BOULDER, Colo. -- The first time Kristen Nordham saw a photo of Irvine, an orphan orangutan living on a reservation in Borneo, she was smitten by the ape's pudgy cheeks and flecked belly.

"I just though she was the cutest one," said Kristen, 14.

Four years later, Kristen hopes to meet Irvine face to face when she travels to Tanjung Puting National Park in southern Borneo early next year.

At Camp Leakey, the park's orangutan rehabilitation center, Nordham will work alongside Birute Mary Galdikas, a leading authority on orangutans and president of Orangutan Foundation International, a nonprofit dedicated to orangutan research and conservation.

The trip is part of Kristen's eighth-grade capstone project at Boulder Country Day School. While in Borneo, she will clean out infirmaries and bottle-feed orangutans whose mothers were killed by loggers. She plans to videotape the experience in hopes of raising awareness about the plight facing the remaining orangutans in the wild.

In fourth grade, Kristen fell in love with orangutans when she chose to write her endangered animal research paper on the great apes. Her research fortuitously led her to Irvine on OFI's Web site.

Kristen saved her allowance and the money she collected from dog-sitting and sent $75 to the organization to become Irvine's "foster mom" for one year. She has continued the annual pledge every year since.

"I told her she had to earn the money for it," said Kristen's mother, Gretchen Nordham, who works at Front Range Community College's Longmont campus. "So she saved up her allowance faithfully, and pretty quickly she had the $75 sponsorship for her 'foster daughter."'

Last year, Kristen kicked her fundraising efforts into full gear. She played her harp at Christmas parties, sold baked foods and took on more pet-sitting clients. Early this year, she sent $500 to the organization to help with efforts to extinguish forest fires threatening the orangutans.

The Bornean orangutan population is estimated at between 45,000 and 69,000, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Red List of Threatened Species. The same list reports that about 7,300 Sumatran orangutans remain in the world.

And those numbers are dropping as more lowland rain forests are cut down to make room for palm oil plantations or destroyed by illegal loggers and by forest fires, said Sarah Whitaker, director of operations at OFI's base in Los Angeles.

"The orangutans are basically going extinct because of mass forest deterioration, which is all human caused," she said.

Orangutans also are sold as popular pets and are hunted by certain indigenous people in Borneo. Currently, there are about 350 orphans in the national park, Whitaker said.

And although the trip certainly won't be a vacation, Kristen is more concerned about what comes before boarding a plane to Southeast Asia.

"I'm scared of all the shots I have to get," she said with a nervous smile.