With Memorial Day looming and summer vacation travel not far behind, public land managers and the Colorado tourism industry are bracing for another summer of crowded trails, overflowing parking lots and likely damage to recreation resources.
Outdoor recreation in the state has grown steadily over the past decade, but following a year that saw an explosive surge driven by the pandemic, there are no signs that that trend is going to reverse.
“All the indices within the tourism industry, the travel industry, are telling us people are coming — and lots of them,” said Scott Fitzwilliams, supervisor of the White River National Forest. “If it’s anything like last year — and many predictions are that it will be more than last year — we expect a lot of people on the forest.”
With new reservation systems, regulations increasing and even more visitors anticipated, the consistent refrain this year from public-lands managers and tourism officials is simple: Do your homework, know before you go, and have a backup plan in case you need to adjust when you get there.
Rocky Mountain National Park will have a timed-entry reservation system again this year, beginning Memorial Day weekend. Officials of the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests this week announced similar systems to manage visitation at two of their most scenic attractions, Brainard Lake and the Mount Evans road from Echo Lake to the peak’s 14,265-foot summit.
In announcing those changes and others, Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests spokeswoman Reid Armstrong cited a 200% increase in outdoor recreation last year across Colorado’s northern Front Range as motivation for the new policies.
“We’re not expecting any fewer visitors than we saw last year,” Armstrong said. “Colorado’s jewel is its public lands, its open spaces. We think people will continue to want to use those.”
Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks figure to get a lot more traffic, too. Lloyd Athearn, executive director of the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, said last year’s final numbers from automated trail counters aren’t in yet, but extrapolating from the numbers that are available, the number of people on fourteeners last year probably exceeded 400,000. That’s about 20% more than the previous high reached in 2018. Fourteener traffic had previously been tracking at annual increases of 5% to 7%.
RELATED: Reservations will be required this year at Brainard Lake and Mount Evans road
“As someone who has been working on Colorado mountains for 25 years, the safe bet is that you will always have more people this year than you had last year,” Athearn said. “The question is, how high? Because we’re still dealing with things from the pandemic, I think people will want to get out because it’s just safer outdoors. There were probably a lot of people who got introduced to the outdoors last year, because it was the only safe thing you could do, who are probably like, ‘I had fun last summer, I’m going to keep doing this stuff.”
Surging visitation is putting pressure on recreation resources at a time when there are fewer people to protect them. Fitzwilliams said he wishes he had more staff for public engagement, patrols and enforcement, but his budget is half of what it was 10 years ago.
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White River, which extends from Summit County nearly to Grand Junction on both sides of Interstate 70, is the busiest national forest in the United States. Much of that visitation comes from the 11 ski areas within its borders, but it has major summer attractions, including Hanging Lake in Glenwood Canyon and the Maroon Bells near Aspen.
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“It’s a little intimidating as we head toward the busy season,” Fitzwilliams said of the staff shortage. “Combining less staff with more and more visitors to the forest, it’s tough. I don’t think we’re meeting the public’s expectations. When you have people breaking the rules or leaving trash or leaving fires unattended, they call us (and say), ‘You’ve got to catch these people.’ There are only so many of us.”
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“It’s shaping up to be a very busy season,” said Donna Carlson, executive director of the Estes Chamber of Commerce, which represents businesses in Estes Park, the Front Range portal to Rocky Mountain National Park. “We’re excited about it, wanting to recover some lost ground. Trying to get a workforce here is definitely our biggest concern right now — getting people who can work this crazy busy summer.”
Last year, Estes Park had to deal with the closure of Rocky Mountain National Park on March 20 due to the pandemic. It reopened May 27, but had to close again due to wildfires in the fall. Still, sales tax revenues declined only slightly year over year, Carlson said.
“People were coming here when they couldn’t go anywhere else,” Carlson said. “Considering that we’re significantly more open this year, with the level of vaccinations, we’re bracing for a very strong season.”
Related: Maroon Bells shuttle service, parking, will be reservation-only again this year
In the Arapaho and Roosevelt forests — which extend along the Front Range from Jefferson County to Wyoming and rank as the fourth-busiest in the nation — visitors created thousands of new campsites last summer just by pitching tents or parking vehicles in undeveloped areas where “dispersed” camping was allowed. They built hundreds of campfire rings, leaving behind trash and human waste. This week, forest officials announced that they are converting some of those areas into day use only this year to help the land recover.
Change is coming to the Crested Butte area, too. Areas near town that previously allowed dispersed camping are being converted this year into campgrounds with designated camping spots. Camping will be allowed only in those designated sites, and when all those sites are filled, campers will have to look elsewhere. That impact will be felt in the Front Range.
“Crested Butte was very popular, like, ‘Hey, I’m just going to CB for the weekend,’ if you were from Denver,” said John Weir, marketing manager for Bentgate Mountaineering in Golden. “It’s not going to be that no-brainer where you just show up and set up your tent wherever there is a spot.”
Sarah Steinwand, a spokeswoman for the Gunnison-Crested Butte Tourism Association, said the move is necessary to protect fragile resources.
“What was happening is that all of those spots were getting full and people were camping in the middle of wildflower fields,” Steinwand said. “It’s still free camping. It’s just that now there will be a designated post at each site, and each side will have a fire ring, just to make it very clear where people can and cannot camp.”
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