When Denver’s Gates Corp. in 2008 debuted a belt-drive system to replace century-old chains on bikes, the company promised a “game changer” for the cycling industry. 

But the chainless revolution —  which the company helped launch for motorcycles in the 1980s — needed big help from bike-makers. While traditional bike chains can easily separate to slide into a bike frame, the belt-drive system needed a frame that could separate to accommodate the carbon belt. 

One of the first bike companies to step up with a new frame to accommodate the Gates belts was the family-owned Spot Brand in Golden. The company designed a frame with what it called “Drop-Out” technology that fit the Gates “Carbon Drive” belt system. 

In 2008, Spot Brands and Gates Corp. inked a licensing and royalty agreement that gave half of the Drop-Out invention to Gates so it could license the technology to other bike manufacturers. Gates said it would protect the patent on the design and pay Spot 8% of its net sales of any products sold by bike companies who licensed the Drop-Out design.

A couple weeks ago Spot sued Gates Corp., saying the Denver-based company has not paid any royalties while the company has expanded its belt technology into more than 1,000 bike models. The lawsuit says Spot is owed “millions of dollars in unpaid royalties.”

“Gates’s benefit was achieved at Spot’s expense because Gates deprived Spot of the economic benefits of the Drop-Out while keeping for Gates alone the economic benefits of the growth of the belt-drive bicycle market,” reads the lawsuit filed in Denver District Court, which claims Gates owes Spot millions in unpaid royalties. 

By 2011, Gates had 54 bike brands using the belt drive on 92 models and the company said the number of Gates belt-driven bikes was growing by 50% a year. The Gates Carbon Drive is now available on 135 brands of bikes offering 1,000 models. The belt-drive system has proven very popular among e-bike brands. 

Bike industry veteran Frank Scurlock in 2009 sold Spot Brand bikes to its current owner — Andrew Lumpkin, whose family founded the Avid bike brake brand in the early 1990s. Scurlock then joined Gates as business development manager for the company’s nascent belt-drive system. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office lists Scurlock as the inventor of the Drop-Out design and Gates Corp. is assigned the patent.

In its lawsuit, Spot says it has identified 30 bike brands building more than 100 models of bikes that use the Drop-Out invention. Gates has made “substantial revenues” selling its belt-drive system to bike brands that use the Drop-Out technology, reads the lawsuit. And those manufacturers “generated even greater revenues than Gates” on bikes with the Drop-Out “all while Spot lost its competitive advantage in the belt drive-bicycle market due to its competitors using its invention for free,” the lawsuit reads.

Gates has not responded to the lawsuit and a spokesperson for the company did not return emails. Spot’s attorneys say the bike-maker tried to contact Gates for records on any companies that have licensed the Drop-Out design, but Gates said it has no records and has not sublicensed the design to any other bike companies, according to the lawsuit. 

“Simply put, Gates did not sublicense the Drop-Out Patent and therefore does not owe Spot Brand any royalty payments,” reads a letter from Gates Corp. attorneys sent to Spot in November last year. The Gates attorneys said the separable frame designs on other bikes  “employ a different approach than that covered by the … patent and simply do not infringe the same.”

Over the course of several letters sent back and forth beginning last fall, Gates’ lawyers said other designs are different from Spot’s Drop-Out while Spot attorneys argue the other bike-makers are using patented technology. In a May 2024 letter, Spot lawyers said if Gates paid Spot $25 million, the bike company would drop the matter and not file a lawsuit. Gates declined the settlement offer and told Spot to not contact the other bike-makers with warnings they were in violation of a licensing agreement with Gates. 

“Gates wanted a piece of Spot’s Drop-Out invention because it was the best solution available to accommodate the Gates Carbon Drive while maintaining frame strength and rigidity. Spot was the first to innovate this module in the market, and along with Gates obtained broad patent rights to protect it,” said Andrew Unthank, the attorney representing Spot Brands in the lawsuit. 

Unthank said Spot has been focused on building bikes since the 2008 agreement and “trusting Gates would live up to its obligation.” When the bike company began to notice more bikes with its Drop-Out design in 2023, Spot called on Gates to enforce the patent and pay royalties.

“Gates offered an ever-changing list of reasons why it is not obligated to pay royalties,” said Unthank, who argues Gates encouraged other bike-makers to use the Drop-Out invention. “Instead of supporting Spot as its joint owner of the patented Drop-Out, Gates dodged and deflected, forcing Spot to investigate further on its own and ultimately into this litigation.”

Sneak Peek of the Week

Steamboat Springs paddleboard pioneer sells Hala, Colorado Kayak Supply to longtime friends

Steamboat entrepreneur Peter Hall was among the first to design an inflatable paddleboard specifically made for navigating whitewater.

