorney for several charter school-advocacy groups, Krajniak became a legal and policy executive with HopSkipDrive, a startup company that provides students with transportation alternatives to traditional school buses, before launching her own consulting business.
Krajniak’s array of career experience “lend(s) itself really nicely to this next phase of Wild Bear,” she said. “We’re really sort of restarting in so many ways, building off of the incredible foundation that Jill Dreves laid over the last 30 years.”
The mission of Wild Bear Nature Center, founded in 1995 as Wild Bear Science School, is to inspire a lifelong connection to nature and community through a creative exploration of the outdoors.
Krajniak joined the Wild Bear board in the wake of an October 2025 blaze that leveled Wild Bear Nature Center’s facility in the Caribou Village shopping center.
“We lost all tangible property in the fire, and it’s been a painful process to rebuild from that,” she said. “… We lost precious art, we lost precious animals, we lost precious exhibits. And there’s still a lot of devastation from that.”
Rather than reestablish itself at the Caribou Village shopping center, which is still early in the post-fire rebuilding process, Wild Bear is operating out of temporary digs across the street in anticipation of moving this fall into its new, much larger home a few miles away at Mud Lake.
“The magnitude of how inspiring and beautiful this facility is hard to put into words,” Krajniak said. “This really was a community-led design, a community-led project. We found local architects; we found local builders. The whole thing was designed to mimic the history of Nederland. The grading of the roofs reflects the mountainscape; local mining operations inspired the aesthetic. We had local Native American tribes come out and bless the land, and they also gave feedback on how to orient certain components of the building in line with their traditions.”
Wild Bear’s permanent Mud Lake facility, currently under construction on five acres adjacent to Boulder County Open Space, features an 8,500-square-foot net-zero nature center and represents a roughly $16 million investment. It will serve as a year-round hub for environmental education.
“In addition to having live exhibits in there, we’ll have co-working space for folks who want to work out of this incredible facility and still be connected to nature,” Krajniak said. “We have two preschool classrooms for our nature-based preschool. We have a dedicated makerspace so we can bring some more art into the community. There’s an observation deck on the top floor so that folks can go out and see the Continental Divide. It’s a really stunning view.”
This article was first published by BizWest, an independent news organization, and is published under a license agreement. © 2026 BizWest Media LLC.