The Habitat Exhibit

The Betty Ford Alpine Gardens at 530 South Frontage Road East in Vail, Colorado, occupies a position in the botanical world that its elevation already announces: at 8,200 feet above sea level, it is the highest public botanical garden in North America, and the plant communities it cultivates and interprets exist in a narrow elevational band where the growing season compresses to weeks, the soils are thin, and the seasonal changes arrive with an abruptness that flatland gardening never prepares visitors for. The gardens are open daily, free of charge, from spring through fall 2026, with the primary programming season running through summer. The Smithsonian’s “Habitat” traveling exhibition, developed by Smithsonian Gardens and circulated by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, was presented at Betty Ford in 2025; confirm current 2026 exhibition programming with the gardens directly at bettyfordalpinegardens.org, as the 2026 seasonal schedule had not been fully published at time of this writing.

What the gardens offer year to year, independent of any traveling exhibition, is a coherent presentation of alpine and subalpine plant communities across four distinct garden zones: the Rock Alpine Garden, the Mountain Perennial Garden, the Betty Ford Children’s Alpine Garden, and the Meditation Garden, each designed around the specific plant associations and ecological relationships that define Vail’s position on the Colorado Rockies’ western slope. Gore Creek runs along the garden’s northern border, and the sound and presence of the creek through the summer season gives the grounds a sensory continuity that the individual garden zones extend rather than interrupt. Live animal presentations from Nature’s Educators, a Colorado wildlife education organization, bring hawks, owls, and other native species to the site for programs calibrated to children and families across the summer schedule.

Vail and the Mountain Setting

Vail’s pedestrian Village core, with its Tyrolean-influenced architecture and car-free commercial corridor, sits minutes from the gardens along a path that runs through Gerald R. Ford Park, the green space named for the 38th President whose Vail connection anchored this community’s relationship with presidential politics through the 1970s and 1980s. The ford family’s enduring connection to Vail is why the gardens carry the Betty Ford name. The Vail Nature Center at the park’s Gore Creek edge offers a parallel natural history education program, and the two facilities function as complementary stops on a half-day exploration of the valley’s accessible natural science offerings.

Good to Know
The Betty Ford Alpine Gardens are free to enter and open daily during the growing season. Parking in the Ford Park lot at 530 South Frontage Road East is available; arrive before 9 a.m. on summer weekends to find easy spaces. The gardens are stroller and wheelchair accessible on the main paths. Morning visits offer the clearest light for photography and the most active wildlife along the creek margin.

The Gore Creek Connection and Nearby Water

Gore Creek, which bounds the northern edge of the gardens, flows east from the Eagles Nest Wilderness through Vail before joining the Eagle River west of town. The creek’s corridor through Vail supports year-round fly fishing for wild rainbow and brown trout, and designated Gold Medal fishing water near the confluence with the Eagle River is accessible from public pull-offs on US-6 between Vail and Minturn. For visitors building a Vail itinerary around the gardens and the mountain valley’s recreation landscape, look on Lake.com for vacation rental properties in the Vail and Eagle County corridor that provide easy access to the Betty Ford Gardens, Gore Creek fishing, and the village’s summer programming calendar.