As most Coloradans know, the lyrics to “America the Beautiful” were inspired by a trek to the summit of Pikes Peak via prairie wagon in 1893. But when Katharine Lee Bates penned a poem called “Pikes Peak,” which became an American anthem after it was set to music in 1910, she could scarcely have imagined the great mountain becoming a trash heap.
Outdoor recreation advocates fear that’s precisely what is happening to the majestic 14,107-foot peak that soars above Colorado Springs, along with the surrounding Pike National Forest.
“We’re trashing America’s Mountain,” says Susan Davies, executive director of the Trails and Open Space Coalition of the Pikes Peak region.
Increasing population, untrained newcomers to outdoor recreation and blatant disregard for the natural environment are causing resource damage, advocates say, spoiling the experience for those who recreate responsibly. As a result, some are proposing that Colorado Parks and Wildlife take over management on the mountain, which currently involves multiple agencies. Discussions are only in preliminary stages, but CPW isn’t opposed to the idea.
“There are, potentially, multiple benefits,” said Frank McGee, southeast region manager for CPW. “In addition to increased or better developed recreational amenities, if we can do a better job of concentrating recreational uses, there’s also an opportunity to reduce impacts on natural resources.”
Among advocates for recreation on Pikes Peak and in the surrounding forest, there is widespread alarm that something must be done.
“Many of us have been convinced for some time that the forest is just broken,” Davies says. “It’s so large, it’s so loved, the population is growing so fast. We are also seeing a level of brazenness that we didn’t see before. People drive up and dump a refrigerator. People drive up and dump a stolen car. People are shooting up trees. I hear and see these things. It’s not that they think they can do it; they know they can get away with it. They’re spoiling my forest.”
Ryan Nehl, supervisor of the Pike and San Isabel National Forest, said the level of irresponsible behavior on the mountain is alarming.
“We do a lot of clean-up on the mountain,” Nehl said. “I was just at our facility and we had over a dozen abandoned RVs that we had collected and were disposing of. It’s a very costly, sometimes dangerous, activity when you come across things like that in the forest. Our law enforcement agents are highly professional and very good at what they do, but the scale of the problem — we could use some assistance. If the state could provide some assistance in that manner, I would be overjoyed.”
Similar behavior has occurred in popular recreation areas across Colorado in recent years, especially since the pandemic which brought out an influx of nature neophytes. But Pikes Peak has unique pressures. It is the only Colorado fourteener located on the outskirts of a metropolitan area — Colorado Springs being Colorado’s second-largest city — and one of the few that is a drive-to tourist destination. Nearly 24 million visited the area in 2022.
The summit is only 12 miles from downtown Colorado Springs, as the crow flies. Hiking to the summit — a 7,400-foot ascent via Barr Trail — or driving up via the Pikes Peak Highway are major attractions. So are the Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway and the Manitou Incline. The nearby Garden of the Gods also attracts millions of people annually.
“Trash and dumping is probably one of the biggest challenges we started seeing, dumping on our public lands like never before,” said Becky Leinweber, executive director of the Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance. “It’s so many tons and tons of dumping of materials. In addition to that, we’re seeing a lot of conflicts between users. With more people comes more interactions, and people not enjoying the experience as much. We’ve got people hiking while other people are running, you’ve got motorized (users) on some of the multi-use trails as well.
“The experience isn’t as great as it used to be,” Leinweber added. “A lot of people end up going off-trail, or off-system trails, creating their own (trails), so we’re seeing more resource damage that way. Bathrooms, if they’re open and maintained, are getting overwhelmed. We truly don’t have enough infrastructure to support all of this use we’ve seen seeing.”
Pikes Peak and surrounding slopes are under multiple jurisdictions, which complicates the problem. Among them are the Pike National Forest, the City of Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs Utilities and others.
“Our land managers are completely under-resourced, and Pikes Peak is such a patchwork of jurisdictions,” Leinweber said. “We have 230,000 acres in the Pikes Peak Ranger District, 225 miles of trail, and the needs are overwhelming for our land managers.”
Leinweber’s group is looking hard for solutions. The Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance is a partnership comprised of government agencies, outdoor businesses and non-profits including CPW, the forest service, Colorado Springs, El Paso County, the Outdoor Recreation Industry Office of state government, the Bureau of Land Management and the Colorado Outdoor Partnership. PPORA began working on the issues facing the region in 2017.
“Even at that time, we were seeing quite a bit of growth, and what we were hearing from our land managers was that they were seeing changes, not just the numbers of people using our public lands, but the impacts and their level of education, just people knowing how to be out there,” Leinweber said. “They were seeing a lot of irresponsible use, some user conflicts, way back then. We started leaning in on, how do we work together to tackle these issues?”
PPORA is pursuing solutions through a process it calls the Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative, consulting stakeholders, conducting public listening sessions, surveys and outreach.
“We now have some draft strategies and action items that will be coming to the public in the next couple of months, when we have our next round of public listening sessions,” Leinweber said. “We took all the feedback we got from the public, from planning, from the alternative models, from listening to stakeholders and industry, and we broke into smaller focus groups to lean into some of these things. One model really did rise to the top as something that needed greater consideration and exploration.”
That was the example of the Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area, a massive swath of land that extends nearly 150 miles along the Arkansas River from Leadville to Pueblo Reservor through Buena Vista, Salida, Cañon City and Florence. Most of the land belongs to the BLM or U.S. Forest Service, but CPW manages it.
Some see that as a possible model to solve the mounting problems on Pikes Peak, but they stress they are far from making decisions.
“We’re nowhere near that,” Leinweber said. “It has been, ‘Hah, this is an interesting thought; what would that look like in our area?’ What considerations would we need to think about to holistically manage that, similar to Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area, where the user experience is consistent across the landscape? How can (CPW’s) involvement support our other land managers? How can what they do add resources to our other land managers that they can’t tap into right now?”
The Arkansas Headwaters is not an “equitable comparison,” Nehl said.
“We’ve got some differences of scale,” Nehl said. “The Arkansas Headwaters is a narrow band along the river corridor. We’re talking on a scale of over 200,000 acres for the Pikes Peak massif.”
Furthermore, Nehl said, to enter into an agreement with another agency to manage recreation on forest land would require revisions to the official forest plan, likely involving a lengthy process that includes an environmental impact study and public engagement.
“We manage on behalf of the American people, not just a localized area,” Nehl said. “We certainly take into account local interests and work with local partners. But a change of this scale would best be done through a forest plan revision process. That’s the guiding document we use for making substantive changes on the landscape.”
Native American voices need to be involved, Nehl added.
“There is a significant amount of tribal interest in that mountain,” Nehl said. “It is a sacred site, and we need to have those tribal voices in the room when we are having these discussions.”
The process already has been long, and much is left to do, but there is urgency among those trying to save Pikes Peak.
“Whatever solution we end up with, we need to move forward, and we need to move forward fast,” Leinweber said. “The problems are only growing, and the growth of people coming is not going to change. Planning for that is the smart way to go.”
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