Plains Conservation Center

The Plains Conservation Center (PCC) is an 1100 acre natural area featuring Wells Crossing, an 1887 rural outpost. Wells Crossing offers all the settled comforts of the pioneer lifestyle: two homesteads, a school house, a blacksmith shop, an heirloom garden, and a chicken coop. Nearby are tepees representing the traveling style of the Cheyenne. This all helps us appreciate how the prairie shaped the lives of two very different cultures.

The focus of the Plains Conservation Center is education, preservation, stewardship, and research.  The Center hosts thousands of students each year.

In addition to the Aurora location, PCC has an additional 8900 acres at the West Bijou site, approximately 30 miles east. This site offers an even more dramatic and pristine backdrop for a short grass prairie experience. In the company of a naturalist, visitors can watch for pronghorn, swift foxes, mule deer, and prairie birds. In one gully wall is the most complete picture found to date of the cataclysmic event marking a mass extinction, including the end of the dinosaurs. This is the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary which attracts geologists and paleontologists from all over the world.