For non-Coloradans, the White River National Forest is just to the west of the Arapaho-Roosevelt. While it is further from population concentrations on the Front Range, it is also the Forest with many famous ski resorts, including Vail and Aspen. It’s kind of a Gucci Gulch of Colorado. Anyway, it would be interesting to hear more from others than Wilderness Workshop in this Colorado Sun story. Again the difference with motorized seems to be (so far) no new trails, rather than remove existing ones. Is it a matter of time?
It’s been eight years since Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper announced his “Colorado The Beautiful” plan to connect 16 gaps in trails across the state, championing development of the highest profile trails, many of which had been in the works for many years.
Only one trail on the list of 16 rural and urban pathways is completely finished: the Palisade Plunge in the Grand Valley. Some appear permanently stuck, like the multi-use trail proposed between Eldorado Canyon and Walker Ranch in Boulder County. Most are winding through complex approvals involving multiple local governments and state and federal land agencies.
The slow, steady trail building is happening as land managers and local governments begin adding extra layers of scrutiny to recreation and its impacts. For many years, recreation was heralded as the easy choice when replacing things like mining, drilling and logging on public lands. That is changing as adventuring skiers, cyclists, paddlers and hikers push deeper into remote areas.
“Land managers like the Forest Service are increasingly recognizing the importance of reducing the ecological impacts of recreation. It’s not an easy task,” said Will Roush, the director of the Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop. “However, our land management agencies still have a long way to go regarding crafting policy and implementing management decisions and practices to ensure our decreasing wildlife populations are protected from ever-increasing recreational use and development of public lands.”
The recent approval of a small section of the proposed 83-mile Carbondale to Crested Butte Trail — one of Hickenlooper’s 16 priority trails — illustrates the growing wariness of adding new recreational access in wild areas.
****************
In 2023, the Wilderness Workshop commissioned a study to analyze the ecological impacts of recreation in western Colorado’s wild places as participation in outdoor activities exploded. The study detailed how trails can disturb soil and vegetation in wildlife habitat and suggested new trails should be built only after “thorough consideration of the ecological consequences” and a better management strategy would be to concentrate use on existing trails.”
The impacts of recreation are becoming more evident in the 2.3 million-acre White River National Forest, where an estimated 17 million annual visitors inject $1.6 billion into rural Western Slope communities, making it the busiest, most economically vibrant national forest in the country. Roush and the Wilderness Workshop have spent years pushing the Forest Service to consider quality over quantity when it comes to recreation on public land, with additional protections for undeveloped areas. And limited new trail development.
Roush said the underway update to the 2002 White River National Forest Management Plan is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for wild lands and wildlife advocates to work with the Forest Service “to ensure our public lands are not loved to death.”
“The science is clear: The most important piece of that is increasing protections for large, unfragmented landscapes,” Roush said.
****************
Seems to me that there are many scientific disciplines to consider. Anyway, the decision for the federal chunk took five years.
The White River National Forest started a National Environmental Policy Act review of five miles of the Redstone to McClure Pass segment on federally managed land in 2019 and issued a final decision in July. The White River’s acting forest supervisor Heather Noel approved a 5-mile, natural-surface trail following an historic wagon trail and the old McClure Pass Road to the top of the pass. Her decision required seasonal closures for construction and maintenance of the trail to reduce impacts for nesting birds, calving elk and lynx. The Forest Service also committed to a comprehensive analysis of the entire trail for future segments planned between Carbondale and Redstone.
The White River National Forest approved five miles of new trail between Redstone and the top of McClure Pass with seasonal closures to protect wildlife. (Handout)
Roush and the Wilderness Workshop cheered the promise of a landscape-scale review of the trail after working with the Pitkin County and Forest Service to protect wildlife habitat along the Crystal River.
“I’m very glad the Forest Service recognized the need to shift from a piecemeal to a comprehensive approach when considering recreational impacts,” Roush said. “It was also heartening to see Pitkin County amend their trail plan to remove the option for a trail through the ecologically valuable lands near Avalanche Creek. The animals and landscape win as a result. Going forward it will be even more critical for land managers and proponents of recreational development to take this holistic and ecologically centered approach from the start.”
2 thoughts on “New Trails Under Scrutiny, Non-Motorized People Have Impacts Too: Colorado Sun”
The new extreme risk aversion to constructing new hiking trails makes me wonder if soon hikers will be in the same situation as motorized users: banned from cross country travel with a rapidly increasing population confined to a rapidly shrinking trail network with hundreds of miles of trails being closed every year. That’s the logical end of a governing philosophy which holds that public lands should be managed for the sole benefit of wildlife and not the American people.
The Rio Grande NF has reduced the number of non motorized trails over the years (decades) primarily in an effort to reduce the workload, but in some case with the added benefit of providing more undisturbed ground for wildlife. The forest has used two strategies to accomplish this: Officially removing trails from the system and quit maintaining some that get little use. None of the decisions made to reduce the number of trails came from pressure from an environmental group.
The RGNF doesn’t get as much use as Front Range forests and those along the I-70 corridor and thus, doesn’t get nearly the recreation funding. Even with the forest’s robust volunteer program, there was no way to keep up with maintenance of the old existing trail system. It is even more difficult to keep up with proper trail maintenance now as the RGNF is a high elevation forest with more than 30% of the cover type in spruce-fir forests. The RGNF was ground zero for the spruce beetle epidemic that primarily moved through the area from 2005 to 2018 (there are still some small pockets of activity). The beetle-killed trees are falling quickly and it is all trail crews can do to clear the trails each year, never mind really taking care of the tread.
Over the years, the RGNF has received requests from motorized and non motorized groups for new trails and the response usually was there will be no net gain of trails, so which trails get closed? The forest is now beginning work on new travel management plans; first winter travel management and then, supposedly, road and trail travel management. In 2006, the forest supervisor promised at a public meeting to begin work on a road and trail travel management plan within two years. Still waiting….
The new extreme risk aversion to constructing new hiking trails makes me wonder if soon hikers will be in the same situation as motorized users: banned from cross country travel with a rapidly increasing population confined to a rapidly shrinking trail network with hundreds of miles of trails being closed every year. That’s the logical end of a governing philosophy which holds that public lands should be managed for the sole benefit of wildlife and not the American people.
The Rio Grande NF has reduced the number of non motorized trails over the years (decades) primarily in an effort to reduce the workload, but in some case with the added benefit of providing more undisturbed ground for wildlife. The forest has used two strategies to accomplish this: Officially removing trails from the system and quit maintaining some that get little use. None of the decisions made to reduce the number of trails came from pressure from an environmental group.
The RGNF doesn’t get as much use as Front Range forests and those along the I-70 corridor and thus, doesn’t get nearly the recreation funding. Even with the forest’s robust volunteer program, there was no way to keep up with maintenance of the old existing trail system. It is even more difficult to keep up with proper trail maintenance now as the RGNF is a high elevation forest with more than 30% of the cover type in spruce-fir forests. The RGNF was ground zero for the spruce beetle epidemic that primarily moved through the area from 2005 to 2018 (there are still some small pockets of activity). The beetle-killed trees are falling quickly and it is all trail crews can do to clear the trails each year, never mind really taking care of the tread.
Over the years, the RGNF has received requests from motorized and non motorized groups for new trails and the response usually was there will be no net gain of trails, so which trails get closed? The forest is now beginning work on new travel management plans; first winter travel management and then, supposedly, road and trail travel management. In 2006, the forest supervisor promised at a public meeting to begin work on a road and trail travel management plan within two years. Still waiting….