If you don’t have the Keep Colorado Wild pass in your car this year, you’ll be paying two bucks more a day at three state parks.
Chatfield, Golden Gate Canyon and State Forest state parks will be charging $2 more for daily passes in 2025, up from the usual $10 fee to enter all the other state parks.
The extra charge is authorized in two pieces of legislation in recent years aimed at allowing parks and their surrounding communities to determine specific needs and a higher fee whose proceeds could be kept local instead of disappearing into a broader fund.
Chatfield’s extra $2 will go into projects run by the Chatfield Watershed Authority, which is the guardian of water quality, recreation resources and wildlife habitat in the areas upstream on the South Platte River from the big reservoir. The main goal for the $2 fund is to lessen the amount of phosphorus that arrives through runoff and promotes algae blooms that harm aquatic life and interfere with recreation. Some of that new money will also go after excess chlorophyll in runoff.
Golden Gate Canyon and State Forest will charge $12 under a different state bill that authorized them to raise the fee to help improve local roads and access. The extra $2 will go to Gilpin and Jackson counties, respectively, for their road maintenance and improvement funds that address needs surrounding the parks.
Frequent users of those three popular parks will likely see the Keep Colorado Wild pass as an even better deal now, since the $29 statewide access price isn’t changing. You can pay the annual pass fee next time your auto registration comes due, though you’ll have to purchase a pass for each car you plan to use — the pass is on your registration, so it’s not transferable from one vehicle to another.
The cheap annual passes mean daily pass collections at most state parks are heading steadily downward. Total daily pass purchases at Chatfield, just southwest of Denver, dropped by nearly 5,000 in 2023 from 2022.
Still, the daily pass is popular enough that the $2 fees will accumulate for some time. Just under 105,000 users bought daily passes at Chatfield in 2023. That was down from about 138,000 daily pass sales in 2020, northeast region state parks spokesperson Kara Van Hoose said.