Colorado Sunday cover of an outhouse with the headline "Do you have a bathroom?"

Endless views. Miles and miles of trails. Nary a restroom in sight.

It’s been nearly 15 years since Colorado Springs padlocked bathrooms in some of its most scenic parks, spurred on by a budget crunch that famously led the city to darken street lights, yank trash cans from some public areas and slash spending on finer things, like toilet maintenance.

The city’s fortunes have since turned around, and I’m pleased to say the streetlights were long ago turned back on, and the trash cans restored. But hikers, cyclists and trail runners who frequent parks and open areas are mostly still making do without public bathrooms. We’re forced to catch as catch can — by dashing to the nearest gas station, grocery store or greasy spoon. You’ll know us by the Day-Glo flash as we go about our business.

For many years, I thought memorizing a list of trailhead-adjacent gas stations with easy-to-remember door codes was a quirk of living in the Springs. But as this week’s Colorado Sunday cover story by Nancy Lofholm makes clear, vanishing public restrooms aren’t really all that rare.

They may be disappearing from a park near you.

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A portable toilet sits next to a locked public restroom at Dos Rios Park in Grand Junction on April 4. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

It started with a pitstop predicament.

When riding or hiking the Colorado Riverfront Trail through the Grand Valley, I could always rely on a chain of public restrooms in various parks when nature called. They were nice concrete brick structures usually attached to shaded picnic pavilions.

Then the padlocks and “closed” signs started going up. What the heck? Why are those cramped, smelly, plastic portable toilets being parked nearby as an alternative?

For a while, I thought it was a temporary inconvenience. Maybe those now-inaccessible bathrooms were being refurbished.

Not so. Public restrooms are being locked for the long term because they have turned into magnets for all sorts of bad behavior, from pranks and vandalism to drug dealing and even murder.

The dilemma — and it is a dilemma around the world — has no solid solution. How do you provide the public with a comfortable place to go without inadvertently supplying a hiding place for crime and destruction?

Read on for attempts to answer that knotty potty problem.

READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE

Photographers never know what visual conditions to expect when it’s spring in Colorado. One day it’s snowing with thick cloud cover, and the next it’s T-shirt weather with bright, direct sunlight. Or we’re steered indoors with limited lighting options. Whatever the case, photographers work with the light they’re given to capture subjects in every corner of the state.

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Billy Barr shakes snow off his skis before heading out to make weather observations March 13 in Gothic. So-called “citizen scientists” like Barr have long played important roles in gathering data to help researchers better understand the environment. His once-hand-recorded measurements have informed many scientific papers over the years and helped calibrate aerial snow sensing tools. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson)
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Storage cabinets in the data hall at the Novva Data Center on March 18 in Colorado Springs. The capacity of Front Range data centers is projected to triple in the next few years, experts say. (Mark Reis, Special to The Colorado Sun)
A graphic showing how much the ingredients in a burger have increased
Young participants of the Hozhoni Days Powwow wait for their turn on the dance floor March 29 inside the Whalen Gymnasium at the Fort Lewis College campus in Durango. The annual on-campus powwow contest was launched in 1966 by Clyde Benally, a first-year student, to create more exposure and networking for Native Americans. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)
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R. Alan Brooks photographed at the Denver Art Museum on March 22. Brooks’ exhibit is a comic-style depiction of the autobiography of Nat Love, a Black cowboy from the 1800s who worked throughout the West and Midwest. “Nat was 11 when slavery ended, and when he became a cowboy he felt this freedom on the back of a horse. So that was a theme that I pulled out in my telling of it, and I think it worked,” Brooks said. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
Alma resident and North London Mill Preservation co-director Jeff Crane hangs pictures inside the recently completed 1883 North London Mining Office overnight ski hut in the Mosquito Range on April 2 in Park County. The three-bedroom hut took five years to build from an abandoned 19th-century mining shack. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)
The Big Stump is one of a number of petrified trees at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument west of Colorado Springs. The national monument has a number of easy and moderate hiking trails to access some of the area’s features. (David Krause, The Colorado Sun)

Tucked behind Pikes Peak is one of the least visited national monuments in Colorado that makes for a great adventure back in time and is not overwhelmed with visitors.

Tens of millions of years in the making but established just a few decades ago, the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument is a Colorado version of the famed Petrified Forest National Park, but a lot closer and much less crowded (just over 63,000 visitors last year vs. a half-million to the Arizona park).

During a recent stop there, of particular interest to me was the geologic history behind Florissant and how some of the largest petrified tree stumps in the world were created. The lessons about the region’s ancient Guffey volcanic complex and how it shaped the area more than 36 million years ago are laid out in easy terms for us scientifically challenged but uber-interested visitors. While not quite T. rex status, the massive redwood fossils (some more than 13 feet in diameter) are sure to appeal to the younger visitors, who will also appreciate the references to volcanic explosions.

