I’m Bart, your nature guide to the Rockies.

I was born and raised among the wetlands and beech forests of Belgium, where I grew up with Eurasian Jays, kingfishers, fly agarics, and black alders. After moving to Colorado and the Rocky Mountains, that childhood fascination with the natural world grew into something much deeper. To paraphrase John Denver, I came home to a place I’d never been before.

For more than two decades, I’ve explored the Rockies as a birder, naturalist, photographer, hiker, and guide. I’m a Certified Interpretive Guide through the National Association for Interpretation, a Colorado State University Native Plant Master Instructor, and a certified forest bathing guide. I’ve led bird and nature walks, developed natural-history curriculum for adults and children, and spent countless hours in the field studying the birds, mammals, plants, fungi, landscapes, and ecology of the American West.

My travels have taken me throughout the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Canada, but Colorado remains home. I’m especially drawn to the places where ecosystems meet and change—from the foothills and montane forests to subalpine meadows and alpine tundra—and to understanding how the lives within them fit together.

I believe a great nature experience is about more than finding a particular bird or checking a species off a list. It’s about slowing down, noticing more, and understanding what you’re seeing: why a bird is here, why a plant grows on this slope but not the next one, what an animal’s behavior tells us, and how all of those pieces belong to a larger landscape.

That curiosity is what I bring to every Alderman Guides outing. Whether we’re looking for a Colorado specialty bird, watching elk move through a mountain valley, identifying wildflowers, or simply stopping to listen to a forest, my goal is to help you leave with a richer understanding of the Rockies—and perhaps a few more questions than you arrived with.