With a $30,000 initial investment in 2011, Hall’s Hala boards — with catchy names like the Hala Atcha, Hala Peno and the Hala Nass — helped create a new way to play in rivers and creeks.

“We set people up with a board that could tackle all kinds of whitewater. We were doing R&D and designing stuff for a cohort of paddlers that didn’t exist back then but we helped bring the sport to life,” said 41-year-old Hall.

The pandemic broke Hall. Shops canceled orders in the summer of 2020 but then doubled up heading into the next year as outdoor recreation soared. He tried to recover using a loan from the Small Business Administration, but then the federal government’s interest rate hikes added $135,000 in debt service to Hall’s bottom line. And then shops with overflowing shelves started canceling orders as the post-pandemic boom in outdoor recreation ebbed.

“Consumer behavior before, during and after the pandemic caused businesses to need to move faster than was possible and that friction is expensive,” Hall said. “Now there are prices being driven down by the oversupply of paddleboards and all these pool-toy paddleboards that sell for $199 and people are selling them for less than cost just to stop paying for storage. The bottom has just been swiped out of the whole paddlesports market.”

And Hall has filed for bankruptcy protection. He helped his creditors sell Hala Gear to a longtime employee, Colleen King. Colorado Kayak Supply — an online paddlesports retailer founded in Buena Vista that Hall acquired in 2019 from a seller who was struggling — sold to Jon Kahn, the longtime owner of Denver’s Confluence Kayak and Ski shop.

“Oh yes, I’m keenly aware that the previous owners have not been able to figure it out,” said Kahn, who opened Confluence Kayak in 1995 on Platte Street “when there were five, six other paddle shops in Denver and Boulder. Now there’s just two of us.”

Kahn hopes operating Colorado Kayak Supply — it’s often called CKS, which conveniently matches the initials of Kahn’s shop — in Denver with his existing warehouse space will help the company. The previous operators rented storage space in the Upper Arkansas River Valley and Steamboat Springs. And Kahn has a vibrant winter business that will help him weather the seasonal flow of paddlesports.

>> Click over to The Sun on Monday to read this story

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The Playground

Spot sues Gates over millions in unpaid royalties for bike frame invention that fits belts, not chains

When Denver’s Gates Corp. in 2008 debuted a belt-drive system to replace century-old chains on bikes, the company promised a “game changer” for the cycling industry.

But the chainless revolution — which the company helped launch for motorcycles in the 1980s — needed big help from bike-makers. While traditional bike chains can easily separate to slide into a bike frame, the belt-drive system needed a frame that could separate to accommodate the carbon belt.

One of the first bike companies to step up with a new frame to accommodate the Gates belts was the family-owned Spot Brand in Golden. The company designed a frame with what it called “Drop-Out” technology that fit the Gates “Carbon Drive” belt system.

In 2008, Spot Brands and Gates Corp. inked a licensing and royalty agreement that gave half of the Drop-Out invention to Gates so it could license the technology to other bike-makers. Gates said it would protect the patent on the design and pay Spot 8% of its net sales of any products sold by bike-makers who licensed the Drop-Out design.

A couple weeks ago Spot sued Gates Corp., saying the Denver-based company has not paid any royalties while the company has expanded its belt technology into more than 1,000 bike models. The lawsuit says Spot is owed “millions of dollars in unpaid royalties.”

“Gates’s benefit was achieved at Spot’s expense because Gates deprived Spot of the economic benefits of the Drop-Out while keeping for Gates alone the economic benefits of the growth of the belt-drive bicycle market,” reads the lawsuit filed in Denver District Court, which claims Gates owes Spot millions in unpaid royalties.

By 2011, Gates had 54 bike brands using the belt drive on 92 models and the company said the number of Gates belt-driven bikes was growing by 50% a year. The Gates Carbon Drive is now available on 135 brands of bikes offering 1,000 models. The belt-drive system has proven very popular among e-bike brands.

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story

The Guide

Colorado gets $5.8 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund

The Land and Water Conservation Fund last week delivered $325 million to all 50 states, the largest distribution from the fund’s state program since 1979.

Colorado got $5.8 million that will be distributed in the next grant cycle by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

Last year, Colorado received five grants from the Land and Water Conservation Fund for $5.5 million for parks, trails, recreation programs and open space in Boulder, Erie, Idaho Springs, Jefferson County and Rifle. Colorado Parks and Wildlife submitted 11 grant applications for projects seeking a total of $10.3 million in LWCF funding.

