The communities around Pikes Peak are busy, grappling with urban and rural visitors eager for adventure on the flanks of the iconic massif.
A widespread collaborative effort to get ahead of the 24 million annual visitors to the Pikes Peak region pioneered a statewide regional initiative to study more than 140 planning guides for the towns, cities and land managers around America’s Mountain. The Pikes Peak Outdoor Initiative found overwhelmed and under-resourced communities and land managers struggling to protect resources and wildlife under the surge of recreation in a three-county region managed by the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the City of Colorado Springs and its water-guarding utilities department.
After three years of study, the best-case scenario sketches a plan where Colorado Parks and Wildlife taps its swelling coffer of revenue from Keep Colorado Wild Pass sales and takes over management of recreation around Pikes Peak.
“What does that look like? How can we partner? How can we collaborate? How can we leverage what CPW is really good at — managing recreation and managing people — so we can free up other land managers to do what they are really good at?” asked Becky Leinweber, executive director of the Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance. “CPW is in a unique position as a land manager in the region to take a larger role.”
The role of Colorado Parks and Wildlife could look something like the Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area, a 152-mile stretch of the Arkansas River that passes through four counties, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and national monument land and draws about 1.4 million annual visitors to the most commercially rafted whitewater in the country.
While it may be tempting to say, do not call it Pikes Peak State Park. It’s too early for that.
“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,” says Frank McGee, the manager of Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Southeast Region that includes the Arkansas River drainage from Leadville to Kansas and New Mexico. “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.”
“But it’s an important nuance,” Leinweber says.
Pikes Peak as a microcosm of Colorado’s growth challenges
The 14,115-foot peak is a busy spot. Colorado Springs requires reservations and $15-a-person tickets to drive to the top and visit the city’s new $66 million, 38,000 square-foot Summit Visitor Center. There’s a cog railway to the summit. The famed Manitou Incline now requires reservations. Colorado Springs Utilities carefully controls limited recreational access to three reservoirs — North and South Catamount and Crystal Creek on the north slope of Pikes Peak — that are essential impoundments in the city’s water supply system. The eastern flanks are crowded with easily-accessible trails and parks above Colorado Springs. The communities on the western flanks are hoping recreation can help spur economic growth.
In many ways, the peak is a microcosm of Colorado, with more popular areas calling for better management of recreational growth and rural communities eager to attract recreating visitors.
When the Outdoor Pikes Peaks Initiative team began talking with residents surrounding the peak one consistent message was around better management of recreation and its impacts. ‘
“Because it’s that influx of people and growth putting pressure on natural resources … or the missed opportunity to add recreation,” said Chris Lieber, the owner of a planning and landscape architecture firm who has shepherded the initiative and the 25-year Ring The Peak Trail plan. “Because it’s hard to say ‘yes’ to more opportunities when you can’t take care of what you have.”
The Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative received the first grant from the state’s Outdoor Regional Partnerships Initiative, which since 2020 has awarded $3.5 million to 18 recreation-managing groups that cover about 70% of the state. The $225,000 grant to the Pikes Peak group has enabled it to gather input from dozens of communities, organizations and residents around the peak.
In three years, the Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative has held 11 community meetings in El Paso, Fremont and Teller counties, held dozens of its own meetings, partnered with the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs to build a database of maps, economic data and outdoor industry statistics and reviewed 16 different possible management models.
The journey led to the doorstep of Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
It’s a crowded stoop. As Colorado Parks and Wildlife collects more than $41 million from the first calendar-year sale of its Keep Colorado Wild state parks pass attached to every vehicle registration in the state, there is a lot of elbowing for a piece of that growing pile of money. The agency is expanding its new Fishers Peak State Park in Trinidad. It is working with the White River National Forest to develop a management plan for Sweetwater Lake, where the local community around the remote lake is angrily objecting to the proposed creation of a crowded state park.
The Sweetwater scuffle has left Colorado Parks and Wildlife with some hard-earned lessons and McGee points to those irked residents when he talks about the “baggage” that comes with the state park shingle.
Jason Robertson, the director of recreation of the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Region, said he has not had any “substantive conversations” with the state “and they need to happen.”
His concern is how a new management proposal from Colorado Parks and Wildlife will change the Forest Service’s working relationships with the city of Colorado Springs, the Broadmoor Hotel and 11 tribes, including the Ute Mountain, Southern Ute, Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho tribes who consider Tava-kaavi, or Sun Mountain, a sacred place.
“We want to make sure that whatever conversations we have really respect those long-standing partnerships and whatever might be done is collaborative with a broad lens for supporting communities,” Robertson says.
The Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative planners approached Colorado Parks and Wildlife with the proposal to manage recreation across the different management landscapes. McGee said this is not an idea that came from Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the agency is “very early in the conversations.”
“But I do think there is an opportunity for CPW to step in with additional resources to provide both maintenance of existing infrastructure and, potentially also the opportunity to do some development of additional infrastructure in some places,” says McGee, noting the impacts of increasing crowds on wild areas around the peak. “What we see a lot of times is that if we don’t provide defined places where people can go … they just go and do it wherever and in some cases that can lead to degradation of natural resources and I think we are seeing that in a real way on this landscape right now.”
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There is not a proposal for the state to acquire land around the drive-up Front Range 14er that towers over Colorado Springs. The rough sketch is more about agreements and partnerships that would give Colorado Parks and Wildlife a larger role in managing record-level visitation.
The latest visitor survey of visitors to Colorado Springs and the Pikes Peak region showed 24 million visitors in 2022 who spent $2.8 billion. The study by Longwoods International showed 68% of the visitors went outdoors for recreation during their trip to the area. With more than 740,000 residents, El Paso County is the most populous county in Colorado and is expected to grow to 1 million people by 2050.
It’s a similar growth pressure seen across the western portion of Colorado, where population increases are spiking outdoor recreation numbers across the state. The Outdoor Regional Partnerships Initiative recently added two new coalitions on the eastern plains that protect grassland habitats. The folks around Pikes Peak are keenly aware they are emerging as a model for what can result from diverse coalitions working to conserve and protect resources while managing recreation.
“We are part of a greater picture,” Leinweber says. “Obviously, our eyes are focused here on the Pikes Peak region but this great work is happening across Colorado because of this growth we’re seeing and this use and the new type of user and the impacts and the real desire to preserve what’s special.”