What is a river?
It depends on your point of view. Sun reporters have fanned out along the Arkansas River, from the headwaters near Leadville to the border with Kansas, to learn what the river means to people in the places it runs through.
ㅤ⚲ㅤ CAÑON CITY
In a tree-shrouded park on the banks of the Arkansas River, Corinne O’Hara counted the ways her family’s move from Summit County to this reputedly gritty outpost in southern Colorado turned into “a gift.”
Instead of the sleepy prison town of Front Range lore, they found a place of year-round adventure, with scenic trails in the high-desert bluffs near their new home, and a 15-minute drive to boating on the river, which runs for 4 miles through the city, the longest in-town stretch of the Arkansas in the state.
Then there’s the resurgent Centennial Park, a leafy oasis near downtown where the trail system meets the river. A free loaner lifejacket station there lets visitors wade or swim with confidence. Two artificial surf waves and a slalom course challenge boogie boarders and kayakers. Boulder-encircled wading areas and terraced seating make room for lounging.
“Before I moved here, Cañon City wasn’t even on my radar,” said O’Hara, who left Dillon in 2019 with her husband, John, and their two teen children after her husband changed jobs. “Most of the time you don’t hear about it. Most of the time you’re just driving through. But it has as much to offer as Dillon, as much as the other mountain towns. And we have the river.”
The O’Haras were among thousands of revellers who converged in Centennial Park in late July for the 16th annual Royal Gorge Whitewater Festival, a two-day extravaganza of boating, mountain biking and running events that doubles as a celebration of Cañon City’s ever-expanding resort town bona fides.
In just more than a decade, this city of 17,000 people, home to the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility and surrounded by a dozen other state and federal prisons, has worked to supercharge a new identity as an outdoors hub with river and trail improvements that have turned heads across the Front Range.
They include three new trail networks spanning more than 50 miles of single track and riverside upgrades that have made Cañon City’s stretch of the Arkansas more accessible, more scenic and safer. The changes are increasing the city’s appeal for locals, inviting new development and positioning Cañon City to claim a greater share of the valley’s lucrative commercial rafting business, city officials and business owners here say.
But for all the energy in Cañon City’s reinvention bid, steep challenges remain, from contending with a gnarly highway separating downtown from the river, to dealing with an abandoned industrial strip that has long blocked redevelopment in a riverside corridor seen as key to making the area feel more like a river town, and less like a prison town.
Tackling those challenges is central to the community’s vision of putting the Arkansas River back at the center of Cañon City’s culture and commerce, and of laying outdated stereotypes to rest.
Learning from other communities
Twenty years ago, the kinetic scene in Centennial Park during this summer’s whitewater festival would have been hard to imagine in this one-time center of farming and industry an hour south of Colorado Springs.
Extensive environmental remediation helped transform the Arkansas at its Leadville headwaters beginning in the early 1990s, producing water quality improvements that have helped power commercial boating and angling on the river, including in Fremont County.
But even in the early 2000s, the river through Cañon City could be an imposing place. Hemmed in by artificial banks made partly of industrial rip-rap — including concrete chunks from demolished structures — the river was a draw for commercial rafters and anglers, but many locals were scared to go in.
“I used to tube it before I was a river guide. You’d get poked in the butt with rebar and stuff,” recalled Chris Moffet, a longtime local and veteran paddler who heads up the Royal Gorge River Initiative Organization, a conservation and recreation group better known as RG RIO, referring to a section of the river he says is now rip-rap-free and safe for tubing and other river fun, thanks in part to funding from his organization.
Although the city had sprawling mountain parks — Temple Canyon Park in its wooded, western foothills and a largely unused 5,000 acres surrounding the city-owned Royal Gorge Bridge, 13 miles west of city limits — rugged dirt roads were the only way to reach them, and the tangled woods mostly lacked trails.
For natives like Brian VanIwarden, a local public school wellness coordinator, the absence of trails and sorry state of the river could make Cañon City a frustrating place to be young, and many people of his generation left town once they turned 18, as he did.
During his college years in Durango, he saw firsthand how a river could provide for a city, becoming central to its economy, its recreation and its culture, while connecting and anchoring people of all ages.
“I moved back, got married and started having kids, realizing, ‘Oh, there’s some things that aren’t happening here that happen in other towns,’” VanIwarden recalled. “I vividly remember my daughter was super young, like 6 months old, and I’m just thinking: What are some ways that we can improve this community?”
In 2010, he helped form Fremont Adventure Recreation, a nonprofit that alongside RG RIO has been at the center of changes in the region.
