Fewer new routes, more people
It was 8:30 on a Saturday morning in August at the Crags, a popular trail an hour’s drive west of Colorado Springs. The sun shone brightly, glinting off the windshields of cars parked everywhere - in ditches, crowded next to the roadside camping spots, and hanging off the steep hillside. The frenetic scene resembled the proverbial anthill, with the ants – hikers, runners, mountain bikers and a collection of dogs - in good spirits on a cloudless day.
They were drawn to this trail on the west flank of Pikes Peak for different reasons. The main route offers an easy hike that’s perfect for families with children and visiting relatives. An adjoining trail to Devil’s Playground has become the new hot spot for hikers and runners who have sought a new route to the summit of Pikes Peak.
The trails at the Crags are located in the Pike National Forest, a sweeping one million acres of forests and mountains with hidden lakes, streams and canyons. They are among 150 non-motorized Forest Service trails on Pikes Peak, hundreds of trails in the Pikes Peak region and thousands of trails on Colorado’s 30,000 square miles of public lands.
With all that space, why was there a freeway-worthy traffic jam at the Crags, and on the same day, similar situations at two other popular area trailheads, for Barr Trail and Waldo Canyon? With this kind of wearying overuse, what will these places and others throughout Colorado look like in 20 years?
Pikes Peak, early morning, November, 2009. What does the future hold for its trails?
After the Great Depression and World War II, recreating in the outdoors saw a rise in popularity. It had been building steadily, wrote conservationist Aldo Leopold in his 1949 book, “A Sand County Almanac.”
“Recreation became a problem with a name in the days of the elder Roosevelt, when the railroads which had banished the countryside from the city began to carry city-dwellers, en masse, to the countryside,” he wrote. “It began to be noticed that the greater the exodus, the smaller the per-capita ration of peace, solitude, wildlife, and scenery, and the longer the migration to reach them.”
Today, according to U.S. Census estimates, more than 370,000 people live in the city, more than 520,000 in El Paso County and more than 21,000 in neighboring Teller County. By 2030, the State Demographer’s Office estimates nearly 905,000 people will live in El Paso and Teller counties.
Combine that rising population with a continued increase in interest in outdoor recreation (the Outdoor Foundation reports overall participation in outdoor activities increased to 50 percent of Americans in 2007) and you get crowded trails.
The Forest Service estimates 50,000 people start up Barr Trail each year. At least 30,000 explore the Crags, estimates Frank Landis, recreation planner for the agency’s Pikes Peak ranger district.
And although there aren’t hard numbers for Waldo Canyon, Landis says he believes it could be the highest-use trail in the state, drawing tens of thousands to its easy-to-access trailhead.
And those are just the non-motorized trails. The state’s trails that allow motorized travel on motorcycles, ATVs and four-wheel-drive vehicles are impacted even more by population increases and an explosion in popularity of the sport machines – more than 130,000 ATV and dirt bike licenses were issued by Colorado State Parks in the 2007-’08 season; representing a 45 percent increase from the 2000-’01 season.
From the doorway of his home in Green Mountain Falls, Dick Bratton has seen trail use explode. Bratton knows his trails – he has been on the Colorado Trails Committee for five years; worked for years with Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado, a trail advocacy group, and is the Colorado coordinator for the cross-country American Discovery Trail.
He personally oversaw the building of a popular trail that begins in the heart of his small town. The Catamount Trail, which winds up a steep hillside just down the road from Bratton’s house, “is no longer a secret,” Bratton says. But Bratton isn’t worried about that trail and others that start in Green Mountain Falls. “We built it as a sustainable trail. It drains well. There are no erosion problems. There’s not a litter problem.”
Bratton echoes Aldo Leopold’s statement about the increasingly difficult search for solitude. “Hikers are trying to find the solitude they got so used to,” he says. “It’s there – you just have to look in wilderness areas and areas farther from the trailhead.”
How far is far enough? Mary Burger, a longtime trail designer and builder who founded Friends of the Peak, a local trail advocacy group, says, “It’s only about 1,000 feet. It used to be that 90 percent of the people who were doing something outdoors would stay within 500 feet of their car. Now, you have to go further to leave them behind. People are staying on the trails and expecting the trails to take them somewhere.”
Friends of the Peak volunteers care for trails on Pikes Peak, and they built the popular Devil’s Playground Trail to the mountain’s summit. The group is still working on the top portion, and Burger says she sees a constant stream of people using the relatively new trail.
Some are drawn by the novelty – new trails are becoming scarce. More money, sweat and hours are being devoted to maintaining existing trails, or in the case of many of the trails on the state’s 54 14,000-foot peaks, rerouting old social trails to make them environmentally sustainable.