Applications from Colorado communities seeking a portion of the $5.8 million in LWCF Colorado funds are due in October and will be announced next spring. Local, county, state and tribal governments can apply for $100,000 to $1.25 million in grants for recreation projects on government-owned land.

Since 1965, the LWCF’s state program has distributed $86 million for 976 projects in Colorado. Combined with distributions through the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the LWCF has sent $357.1 million to 1,691 projects in Colorado since 1966.

The fund gets $900 million a year from royalties paid by companies drilling off-shore for oil and gas in U.S. managed waters. Last year, the Land and Water Conservation Fund delivered $3.4 million for the Pike and San Isabel National Forests to support the acquisition of 289 acres atop the 14er Mount Democrat. In 2021, the fund delivered $8.5 million to the White River National Forest for the acquisition of Sweetwater Lake.

“The Lost Mountaineers” documentary — screening in Vail, Leadville and Denver this week — details the 10th Mountain Division finals days of WWII

At the bottom of Italy’s deepest lake lies a mystery. The amphibious vehicle that carried 25 10th Mountain Division soldiers in the final days of WWII sits upright on the bottom of Lake Garda. All but one of the soldiers are listed as missing in action. Their remains were not found after their amphibious vehicle sank in the alpine lake on the night of April 30, 1945.

Volunteer divers found the wreckage in 2012. A submarine searched the lake bottom in 2013 and found no evidence of the 24 men who drowned that night. (There was a sole survivor, who worked as a lifeguard before joining the 10th Mountain.) German forces surrendered a week later and the deaths of the 24 10th Mountain soldiers — some of the war’s last casualties — were eclipsed by the Allied forces victory.

An Italian nonprofit in 2023 made a documentary — “The Lost Mountaineers” — about the deaths of the 10th Mountain Division soldiers, chronicling the division’s role in the final chapter of the war as well as recent recovery efforts. “The Lost Mountaineers” is screening Aug. 14 at the Colorado Snowsports Museum in Vail, on Aug. 16 at The Old Church in Leadville and Aug.19 at the History Colorado Center in Denver. A Q&A session with the documentary’s production team will follow all three screenings.

— j

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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. 

Pitkin County commissioners spent two years gathering public input on the Carbondale to Crested Butte Trail and in 2018, narrowly approved a small section of unpaved trail from Redstone to the the top of McClure Pass. The county — which has a 293-page plan outlining 10 potential alignments for 13 segments of the trail from Carbondale to the top of McClure as part of a possible 22-year development plan that could cost $103 million — finished construction of a 8.5-mile paved trail along the Crystal River out of Carbondale in 2010. 

Pitkin County commissioners in June amended the county’s 2018 plan to make sure any future approvals for the trail follow “a comprehensive environmental analysis of the potential direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts and connected actions” from the trail from Carbondale to the top McClure. That analysis will weigh access alongside protection of wildlife and habitat. 

A second amendment approved in June by Pitkin County commissioners eliminated construction of a trail on the east side of the Crystal River around Avalanche Creek, dismissing one alternative in the 2018 plan that routed the trail off the river though undisturbed elk and bighorn habitat. That requires the trail to more closely follow Colorado 133 for about a mile at Avalanche Creek, with engineering challenges and higher costs. 

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. 

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.”

Understanding the ecological consequences of new trails vs old

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. 

The Gunnison County section of the trail is pretty much one-way — down — from the top of McClure Pass. (Hence the Carbondale TO Crested Butte name.) The plan calls for using the existing 18-mile Raggeds Trail from the pass down to Kebler Pass Road and no one pedals up the Raggeds Trail. 

The segment of trail at the base of Kebler Pass near Paonia Reservoir to Crested Butte follows the Kebler Pass Wagon Road for about 23 miles up from the Erickson Springs Campground. It was first floated by the Gunnison National Forest in its comprehensive 2010 travel management plan. 

The Gunnison National Forest has built two new segments of trail along the wagon road parallel to the road over Kebler Pass and a third segment also following Gunnison County Road 12 over Kebler Pass is approved and planned. The portion of the Carbondale to Crested Butte Trail from Erickson Springs Campground to Horse Ranch Park on the Kebler Pass road “is a much lower priority” than the sections along the pass, said Paonia District Ranger Levi Broyles in an email. 

There’s little controversy over plans for the trail in Gunnison County. The Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association has an idea for building the trail and connecting it to the popular Dyke Trail on Kebler Pass. David Ochs, the longtime boss and trail builder at the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association, said basic plans are taking shape but there’s been little progress.

“It should be a full-on ‘path,’ with some backcountry huts and overnight spots on it,” Ochs said. “ It should friggin’ exist, but there is a lack of resources. We’ve pledged efforts, and spent time out there, but it takes that Paonia side — or someone — to really champion it.  We love that they are moving on it Pitkin County. Now it needs to happen here.”