But propping up outdoor recreation and peeling back layers of neglect along the Arkansas took more than a network of volunteers, as crucial as their help has been.
In Cañon City, people like VanIwarden and Moffett found land managers and community leaders who saw merit in their vision. And the collaborations they formed were helped along by significant support from the state, particularly Great Outdoors Colorado, which has awarded at least $3.5 million to Cañon City and Fremont County in the past 15 years, including $2.4 million for river and trail projects.
The birth of a river-and-trails town
An early splash came in 2010, with the arrival of the Whitewater and Kayak Recreation Park — or WKRP in Cañon City — spearheaded by a local whitewater group also calling itself WKRP, the precursor to RG RIO. Paid for with a $200,000 GOCO grant and $200,000 in cash and in-kind donations, the project overhauled 200 feet of riverbank on both sides of the Arkansas, creating surf waves, wading pools and sandstone terraces in an area once lined with industrial debris.
A 2018 expansion of Centennial Park added a neighboring playground and splash pad, creating a seamless experience between the whitewater features and the refurbished park that surrounds them, and giving the city an early taste of a thriving riverside scene more familiar in Salida and Buena Vista.
Meanwhile, an unlikely partner helped jumpstart trails in Cañon City. At the local Bureau of Land Management office, an agency recreation planner named Kalem Lenard designed and oversaw the construction of more than 10 miles of rocky single track at Oil Well Flats on BLM land about 7 miles north of the city.
Ready for visitors by 2014, it turned a remote former four-wheel drive spot into the area’s first multiuse network open to hikers, cyclists and equestrians, and quickly became a smash hit with mountain bikers from across the Front Range.
Harnessing the excitement, Fremont Adventure Recreation, or FAR, helped land funding in 2016 for the South Cañon Trails network. It arrived within the year, nestled in a neighborhood along the city’s western edge, giving locals an epic backyard where the trail names, like Hard Time and Redemption, nod to Cañon City’s prison town rep. The initial phase cost roughly $250,000, paid for by a state trails grant, BLM funds and donations from FAR.
Visitors there can continue climbing single track into the upper reaches of Temple Canyon Park, now accessible by trail network for the first time since it was deeded to the city in 1912 by an act of U.S. Congress.
A world-class community asset
The third network, and the masterstroke, began to materialize at Royal Gorge Park in 2016 — born from the ashes of a June 2013 wildfire that ravaged the city’s signature tourism draw, destroying 48 of 52 buildings on the grounds and causing only minor damage to its iconic steel span bridge overlooking a 1,000-foot drop to the Arkansas River.
In the wake of the fire, the city got a quick start on planting more than 10,000 trees and reseeding blackened terrain, part of a massive, $30 million rebuilding effort.
But it relied on FAR, with its focus on bringing new trails, to help map out a strategy for developing the charred park area, located on the north side of the gorge, into a community draw, said Rex Brady, parks and open space director for the city.
“It looked like the surface of the moon. And, you know, I started talking with FAR and talking about trails, and they just kind of bloomed from there,” Brady said, recalling how members of the group were among the first on the ground at Royal Gorge Park after the fire, and the first to pledge their help.
With financial support from FAR, the city hired a professional trailbuilder, Steve Thomas, to begin mapping a network with a mind toward minimizing erosion and avoiding sensitive areas as the park recovered. Within a few years, the city put him on the municipal payroll as a seasonal employee to keep the project going.
“It’s kind of a rare opportunity to have something that spectacular,” said Thomas, owner of Terra Firma Trails, who spent roughly six seasons using a minidozer, an excavator and teams of volunteers to lay more than 20 miles of trails through juniper forests and along the jagged cliffs overlooking the gorge, in areas where few people had previously visited.
The result is a “world-class” trail network that showcases how creative partnerships can hold down expenses on a major community upgrade, Brady said.
Without a seasonal employee, he added, the “cost would have been astronomical, and we’d have never been able to afford it.”
“An immense amount of activity”
From an economic standpoint, Cañon City’s trails and river attractions have generated “an immense amount of activity,” creating an estimated 300 jobs and increasing the region’s appeal for potential residents, tourists and companies looking to relocate, said Rick Harrmann, the city’s economic development manager.
“We see a whole lot more people on bikes around now than we did before,” Harrmann said. “Partially because of that, a lot of the newer developments are focusing on our outdoor activity, and we are seeing an increase in the younger population coming into the community. Anecdotally, we’re seeing higher incomes coming to the community.”
Sixty-five percent of residents who have lived in Cañon City for five years or less said trail access was a “very important part” of their decision to move to the area, according to a survey by University of Colorado researchers as part of an economic study jointly commissioned by FAR and the city.
