Western alum named top game warden

Long before Ross McGee, who graduated from Western Colorado University in 2013, won the most prestigious honor in Colorado wildlife management, he was a kid who knew just what he wanted. For him, it was game warden or bust.

“I just had a love for hunting and fishing and wanted to pursue being a game warden,” he said. “I really didn’t have a plan B.”

Growing up in Grand Junction, Colorado, McGee hoped for a career that would keep him close to home, working with the wildlife he knew and loved. But those jobs are hard to come by. Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) employs a relatively constant number of game wardens, and only a limited number of positions open up on the Western Slope every year.

Several universities in the region offer degrees in wildlife or fisheries biology, which he would need to get his foot in the door. But, in such a competitive field, it would take more than just a degree to get where he wanted to go. He would need to find a university that had connections.

When he considered his options, Western had the right mix of a small college with small classes, a small town, and a landscape where a kid who loved wildlife and the outdoors could thrive. Western also has a record of creating pathways from college to career for students studying wildlife and conservation biology.

While he was a student, McGee worked closely with professors like Kevin Alexander and Pat Magee. Magee’s immersive teaching style takes students out of the classroom and puts them into the field with working biologists in the ecosystems they’re studying and managing.

“Western, being in Gunnison, is a wildlife-rich place. So it draws people who want to work with wildlife,” he said.

In 2016, CPW hired McGee to serve as the district wildlife manager for Area 6 in Meeker, Colorado, where he’s the game warden for nearly 1,000 square miles of public land and private ranches, from the sagebrush steppe to the high-elevation pine and spruce forests. It’s a job he waited his whole life for.

And the role suits him well. Just ten years into the job, his colleagues nominated him for the John D. Hart Wildlife Officer of the Year, which recognizes one exceptional game warden in all of Colorado each year. In their nomination letters, they wrote about a man who runs an education program in the Meeker schools to teach students about wildlife conservation, who works with landowners to find workable solutions to complex challenges, and one who was likely born 150 years too late.

“It’s about the resource, and it’s about the people who use the resource. It’s about treating people fairly,” McGee said. “We all get into wildlife management to work with animals. But mainly we’re working with people and trying to treat people fairly. It’s pretty simple.”

In granting McGee the coveted award this year, CPW stated, “Officer McGee distinguished himself through community engagement, innovative conservation efforts, and his commitment to addressing complex wildlife challenges. He has fostered private-public partnerships that opened more than 4,500 acres for public hunting and wildlife surveys, while also managing significant big game migration corridor challenges. Officer McGee’s leadership, expertise, and firm yet humble approach to law enforcement make him a deserving recipient of this prestigious award.”

After achieving his goal and finding success in the career he’d always hoped for, recognition for his service was just icing on the cake.

“When your peers nominate you for something like this and officers from around the state vote on it, it’s very humbling and it’s a lot to take in,” he said. “It’s easy to do good things when you work with good people.”

For McGee, the award also reflects the values that shaped him, from the time he was a boy out hunting and fishing on the Western Colorado landscape to his time as a student at Western.

“The passion for the resource rubs off on you,” he said. “And that’s what it takes in the field of wildlife management. You just have to be passionate about it because it’s not about the paycheck. It’s about the resource.”

(Seth Mensing is the Western Colorado University media and communications manager.)