More than 1.5 million Colorado vehicle owners have delivered more than $40 million to Colorado Parks and Wildlife by including a $29 Keep Colorado Wild Pass as part of their annual registrations.
The first fiscal year of Keep Colorado Wild pass sales ended June 30 with revenue reaching $40.9 million. That unofficial tally — final numbers will be updated by the fall — means that parks, wildlife, backcountry search and rescue volunteers, and avalanche forecasters will get boosts in funding in the coming year.
The Keep Colorado Pass plan that launched in January 2023 adds $29 to every vehicle registration in the state unless owners opt out. The pass provides access to all state parks. The 2021 legislation that created the program hoped to generate more revenue than the annual $80 parks pass that delivered $23 million to CPW in 2020. Early projections hoped CPW would harvest at least $36 million in annual revenue from the new parks pass plan.
That plan set aside the first $32.5 million in Keep Colorado Wild Pass sales revenue for the state’s 42 parks. Then $2.5 million would go to more than 50 Colorado Backcountry Search and Rescue, or BSAR, organizations. And the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, or CAIC, will get $1 million.
At $36 million, the tap would return to CPW for wildlife funding for trails, wildlife programs and diversity and inclusion projects.
The roughly 2,800 volunteers who serve on Colorado’s search and rescue teams secure about $9 million a year through fundraising. The additional Keep Colorado Wild Pass funds will ease that fundraising burden.
“The hope is to make it easier on volunteer responders so they don’t have to do the same kind of fundraising,” said Jeff Sparhawk, the head of Colorado Search and Rescue Association, which has helped work out a formula to distribute the funds to search and rescue teams based on the size of the area they cover, the number of calls for help and the size of the rescue teams.
That $9 million figure is just how much the volunteers raise through their communities. It does not include spending by county sheriff departments that oversee search and rescue teams, nor does it account for the amount individual volunteers spend on equipment and travel for rescue missions and training.
CPW projected revenue from Keep Colorado Wild Pass sales would land between $21.5 million and $54 million. It was a wide range because no one knew for sure how Colorado drivers might react to the additional $29 fee on their annual vehicle registration bill. There were more than 5 million cars and light trucks registered in Colorado in 2023 and about 30% are included in the Keep Colorado Wild Pass program.
Traffic patterns from those new pass holders will not be known until CPW releases recent visitor tallies to Colorado’s state parks. In fiscal 2023 — which ended June 30, 2023 with only six months of Keep Colorado Pass sales — there were 17.9 million state park visitors, down from a pandemic peak of 19.5 million 2020.
For the past two years, the state legislature has sent extra funding to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, enabling an overhauled website and forecasting system for the 2022-23 season and a new avalanche awareness campaign as well as forecasts and educational materials in Spanish. The center also converted some part-time positions into full-time jobs, expanding its roster of avalanche forecasters into more communities.
Last month, CAIC forecasters met with Avalanche Canada to map out a 10-year plan for using new technologies and forecasting tools to further grow avalanche awareness and safety in the backcountry.
Ethan Greene, the head of CAIC, said the new funding “will help support this strategic work to provide more accurate and specific avalanche forecasts for the Colorado mountains.”