New foot and bike events also came to Cañon City, bringing in tourism dollars and giving locals podiums to shoot for. They include six- and 12-hour bike races hosted by Zia Rides, bike and foot races held by Aravaipa, and a 35-mile ultramarathon put on by Revenant Running. In October, the city will host the Royal Gorge Rumble, a race in the Colorado High School Cycling League series.
The Pikes Peak Apex, a multiday mountain bike race based in Colorado Springs, has picked Cañon City to host a stage during three of the past six years, including a 40-mile-plus loop featuring a midrace crossing of the Royal Gorge Bridge, with its dizzying view of the river — a particular highlight among pro riders, race organizers said.
“You don’t really find many opportunities anywhere in the United States to do something cool like that in the middle of a ride,” said Apex executive director Micah Rice, who praised the region’s flowing, rocky terrain along with its spectacular scenery.
“It’s just a lifestyle you can easily maintain”
At the Royal Gorge Whitewater Festival — one of many fundraisers that both highlight and help pay for new outdoor amenities — revelers offered up more anecdotal evidence about the power of outdoor recreation to shift perceptions about the community.
Among them was Mandy Mashaney, an Oklahoma native who moved to Colorado Springs with her husband, Billy, in 2017. Two years ago, they moved again, to Cañon City, drawn by the small town feel, lower housing prices and river and trail access that otherwise required a trip to the mountains.
“We fell in love with it,” Mashaney said, calling the outdoor upgrades a central part of the city’s appeal.
It’s a common sentiment among the area’s home buyers, many of whom come from out of state and elsewhere in Colorado, citing Cañon City’s lower cost of living and easy access to shopping and an airport in Colorado Springs roughly an hour away, said Carla Braddy, a Realtor and Cañon City native.
“We’ve always been known as just a prison town,” said Braddy, a board member of the Royal Gorge Chamber Alliance, one of the festival’s sponsors. “We’re coming to be known as a really great value area for families.”
Corinne and John O’Hara, previously of Dillon, were at the festival in part to watch their children participate in a mountain bike race. The couple said their move to Cañon City helped fuel the teens’ deepening interest in outdoor activities of all kinds, partly thanks to the region’s warmer-than-average weather, which has led the city to brand itself the “climate capital of Colorado.”
“We traded off the accessibility of skiing for year-round mountain biking and trail access,” John O’Hara said.
“It’s just a lifestyle you can easily maintain here,” Corinne O’Hara added.
As the couple extolled their adopted home town in a gathering crowd, Warren Hart of RG RIO helped ready the slalom course on the river for an upcoming paddling contest. He worked near a line of children in lifejackets awaiting their next turn on the surf waves, while others jumped in to float a few hundred yards before running back upriver to do it again.
“Everyone loves it,” Hart said of the river as it teemed with people. “It used to look like a ditch.”
Keeping the momentum going
The community goodwill has gone a long way in helping to keep the momentum going.
Since its inception, FAR has collected nearly $1.5 million from donations, grants, special events and a “1% for Trails” promotion that has enlisted 11 downtown businesses to donate 1% of their profits. The money has helped build the trail networks in the South Cañon and Royal Gorge, a bike skills park and a popular downhill-oriented trail at Oil Well Flats, among other projects.
The group is at work on their next goals: putting the finishing touches on a new riverside children’s pump track and bike park, set for a ribbon-cutting later this month, and getting approval from BLM to finish the final, 5-mile trail segment of what they’re calling the Royal Loop — allowing riders to start on a riverside trail in Centennial Park, climb through the South Cañon area to the backside of Royal Gorge Park, cross the bridge and come back almost entirely on single track or dirt road.
“We have the funding pretty much sitting in our bank account waiting to spend it,” VanIwarden said.
On the Arkansas, RG RIO is eyeing a third surf wave at the whitewater park and is part of a coalition pushing to modify or replace a water diversion structure known as the Minnequa Dam southeast of the city.
The roughly 80-year-old dam — used to supply water to Evraz steelmill in Pueblo, the city of Florence and ditch companies — makes the river impassable to boats while damaging fish habitat for miles in each direction. Engineering a safer, navigable alternative would improve habitat and grant paddlers clear passage to the neighboring town of Florence, or to Pueblo, for that matter, backers of the effort say.
For commercial rafters and whitewater enthusiasts, the Minnequa Dam is the last “hard stop” on 140 miles of river between the Leadville headwaters and the Pueblo Reservoir.
