THE BOULDER COUNTY LAND BRIEF
Land in the
Crystalline Mid-Elevation Forests setting.
Boulder County has 726.4 square miles of land in Colorado. 6 mapped landscape regions meet across Boulder County: Crystalline Mid-Elevation Forests, Front Range Fans, Crystalline Subalpine Forests, among others.
Steep mountains rise through distinct vegetation bands, from lower grass and shrub country to conifers and alpine terrain. Elevation is a defining difference across Southern Rocky Mountain landscapes.
Regional context: Southern Rockies ↗ · Regional mapping across the county footprint
Where the landscape changes
Boulder County intersects 6 mapped regional units. The largest mapped shares are:
- Crystalline Mid-Elevation Forests37.5%
- Front Range Fans33.6%
- Crystalline Subalpine Forests12.8%
- Alpine Zone9.9%
- Foothill Shrublands4.3%
High Plains in Boulder County
Broad, comparatively smooth plains distinguish the High Plains from neighboring broken terrain. The natural grassland setting is drier and higher than the Central Great Plains to the east.
Read the regional source ↗Finding your parcel within Boulder County
The atlas lists 34 cities, towns, townships, and Census communities associated with Boulder County, including Longmont, Boulder, Erie. The list includes overlapping geography types and does not divide the county into exclusive service areas.
Boulder County by land and water
The Census records 14.1 square miles of water within Boulder County, or 1.9% of its total area. That share is close to Boulder County’s 1.9%. This is geographic context; waterfront status and usable land must be checked at the parcel.
For scale, Boulder County has 578.8 times the land area of nearby Glendale CDP (1.26 square miles). These areas describe boundaries, not comparable property prices.
The Census boundary meets Broomfield County, Gilpin County, Grand County, Jefferson County, Larimer County, Weld County within Colorado. A tract near one of these lines should be matched to the county identifier on its own records.