Sneak Peek of the Week

Sliver of the Carbondale to Crested Butte Trail approved after years of review with promise of more intense study ahead

For the past decade or so, recreation in Colorado was the solution. Closing mines? How about a national monument? Logging fading? Try trails. Power plants shutting down? Consider a whitewater park.

But as participation in outdoor recreation grows, more land managers and counties are more closely studying not just recreational opportunities but their impacts on wildlife and habitat. As adventuring campers, hikers, paddlers, bikers and skiers push deeper in remote areas, federal, state and local officials are scrutinizing recreational development.

“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 Wilderness Workshop. “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.”

In 2023, the Carbondale-based 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 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.

The most recent example of the extra study of recreation came in the past couple months as the White River National Forest and Pitkin County approved 7 miles of new trail along an old pass road between Redstone and McClure Pass. The trail is part of the proposed 83-mile Carbondale to Crested Butte Trail, which was part of former Gov. John Hickenlooper’s “Colorado The Beautiful” plan to hasten construction of 16 high priority trails.

Both the approvals from the county and Forest Service said any further approval of new segments of the trail would be weighed with a study of impacts of the entire length along the Crystal River. A new amendment to a 2018 approval of the trail in Pitkin County between Carbondale and the top of McClure Pass said any more approvals for the trail would follow “a comprehensive environmental analysis of the potential direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts and connected actions” of the trail in the Crystal River drainage.

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The Playground

Limited access at Colorado’s newest state wildlife area is one of several options for pristine landscapes changing hands in Colorado

A coalition of advocacy groups sued Colorado Parks and Wildlife last fall over new rules governing state wildlife areas, arguing the agency was favoring hunters and anglers over other types of users, like hikers and bird watchers.

Hook and bullet access access was the deal a decade ago, when the state’s 350-plus state wildlife areas were supported almost exclusively with revenue generated by hunters and anglers. Now, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has more diverse revenue tools — like the Keep Colorado Wild Pass — that are supported by a much broader contingency than the hook-and-bullet crowd.

That case is ongoing. But the state’s newest state wildlife area — about 1,860 acres of prime elk habitat along 5 miles of the trout-rich Tarryall Creek south of Fairplay — is definitely catering to hunters and anglers. Access to the new Collard Ranch State Wildlife Area will require a hunting or fishing license or a state wildlife areas pass.

The $8.5 million deal involved Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Great Outdoors Colorado and the Western River Conservancy, which bought the land a couple years ago with a plan to sell it to the state for protection.

Access reserved for a limited number of specifically licensed visitors will certainly conserve the former Collard Ranch. This won’t be a state park with big crowds and packed parking lots. And it won’t be a gated, privately owned playground for the wealthy.

There are lots of paths to pursue when pristine parcels change hands, and the plan for Collard Ranch is one of four avenues unfolding right now in Colorado.

There’s Stagecoach, the long closed ski area in southern Routt County where a private developer is planning a private ski and golf resort for the very rich. There’s Fishers Peak, a new state park on the border of Trinidad that promises to support a growing outdoor recreation economy in southern Colorado. Or Sweetwater Lake above the Colorado River in Garfield County, which the Forest Service acquired after years of plans from developers and partnered with the state with plans for a new state park or recreation area. Locals in Sweetwater are irked at the park plan. Folks in Routt County are wary of a gated community with outdoor amenities reserved for members.

There likely will be some grousing in Park County as access to the state’s newest recreation area will be tightly controlled. But maybe the crowd-limiting measures and focus on conservation will help better protect the natural resources in the headwaters of the South Platte River.

“Western Rivers’ motto is ‘Sometimes to save a river, you have to buy it’ and that’s exactly what we did at Collard Ranch,” Allen Law with the Western Rivers Conservancy, told Sun reporter Tracy Ross.

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read Tracy’s story

The Guide

Denver is Colorado’s top tourist destination but traveler dollars in mountain towns have an outsized impact

Colorado is the epicenter of U.S. skiing, accounting for nearly a quarter of the nation’s visits to ski resorts.

But Colorado’s largest tourism draw isn’t skiing. It’s the city of Denver, which harvests more than one-third of tourist dollars spent in the state.

The latest economic impact reports on Colorado’s tourist economy — released this week by the Colorado Tourism Office — show yet another banner year for the state’s bustling tourism industry. The 93.3 million visitors who spent $28.3 billion in the state in 2023 marked an all-time high for Colorado tourist businesses.

Almost half of those traveler dollars were spent in the six-county metro Denver area.