In March, the nonprofit Arkansas River Watershed Collaborative announced it had assembled funding to begin studying options and costs of modifying or replacing the dam. The funders include Colorado Water Conservation Board and the city of Florence.
“Once you get Minnequa open, it’s going to be an economic boon for Florence, too,” RG RIO’s Moffett said, envisioning a new tradition of family tubing trips that start in Cañon City and end 7 miles downriver. “You’re going to get a whole different kind of river traffic that’s like a nice little day trip for tubing. Float all the way there, get out at Florence, have some lunch and leave.”
The project could bolster populations of feeder fish that in turn nourish larger species, contributing to the ongoing recovery of the river after decades of abuse.
“Wildlife is going to benefit, recreation is going to benefit, habitat is going to benefit,” said Andy Neinas, owner of raft trip outfitter Echo Canyon River Expeditions, who has long advocated for the change.
The river of asphalt in Cañon City
Even Cañon City’s most ardent boosters are quick to concede the city’s transformation is far from complete.
To many outsiders, its generous offerings remain stubbornly hidden — concealed by that other river in town, U.S. 50, which cuts through the city swelling to five or six lanes plus a median in its broadest passages.
A rail corridor borders the highway to the south and a frontage road to the north, further cleaving the river from Cañon City’s historic downtown area, whose 80 brick and stone buildings make up the longest stretch of preserved Main Street in the state.
Now, a years-in-the-making revitalization plan is seeking to bridge the gap between the river and downtown.
The effort involved steps to create a pedestrian corridor at Third Street linking downtown with the pedestrian bridge into Centennial Park, along with improved crossings on U.S. 50, with new medians. Related improvements to Main Street dragged on longer than expected, leaving some area business owners frustrated by the slow progress.
The more ambitious part of the plan is to target a series of abandoned properties between downtown and the river, which could clear the way for a thriving scene of shops and restaurants, helping to cement Cañon City as a Front Range alternative to higher-elevation river towns, city leaders say.
But that goal is mired in vacant buildings and deserted land, much of it requiring costly environmental remediation.
In May, the Environmental Protection Agency awarded Cañon City $1.5 million in cleanup grants partly for further remediation of the former site of Skyline Steel, which operated a scrap metal recycling facility for more than five decades before the city purchased the property in 2019, along with its collection of asbestos-laden buildings and soils contaminated with heavy metals.
“Right on the river — that’s our low-hanging fruit,” Harmann said of the property, where the city demolished five contaminated buildings in 2023. “Once that money gets turned on, in October, we’re ready to get started.”
The city’s 2017 Centennial Park master plan shows the ultimate goal for the site: a riverfront development overlooking the surf waves in the whitewater park. Whether it can be achieved may hinge on negotiations with Acorn Petroleum, a fuel supplier located next to the Skyline Steel property.
“Our plan was to help Acorn Petroleum move — offer them a land swap and offer some financial assistance through the urban renewal authority to move — but those negotiations are pretty stalled right now,” Harrmann said. Instead, the city will proceed with the cleanup while the city council decides the way forward. Harrmann said one option is to build a road around Acorn to provide access, which would in turn allow the owners of another neighboring property, the site of a former ice house, to pursue redevelopment.
“The biggest challenge, though, for the riverfront is, we’ve got to finish the cleanup,” he added. “There will be developers who come along and want to do something, regardless of whether Acorn is there or not.”
The city is also set to launch a planning process to refurbish the grounds of a former Black Hills Energy coal-fired power plant across from the Skyline Steel property that also figures into the city’s long-term facelift, and is similarly freighted with environmental concerns.
Other impediments remain. At least 16 industrial businesses have operated next to the river since the city’s founding, including a zinc smelter, an oil refinery and a petroleum tank farm, the EPA said in an April report on the city’s revitalization efforts. The figure included some businesses dating to the late-1800s that closed decades ago, potentially leaving contaminated buildings and soil, the EPA said.
For the grassroots groups that kickstarted Cañon City’s investments in the river and trails, the complementary push to renew downtown, however messy and slow moving, is another facet of the community’s return to the river — and a show of the strength of its vision.
“No sole person gets credit for this,” VanIwarden said. “It’s a labor of love by a lot of people. Which is maybe why it hasn’t died. ”
As Hart, of RG RIO, eyed the river during the whitewater festival, he pointed to the now-vacant stretch of riverbank that for decades belonged to Skyline Steel.
His group long ago helped rip out concrete chunks that had armored the banks below the business. With any luck, he said, something new will be in its evolving footprint before long — maybe a place with a few tables on a deck overlooking the Arkansas.
“A place where you can go and look out on the river and have a beer and a burger.”