The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative was founded in the mid-1990s by a collection of groups that started to notice the alarming rate of decline on the fourteeners. “Impact was accelerating and becoming extensive,” says CFI spokesman Greg Seabloom. “In Chicago Basin (in southwest Colorado), for example, we found erosion gullies two or three feet deep and 10 to 15 feet wide. They were old trails or roads, but because of the soils and vegetation types there, they had suffered a lot over the past few years.”
The CFI estimates a half-million people visit the fourteeners each year. Mountains nearest the Front Range suffer the most impact. “Grays and Torreys peaks and Mount Bierstadt see hundreds and hundreds of people every week,” Seabloom says.
The CFI uses volunteers to serve as trail stewards who monitor fourteener trails and educate hikers and climbers, and others who work on dozens of trail-building projects unique to the high altitude routes.
Words like “sustainable” and “maintaining” are often used by conservationists and trail advocates when they are asked about how they see their favorite trails in the future. And maintenance projects need muscle.
Dick Bratton says he has seen an increase in volunteerism. “There are more and more people volunteering to work on trails. There seems to be more concern about taking care of what we have.”
And why do we care? Conservationist Leopold writes that it’s complicated: “Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altriusm, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. “
Burger of Friends of the Peak says it this way: “We often talk about recreation as a method towards fitness. That’s part of the total package. But I believe our desire to be outdoors is because we are natural animals. For me, being in nature satisfies something that’s almost like a hunger.”
But Burger warns that, no matter how much importance we place on outdoors experiences, we can’t lose sight of what could happen if we don’t work to sustain public lands. “Here’s the problem,” she says. “There are 150 miles of trails on Pikes Peak alone. None of them are being maintained except by volunteers with Friends of the Peak. We can work on about a mile of trail a year. With 150 miles, we will never finish!”
So she re-emphasizes the importance of volunteer groups such as FOTP, CFI and Volunteers for Outdoors Colorado. “We have to get the word out that trail work is the best sport there is. It’s not drudgery. It’s not horrible. It’s not something that just convicts do. It is fun.”
And it’s necessary and effective, says Dick Bratton. “Trail building has come a long ways in the past 15 years. We are building and rerouting trails that are much more sustainable; that require almost no maintenance.”
So how does trail planning and sustainability relate to trails such as the Crags? That’s the question the Forest Service answered this year with some changes to the long-time favorite.
“We knew there were overcrowding and safety issues there,” Frank Landis says. “People had to drive through the campground to get to the trailhead. It deteriorated from the setting along the creek. We had come to realize it wasn’t an ideal situation, having a trailhead in companion with a campground.”
Earlier this summer, a new parking lot was built outside the campground. The lot designed to hold 40-60 cars “is something we’ve been trying to do for 15 years,” Landis says. The Forest Service built a new trail from the lot which bypasses the campground and hooks up with the original Crags trail after about a half-mile.
On the crowded August morning, there were only four cars parked in the lot, but Landis says that future signs and regulations will further reroute motorized traffic out of the campground.
The new route, with a 400-foot elevation gain, makes the beginning of the gentle Crags trail longer and more strenuous, but it’s a sign of inevitable future changes that will allow these crowded hot spots to remain open.
The Forest Service is also addressing motorized travel in the forest. The Pikes Peak District is in the midst of a public comment period for its South Rampart Travel Management Plan, which designates and maps routes on forest land that are open to motorized vehicles. When the plan is finalized, some existing trails may be closed because they aren’t deemed sustainable.
Those are tough choices, Landis says. “The hardest thing to do in recreation is try to match the experience with the user’s expectations.”
And what does Landis see 20 years from now? “We are looking right now at accessibility. The population will get older, so we will have even more obligation to accommodate them. And with that older population, I see more opportunities for education and interpretation at sites.”
CFI’s Seabloom hopes for a future “with sustainable trails built on all the fourteeners, with volunteer groups who are actively maintaining them.”
Bratton believes the state will respond to an increasing population and even heavier use of trails “by shifting our programs to provide more money for trails maintenance.”
And trail users may have to open their own wallets if they want to visit their favorite trails. “I think we are moving toward a more managed recreation setting rather than unmanaged,” Landis says. “You might see designated dispersed camping sites rather than allowing camping everywhere. You might see more ‘pay to play’ areas” with additional fees.”
Despite the possibility of having to pay for more outdoor experiences, experts don’t believe the crowds will dissipate. U.S. Forest Service scientist Ken Cordell wrote in a paper titled “The Rise in Outdoor Recreation,” that popularity can be an opportunity for those who manage public lands.
Cordell writes that public interest in nature can be converted to “active support of and engagement in conservation,” and that it can also be used “as a means of stimulating greater physical activity.”
Mary Burger of Friends of the Peak believes interest in the outdoors “is always good.” She has a simple wish for the future: “That more people learn to enjoy the out-of-doors in a respectful way, and become part of a community, the better off we will be.”