In the city of Denver, spending in 2023 reached an all-time high of $10.1 billion, up from $9.7 billion in 2022. Tourist dollars supported 44,750 jobs in Denver in 2023, up from 41,400 jobs in 2022.

The Colorado Tourism Office-commissioned report by Dean Runyan and Associates breaks down spending in each Colorado county. We crunched some numbers for seven counties with 15 ski areas that account for more than 90% of the state’s annual 14 million skier visits: Eagle, Grand, Gunnison, Routt, Pitkin, San Miguel and Summit counties.

The seven resort-reliant counties saw $5.67 billion in visitor spending in 2023, up from $5 billion in 2022. Tourist dollars supported 41,555 jobs in those counties in 2023, up from 36,790 the previous year.

The visitor spending in Colorado’s mountain towns is much smaller than in Denver, but those visitors have an outsized impact in small communities. In the Mile High City, tourism jobs make up about 6.2% of the city’s population. In the seven resort counties, tourism jobs account for 25% of the population.

>> Click here to read this story

The Project 2025 roadmap for Colorado’s public lands under a Trump administration

Colorado is often on the backburner of presidential election campaigning. But Colorado could see changes if Donald Trump wins a second term. While the Trump campaign has been light on details for how a Trump administration might impact Colorado, the 922-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” presidential transition proposal promises some changes for the state’s public lands under a new administration.

The Project 2025 plan for the Interior Department was penned by William Perry Pendley, an Evergreen-based conservative lawyer who served briefly as the head of the Bureau of Land Management under Trump in 2020.

Perhaps the most impactful proposal in Pendley’s plan is calling for a new president to repeal the Biden administration’s withdrawal of mineral and energy leases on 221,000 acres in the Thompson Divide.

The Project 2025 plan urges the Interior Department to escalate drilling and mining across public lands while scaling back Biden administration protections for wildlife and habitat, which would be a big shift for Colorado.

Pendley, who has consistently advocated for the federal government to sell public lands, said a new administration should work to repeal the Antiquities Act of 1906, which has been used by 18 of the country’s 21 presidents since 1906 to establish or enlarge 163 national monuments.

“As has every Democratic president before him beginning with Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden has abused his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906,” Pendley wrote, who pointed to Biden’s creation of the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in 2022 as an example of “the outrageous, unilateral withdrawals from public use of multiple-use federal land.”

“In the days before the 2024 election, Biden will likely designate more western monuments,” Pendley wrote. (River and environmental advocates are urging Biden to use the Antiquities Act to protect more than 390,000 acres of land around the Dolores River as a national monument, which has stirred emotional opposition in rural parts of Mesa and Montrose counties.)

Pendley played a role in the Trump administration’s relocation of the BLM’s headquarters to Grand Junction from Washington, D.C., in 2020. His Project 2025 contribution also urges a reversal of the Biden administration’s plan to move the headquarters back to the nation’s capital.

— j

The Colorado Sun is part of The Trust Project. Read our policies.

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

A consortium of mountain towns will push Colorado lawmakers this year to pass legislation that would enable local governments to ask voters to tax homes that sit empty for most of the year. 

There are no communities in Colorado that tax empty homes, but the growing challenge of building affordable housing for workers in mountain communities where real estate prices are soaring and as many as 40% of homes are unoccupied by full-time residents is fueling creative thinking around new revenue sources. 

“We are not asking the legislature to make it so. This just clears some potential land mines for communities who might want to do this,” said Jonathan Godes, a councilman in Glenwood Springs and president of the Colorado Association of Ski Towns, or CAST, which is promoting the legislation for the coming session. 

CAST is asking its 28 resort town members to support a bold legislative agenda this year. The group also is hoping for lawmakers to approve legislation that will enable local governments to approve fees on every real estate transaction. 

(There are 12 Western Slopes communities that have real estate transfer taxes — from 1% to 3% on all property transactions — that were established before passage of the 1992 Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, which prevents new taxes without voters approval. Those communities — Aspen, Avon, Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Frisco, Gypsum, Snowmass Village, Telluride, Vail and Winter Park — are collecting record revenues in recent years as home prices soar.)

CAST also plans to lobby for legislation that would smooth the process for asking voters to allow taxes on short-term rentals. In recent years, voters in at least 10 mountain towns have overwhelmingly approved taxes on vacation rentals.

Local governments are preparing for potential ballot initiatives in November that would slow property tax collections as real estate values climb. Proposition 50 would cap property tax increases at 4% a year. Initiative 108 would cut assessment rates for residential and commercial property. 

