A $7 million grant to help bring shade and more active recreation to underserved miles of the beloved High Line Canal in northeastern Denver and Aurora.
Cantilever bridges over spectacular portions of Clear Creek Canyon, in an effort to link up a definitive 65-mile Peaks to Plains Trail connecting Denver directly by bike or foot to Loveland Pass.
More than 7 miles of Eagle Valley Trail to complete another spectacular bike and foot path connecting Breckenridge to Aspen without fighting car traffic.
The chance to preserve the legendary Lost Canyon Ranch near Castle Rock from luxury housing development and showcase it next to popular Castlewood Canyon State Park.
It’s a heady list of spring gifts to Coloradans as Great Outdoors Colorado returns the people’s lottery spending in the form of park and trail legacies. These and a handful of high-profile acquisitions are this year’s GOCO Centennial Program investments, announced every five years as part of the agency’s open space preservation and access mission.
The overall $68.9 million funding round for Centennial Program projects is GOCO’s biggest so far, and includes much larger individual chunks of money than the agency previously funded. There are three $7 million trail projects in the mix, said GOCO director of programs Chris Yuan-Farrell, while the fund’s previous largest trail investment was a $4.8 million grant.
“It’s pretty apparent that there’s a need to steward these kinds of magnificent, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that don’t really exist elsewhere,” he said.
GOCO and others have heard the criticism that the canyon portions of Peaks to Plains Trail, in particular, seems like a hefty per-mile investment. The new GOCO grant is to help Jeffco to work on just three miles at the Huntsman Gulch area just west of Golden. Showcasing the canyon without blasting away at the walls or chasing away threatened species means expensive hanging bridges and other engineering marvels.
“This is not just building a trail, it’s building a park that is going to have 100 years if not more lifespan,” Yuan-Farrell said. “So when we think about an investment over that 100-year term, it seems like a pretty solid investment in terms of dollars per year. There’s a lot of factors that if we get beyond this discreet moment-in-time sticker shock, we can start to think about the other aspects of it that makes this such a compelling project.”
Completing Peaks to Plains will mean that, eventually, a visitor could get off a plane at Denver International Airport, get on a bike, and pedal on a dedicated trail along riverways and canyons to Golden, Loveland Pass, Breckenridge, Frisco, Vail and on to Glenwood Springs, said Scot Grossman, Jeffco’s project management supervisor.
“That’s the grand vision, and we call that the quintessential Colorado experience,” Grossman said. “The connectivity is mind-blowing.”
The “missing link” is the parts of Clear Creek Canyon itself where paved, dedicated trails have not yet been pieced together. Jeffco controls 13.5 miles of Peaks to Plains, with 3 more of those miles now under construction, and the Huntsman section will be the next to go once final funding is secure. Jeffco Open Space has pledged $270 million of the dedicated tax to the canyon trails and associated Clear Creek Canyon Park, Grossman said.
Jeffco is essentially creating the equivalent of a national park through and around the canyon, Grossman said, already heavily used by a diverse metro Denver population and planning to host far more visitors. In Jeffco’s continual public surveys, residents want both land preservation and recreation amenities, he said.
The expense of Clear Creek Canyon has not undercut other Jeffco recreation, Grossman added.
“In the last eight years that I’ve been in charge of our capital improvement program, we’ve never pushed off a capital project because Peaks to Plains or Clear Creek Canyon Park are too big and sucking too much money out,” he said. “We’ve also never said no to any land transactions or acquiring land because we don’t have the funds. So while, yes, it’s a big capital project, with our budget balances we’re still able to do the conservation, the recreation opportunities that we’re looking for, that our visitors want.”
Funding stretched by local, foundation matches
With the high expense in mind, GOCO looks whenever possible to local governments like Jeffco and conservation funds to stretch the grants with their own spending. In northeastern Denver and Aurora, the High Line Canal’s private legacy fund will match GOCO spending with millions more.
That metro Denver project highlights how GOCO is meant not just for pristine mountaintops, but for preserving and activating recreation everywhere people want to find it.
The northeastern High Line project “is to create what they’re calling ‘parklets’ all along that 27-ish mile corridor, to build new connections for various community members, so that the experience could be as compelling as it is elsewhere along the canal,” Yuan-Farrell said. “And really just reactivate or activate that corridor and take a disused resource and get people connected.”
On the High Line, the GOCO $7 million will be added to $9 million in matching money from Denver, Aurora and Arapahoe County, and $2 million in High Lane Canal Conservancy private donations, said conservancy chief executive Harriet Crittenden LaMair.
The northeastern section of the High Line, winding its way into Arapahoe County from the Bible Park area in southeastern Denver, has suffered “a historic lack of investment,” LaMair said. In addition to new planting and development of “parklets” in cooperation with the local governments, the High Line must make changes to accommodate how canal use has changed.
The ditch is no longer a vital water system for cities or farms along the way, so advocates must find ways to direct and keep stormwater in the canal if they want it to remain a water attraction for more months of the year, LeMair said. The advantage for neighborhoods willing to invest, she added, is that the canal wetland can serve as both flood control and a natural stormwater filter, with stormwater losing more than half of contaminants in as little as 48 hours.
GOCO’s current round of funding includes some other one-off, high profile items:
- A $10 million loan to Pitkin County to lock up 650-acre Snowmass Falls Ranch, while other partners work out the financing and the bureaucratic arrangements to transfer the parcel to the U.S. Forest Service. The property would eventually be integrated into Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness.
- $3.2 million in “stewardship” trail funding for Colorado Fourteeners Initiative and Chaffee County partners to shore up worn areas on some of the state’s most-climbed peaks. It’s more than GOCO has spent on stewardship before, with the agency previously focused more on land acquisition rather than upkeep and maintenance. The partners will work on 20 fourteener demonstration projects, GOCO said.
- $3 million to the town of Castle Rock to help buy the 682-acre Lost Canyon Ranch at the edge of Castlewood Canyon. Final purchase negotiations are ongoing, Yuan-Farrell said. “If this land is not protected, eventual development would have significant impacts to wildlife and visitor experience in the adjacent” state park, GOCO said in a release.
- $2 million to Colorado Springs and $1.5 million to Larimer County to help secure desirable private ranches for public open space. Colorado Springs and The Conservation Fund previously bought 1,018-acre Wild Horse Ranch for $7.7 million, and Larimer County is acquiring 1,547-acre Heaven’s Door Ranch that will link up other conserved lands.
Finally, Yuan-Farrell said he is nerding out over a new $7.9 million data grant for the Statewide Natural Heritage Survey to be run by Colorado State University. The grant will help speed up a 30-year survey into a five-year program, Yuan-Farrell said, allowing Colorado to inventory all the open space and wildlife assets for a benchmark of the state’s biodiversity.
A data grant “is not everybody’s greatest topic,” he said. “But there’s such a need for having good baseline data to support decision making when it comes to open space protection.”