There is a trio of petrified stumps just outside the visitors center, but the park’s main trail is the 1-mile loop that takes guests past a number of fossils, including one known as The Big Stump.

Along the way you learn about how the area was a hunting ground for Native Americans for thousands of years, then discovered and pillaged in the 1800s before the area became privately owned and managed in the 1870s and 1920s. It wasn’t until 1969 that the area became a national monument, thanks to three women who fought off developers.

(Fun fact: Walt Disney legally bought a whole stump during a visit in 1956. The 5-ton fossil remains on display at Disneyland in front of the Rivers of America.)

The monument’s 15-mile trail system is set up well (the longest being 4 miles), and there is a nice variety among the eight designated paths. The visitors center has a collection of insects, fish, plants and other fossils.

A few things of note: no dogs or bikes allowed on the trails; there’s no camping/lodging or restaurant on-site; the main path is pretty easy, but sun-exposed, so be ready; and there are night events worth checking out throughout the year.

And for a cool Colorado day trip, it’s pretty easy to get to, just about 35 miles off Interstate 25 west of Colorado Springs. It’s $10 per person 16-older (15-younger are free), or check out the $35 annual pass.

READ MORE AT NPS.GOV

EXCERPT: Amid the many layers of fascinating Colorado history, author David Forsyth has focused his attention on an often overlooked element of Denver’s long effort to outgrow its cowtown roots — amusement parks. “The Amusement Park at Sloan’s Lake: The Forgotten History of Denver’s Manhattan Beach” dives deep into the 19th-century story of a troubled park with a rich history — including, as this excerpt explains, an all-out effort by rival Elitch’s to lay siege to the Sloan’s Lake property with the intent to taking its animal attractions.

READ THE SUNLIT EXCERPT

THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: Forsyth originally planned to write a much broader book looking at multiple parks no longer on the landscape. But as he researched and began writing during the pandemic, he saw the project go in an entirely different direction. Here’s a portion of his Q&A:

SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory. What inspired you to write it? Where did the story/theme originate?

Forsyth: This book grew out of my book on Lakeside Amusement Park back in 2016. I did a lot of research on the four other Denver amusement parks that were around at the same time and I decided the three that were long gone deserved to have their stories told, too. … Life and a lot of other things got in the way and when I finally sat down in 2020 to start on it I decided to start with Manhattan Beach and I very quickly realized its story was a book on its own.

READ THE INTERVIEW WITH DAVID FORSYTH

🎧 LISTEN TO A PODCAST WITH THE AUTHOR

A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston speaks to the media alongside Amanda Sandoval of Denver’s City Council on Jan. 3 while visiting a migrant encampment in northwestern Denver. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

🌞 The 15-month, $63 million effort to house migrants from Central and South America seeking refuge in Denver appears to be winding down. Jennifer Brown reports that Denver Human Services is closing three of the remaining four hotel shelters, clashing with past statements by Mayor Mike Johnston.

🌞 Sometimes, the glass isn’t half full or half empty — the glass just is. That zen-like koan captures the latest business outlook from Colorado’s private industry leaders, who say the state’s economic climate is in a purely neutral place. They can’t complain, but they’re not about to celebrate. As Tamara Chuang reports, that’s as full as the glass has gotten since 2020.

🌞 The Stanley Hotel, which helped bring us the horrors of Stephen King’s “The Shining,” could probably inspire a second nail-biter on the vagaries of Colorado real estate. Jason Blevins recounts how, months after a deal to sell the hotel to an Arizona nonprofit crumbled, the state of Colorado has its own plan to buy and upgrade the hotel — and eventually use the revenue it generates to benefit other cultural landmarks.

🌞 In most cities, stormwater is a nuisance that requires huge sums of money to collect and divert. Could it be the key to solving the U.S. water crisis? It’s a compelling question raised by Jerd Smith’s story on a new assessment that stormwater offers “vast potential” to shore up the nation’s water supply. Coloradans could miss out, however, due to the state’s water laws.

🌞 So why not convert all those unused office buildings in downtown Denver into housing? The reasons, we learn in this story by Tamara Chuang, are basically endless — so much so it’s usually cheaper to knock down an old office building rather than renovate it.

🌞 A Denver nonprofit that aims to lift up homeless youths is being sued on the claim they held down blue-collar workers — namely, by shorting their pay for work on a $38 million shelter. Urban Peak blames the city for not warning the nonprofit sooner that it was using the wrong payscale for the contractors. Now, Jennifer Brown informs us, the error could add up to $4 million to the shelter costs.

Well, Colorado Sunday friends, it’s been real, but I’m afraid I have to run …

— Lance & the whole staff of The Sun

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.

This byline is used for articles and guides written collaboratively by The Colorado Sun reporters, editors and producers.