If those measures pass, “counties are thinking about how we diversify our revenues so that we’re not solely reliant on property taxes,” Summit County Commissioner Tamara Pogue said. “The wild swings are hard on our residents and also hard on those of us who care about good governance and balanced budgets, both of which require an ability to forecast. That’s becoming increasingly difficult with the annual decreases in the assessment rate.”

CAST last year pushed for a real estate transfer fee but the legislation never advanced. 

CAST is careful to call the real estate transfer revenue proposals a “fee” to sidestep the legal requirement for voter approval of new taxes under TABOR. While the tax on vacant homes would require voter approval, a real estate transfer fee could be passed by local elected officials.

“If the real estate transfer fees are fees, not taxes, used to defray the cost of a particular government service, such as affordable housing, then TABOR does not apply,” reads an April memo from the association’s attorneys at the Sherman & Howard law firm. That memo cites the 2018 decision by the Colorado Supreme Court that ruled Aspen’s 2011 ordinance charging 20 cents for paper bags at local stores was a fee to offset costs of waste reduction and not a tax that would require voter approval under TABOR. 

There are other vacancy taxes under consideration outside the state as destinations grapple with a housing crisis in areas with large numbers of vacation homes. 

In South Lake Tahoe, voters this fall will weigh a tax on homeowners whose properties are empty more than 182 days a year. The tax — $3,000 per unit for the first year of vacancy and $6,000 for subsequent years — would support building more housing for working locals. A recent survey showed 44% of the 16,276 homes in South Lake Tahoe are vacant, up from 33% in 2000. Proponents vying to get the vacancy tax on the fall ballot say it could be the city’s largest single revenue source. 

In Hawaii, lawmakers have spent two years debating legislation that would impose a 3% tax on the assessed value of homes that are vacant for more than 180 days a year. The legislation is meant to deter real estate speculation in a state where investors from afar now spend as much as $5 billion a year on homes, up from $500 million in 2008.

Crested Butte voters in 2021 rejected a proposal for a $2,500-a-year empty home tax on homes that were vacant half the year.  

Most vacancy tax proposals point to Vancouver in British Columbia, where a 3% annual tax rate based on the assessed value of empty homes that launched in 2017 has raised $142 million in revenue for affordable housing in the city while reducing the number of vacant homes in the city by 54%.

The proposal from CAST says the vacancy tax legislation would authorize local governments “to disincentivize those vacancies.” 

“Local programs could then use the tax revenue to incentivize renting those vacant homes to the local workforce,” a position statement from the association reads. (Publicly funded programs in Breckenridge, Eagle County, Summit County and Winter Park offer cash to owners who stop renting their properties to vacationers and sign long-term leases with working locals.)

There are more than 4,000 active licenses for short-term rentals in Summit County, where federal courts last month dismissed lawsuits filed by property owners challenging recent local tax plans and limits. Owners of second homes and vacation rentals are growing weary of the recent deluge of regulations and legislative proposals, said Toby Babich, who runs a property management company in Breckenridge and serves as board president of the Summit Alliance of Vacation Rental Managers. 

Babich said lodging occupancy is declining and tax revenue from short-term rentals and traditional hotels is falling in Summit County. With the decline, the additional caps, taxes and hurdles are threatening tourism economies, Babich said. Those 4,000 licensed properties are supporting local businesses by hosting visitors, he said.

“I don’t know if we’ve reached a breaking point as much as it is already broken and these local governments are looking for the short-term rental industry to go away,” Babich said. “There is definitely a place for taxation and regulation and we understand there is a need for housing and it’s difficult to live up here. We want to be part of the solution. But we can’t be the whole solution.”

The legislative position from the ski town association defines vacant homes “as those not used as homes for most of the year.” It is unclear if a home filled with vacationers — and not necessarily the owner — would be considered vacant. 

The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, counts homes that are rented to short-term visitors as unoccupied because no one is living in the house. The latest U.S. Census American Community Survey in 2022 showed a total of 205,621 homes that were not occupied by owners in Colorado and 2.38 million occupied homes. The survey showed 90,728 of those unoccupied homes were for “seasonal, recreational or occasional use” and 43,819 of those vacant homes were available for rent. Colorado legislators have counted about 24,100 homes in Colorado that are available as short-term rentals, many of those clustered around resort communities. 

Many of the finer points in the legislative plan — like how many days a house would need to be unoccupied to be considered vacant — would be hammered out with specific lawmakers who craft the legislation. And some of those details around a vacancy tax would be addressed in local ballot questions, Godes, the Glenwood Springs councilman, said. 

“In my opinion, speaking with my council hat on, a home filled with short-term renters and sometimes (the owner’s) family, I do not think that home is vacant,” he said. “But that might be different for different communities.”

