navigate shrinking budgets, Colorado Parks and Wildlife could assume a larger role in managing recreation on public lands around Pikes Peak.
A consortium — the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, El Paso and Teller counties, the cities of Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs and Colorado Springs Utilities — is asking CPW to help manage increasing recreation around America’s Mountain, starting with management of the Ring the Peak Trail.
“This can allow the Forest Service to focus on areas where they can do the most good with their wildfire crisis strategy. The same can be said for Colorado Springs Utilities focusing on water supplies and the health of our watersheds,” said Becky Leinweber, cofounder of the Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance, which has worked to gather diverse public and private interests around the massif to plan for the next chapter of growth. “CPW has capabilities and expertise that can truly balance both the conservation needs and the recreation needs. This is a unique moment for us.”
Gov. Jared Polis in his State of the State address last week said CPW “is partnering to better care for and expand recreational opportunities on America’s peak.” After the speech, CPW announced it had received a letter of intent from a group of Pikes Peak-region land owners and managers hoping to enlist the agency in managing recreation in a region that draws 24 million visitors a year.
The plan first floated by the Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative has been simmering for more than a year after several years of study revealed overwhelmed and under-resourced communities and land managers dealing with a tsunami of recreation visits across the Pikes Peak region, which spans a checkerboard of land controlled by cities, counties, the Forest Service, the BLM and a water-guarding utilities department.
The Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative was forged in 2021, the first to take shape as part of a call by Polis for communities to form regional partnerships that could help craft a statewide outdoor recreation plan that accommodates improved access alongside conservation of wildlife, habitat and community quality of life. Today, there are 20 regional partnerships covering three-quarters of the state.
Unlike federal land managers, CPW has some new revenue rolling in from the Keep Colorado Wild Pass. More than 1.5 million Colorado vehicle owners last year included the $29 pass on their annual registrations, delivering more than $40 million to CPW. (The agency traditionally collected around $20 million a year from selling park passes.)
While it’s a new framework for CPW, the agency is well versed in working across multiple jurisdictions with a host of land managers. The Pikes Peak plan for CPW could look similar to its management of the Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area, which draws about 1.4 million annual visitors to 5,355 acres around a 152-mile stretch of the Arkansas River that winds through four counties, Forest Service and BLM land and a national monument.
That stretch of river between Leadville and Cañon City is the most commercially rafted river in the country. The Arkansas River Outfitters Association estimates nearly 200,000 rafters every summer spend more than $13 million in Chaffee and Fremont counties, supporting 600 jobs.
Locals in Pikes Peak especially like the “recreation area” moniker CPW uses around the Arkansas River. No one, not even the state’s more-parks-everwhere governor, is calling this a step toward Pikes Peak State Park.
“One of the things we are seeing and finding out is that the term ‘state park’ is a charged term and it potentially carries some baggage,” Frank McGee, the manager of Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Southeast Region, which includes the Arkansas River drainage from Leadville to Kansas and New Mexico, told The Sun last year when the CPW management plan was first floated. “I don’t know if this will ever be a Pikes Peak State Park. Maybe this is just a recreation area. I know that’s a nuance.”
This is not a state park
That’s maybe a lesson from Sweetwater Lake, where locals are actively fighting a plan that was first announced as a new state park for the lake and community at the end of a 12-mile dirt road above the Colorado River. CPW and the White River National Forest have partnered to improve access at the remote lake in Garfield County, which the Forest Service acquired in 2021 with an $8.5 million grant from the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
“Sweetwater is a solitary, low-visit location that is a very different experience than Pikes Peak,” Sweetwater resident Derrick Wiemer said. “Heck, they host a race on the road, nobody is thinking of that as a quiet remote location. Looking at it from a distance, I feel that the state is likely better suited up there. The local communities around Sweetwater — Garfield and Eagle county people — are strongly against another Sylvan Lake or any level of state park that takes a local gem from the people.”
CPW also has managed the 2,701-acre Cheyenne Mountain State Park since it opened in 2006 just south of Colorado Springs, with a mix of land owned by the city, the Colorado State Land Board and CPW. In recent years the city has added several hundred acres to the park with acquisitions funded by the city’s open space sales tax.
Becky Leinweber, executive director of the Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance, Jan. 18, 2024, in Colorado Springs. Leinweber formed the group in 2016 to support recreation industry around the Pikes Peak area. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)“In addition to the advantages that CPW brings to the staffing and management of Cheyenne Mountain State Park, the City of Colorado Springs benefits immensely by having a beautiful state park in its back yard for this growing metropolitan area for recreational access and to appreciate the value of significant land conservation on the city’s edge,” Britt Haley, the city’s parks director, said in an emailed statement.
The initial plan — really it’s a plan to start talking about a plan — is very early right now and it will focus on the Ring The Peak Trail, which is the focus of a 25-year effort to build and link a 63-mile loop around Pikes Peak. The CPW proposal is not necessarily about finishing that 25-year trail plan as much as getting the agency to better organize management challenges on the trail.
Most of the comments from the people with the agencies, organizations and cities on the letter of intent included reticence to get into details because “this is very preliminary,” said Ryan Nehl, the supervisor of the Pike-San Isabel National Forests & Cimarron and Comanche National Grasslands.
“We are just exploring this,” Nehl said.
There’s no talk of any land transfers. Definitely no one has said “state park.” The news release from Polis and CPW after the State of the State made sure to mention there was no plan for the agency to take over management of the Pikes Peak Highway or the privately owned Broadmoor Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway.
This is all about getting visitor management under control so communities and land managers can better plan for the future, Leinweber said.
“We want to be exceptional in our outdoor recreational opportunities. We want to be exceptional in our natural resource conservation. And we want to be exceptional in how we manage both those,” she said. “This is us rolling up our sleeves and figuring out how to make that happen.”
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