The Colorado tourism industry is still on a tear. Since 2010 — minus the global meltdown in travel during the pandemic years — Colorado has hosted record numbers of visitors leaving record-setting amounts of cash in their wake. 

A total of 93.3 million travelers in Colorado spent $28.3 billion in 2023. Both those numbers are all-time highs. For reference, that compares with what was then a record in 2014, when 71.3 million visitors spent $18.6 billion in Colorado.

There are more travelers spending more in Colorado than ever before, according to Longwoods International, a visitor research firm that began tallying the impacts of U.S. tourism in the 1980s. Colorado was the first state to engage Longwoods to survey visitors in 1986.

“It’s great to keep it moving in the right direction,” said Tim Wolfe, the head of the Colorado Tourism Office. 

Longwoods’ 82-page 2023 report identifies travelers who came to Colorado after seeing an ad campaign or promotional materials promoting the state as a vacation destination. The Colorado Tourism Office spends $12.7 million a year on media advertising, with $11 million of that directed toward the state’s 12-year-old “Come To Life” campaign and the remaining  spent on the office’s “Do Colorado Right” ads, which this year, for example, focused on how to stay safe in Colorado with messages that promote life vests around the state’s lakes and fire safety when camping.

In 2023, travelers responding to marketing booked an estimated 21.6 million overnight trips in Colorado, down 4% from the previous year, while travelers staying with friends and family stayed 14.8 million nights in 2023, a new high, up 14% from 2022.  

Overnight visitors spent $22.9 billion, while an estimated 53.8 day-tripping visitors in 2023 — a record number of people taking day trips to or within the state — spent $5.5 billion, which was nearly evenly split between in-state residents and out-of-state visitors.

About 5 million of those overnight trips were booked by vacationers coming to Colorado to explore the outdoors. About 2.7 million overnight trips were from people in Colorado for special events and 1.1 million visited resorts. The 2023 Longwood reports show about 2 million overnight trips involved people staying in cities and 1.3 million overnight trips were for people visiting Colorado’s casinos.

An economic review of tourism in Colorado by Dean Runyan and Associates, which also has been studying the state’s tourism travelers for decades, showed visitor spending of more than $28 billion employed 188,000 workers in 2023, up 5% — or 9,450 jobs — from 2022. And those workers earned $9.9 billion in 2023, up 13% from the previous year. 

State and local tax revenue paid by tourists grew to $1.8 billion in 2023, generating the equivalent of $800 for every Colorado household. 

About half of that traveler spending was in Denver, with visitors to the Mile High City leaving $13.9 billion in their wake. Visitors to nine Colorado high country counties — Clear Creek, Eagle, Garfield, Gilpin, Gunnison, Lake, Park, Pitkin and Summit — spent $4.3 billion in 2023, followed by visitors to the Pikes Peak region who spent $3 billion, and Boulder, Larimer and Weld county visitors who spent $2.5 billion.

Business travel to Colorado still waiting for a rebound

Business travel has yet to rebound following the pandemic, with Colorado logging 3 million overnight trips from those travelers. That’s up slightly from 2022, but well below more than 25 years of annual business traffic to the state reaching more than 4 million overnight trips. 

The Colorado Tourism Office recently distributed $4.8 million in Tourism Recovery Marketing Grants to seven regions of the state through the federal Economic Development Administration. About half of that went to Front Range communities that have been slow to rebound from the pandemic declines, especially with business travelers.

But the grants to communities in metro Denver, the northern Front Range and around Colorado Springs were not necessarily focused on rebuilding business traffic, which has seen a decline as part of an overall business shift toward remote work and online meetings. 

“I wonder if there would be a huge return on investment trying to bring business travel back,” Wolfe said. “So now we are seeing people thinking about how they can replace that business traveler, maybe by boosting leisure travel.” 

The largest expenditure for visitors to Colorado is lodging, accounting for $6.2 billion in spending, followed by transportation, dining, recreation and retail. Spending in those four categories climbed in 2023. The average cost per person for an overnight trip to Colorado was $580, up from $550 in 2022. Daytrippers spend about $101 per person. 

About 85% of overnight visitors to Colorado have been here before and 62% have traveled to the state in the past year. About 29% of the travelers driving the Colorado tourism industry are Colorado residents — and most of them are from the Front Range — followed by visitors from California, Texas, New York and Florida.  

The U.S. tourism industry is strong, with travelers spending $1.3 trillion in 2023, an all-time high. The travel industry employed 254 million  workers in 2023, up 5% from 2022, but below record levels. U.S. visits from international tourists are up as well, climbing 25% in 2023, but international tourism to the  U.S. has not  rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. 

The largest draw for Colorado visitors is visiting friends and family, followed by people who are touring, playing in the outdoors, attending a special event or visiting a city. About 4% of the state’s overnight trips were for skiing or snowboarding, which amounts to about 864,000 overnight trips in the 2023 calendar year. 

Colorado ski resorts reported about 14 million skier visits in the 2023-24 ski season. While Longwoods counts yearly traffic and resorts count seasonal visitors, the discrepancy between these tallies indicates the size of the daytripping skier market, with Colorado residents heading up to ski for the day accounting for the vast majority of skier visits. (The Colorado resort industry does not release demographic information about its skier traffic.) 

Longwoods reported that about 13% of overnight visitors booked their trips through short-term rental web platforms like Airbnb or Vrbo. That is up from 10% in 2022. The Runyan economic analysis shows 2023 visitors spending $15 billion on hotels and motels across the state and $2.5 billion on short-term rental homes. That compares to $14.6 billion spent on hotels and motels in 2022 and $2.3 billion on short-term vacation rentals. 

The average income of Colorado’s overnight travelers was $80,000 a year, with about 40% of travelers earning less than $50,000 a year. And 82% of Colorado’s tourists are white, compared with 78% in 2022. 

Since before the pandemic, Colorado tourism officials have seen more community angst over tourism as residents work to protect their quality of life in towns that are seeing record numbers of visitors. 

More communities are diverting lodging tax revenues away from tourism marketing and toward affordable housing. Many communities are increasing regulations, taxes and limits on short-term rentals. But the lamentation over tourism is starting to change, Wolfe said, as occupancies and tax collections fall in the first half of 2024. Early surveys show occupancy in short-term rentals across Colorado has fallen in five of the first six months of the year. 

Wolfe said the return to “a more normalized pattern” of travel coming out of the exceptionally busy months after the pandemic, coupled with more state and federal funding for affordable housing, is alleviating some of the concerns about increasing tourism impacts. 

When Colorado voters slashed tourism funding in 1993 — eliminating a tourism-marketing budget of $12 million — the state’s ranking among travelers dropped from first place to 17th. In 2000, lawmakers reinstated funding for tourism promotion. The state lost an estimated $2 billion a year in tourism revenue when tourism promotion went dark in the 1990s, according to Longwoods. Longwoods uses the funding cut as what it calls a “cautionary tale for financial decision-makers” who may be tempted to cut tourism marketing dollars.

Right now Wolfe’s tourism office is working to grow international traffic — which has never recovered from the pandemic decline — as well as extending the length of stay of overnight visitors. The average stay for Colorado vacationers in 2023 was 4.4 nights, the lowest in six years and below the long-term average. 

“If we could fill those resorts with six- to seven-night stays through the winter, it would be much easier for those communities and the environments,” Wolfe said, noting how shorter visits stress lodging staff with more turnovers while longer stays provide more revenue with fewer impacts. 

The sheriff of Central City, Billy Cozens, was ready to settle someplace quiet. The idyllic home he and his new wife, Mary Cozens, built in the late 1800s was among the first homesteads in the Fraser River Valley. It became a popular stagecoach stop and ended up on the National Register of Historic Places. 

Now the meadow along U.S. 40 that was once the Cozens’ backyard is a battlefield pitting Fraser residents against a developer. That developer, Clark Lipscomb, has plans for homes and hotel rooms there. The residents say a 2003 agreement promised that Cozens Meadow would be forever protected in a conservation easement. 

The fiery fight over the historic meadow is headed to a trial this week as Lipscomb pushes proposals for more development in his Grand Park community in Fraser, just outside Winter Park.

When Amanda Erath moved to Grand Park in 2019, she would go cross-country skiing in the winter in Cozens Meadow. In the summer her neighbors play frisbee golf there. 

Now Lipscomb has fenced and gated the area and filled the meadow with grazing cows. The latest proposals for homes and hotels in the meadow pushed Erath — and about two dozen of her neighbors — to plead with town planners to better protect Cozens Meadow. 

“He is, piece by piece, destroying one of the most beautiful areas in our community,” Erath said in an interview. “We shouldn’t have this level of development without also thinking about how it will impact the community and addressing that at the same time.”

The complex fight over Cozens Meadow has implications for both historic conservation easements in Colorado and the ongoing challenges facing homebuilders in rural communities. Both sides are sure they are right and soon a Grand County judge could crown a winner. 

To follow the twisting tale of protections around Cozens Meadow, let’s go back more than 20 years. 

In 2003, renowned Colorado developer Robert “Buz” Koelbel and his partners at Cornerstone Holdings reached an agreement with the Town of Fraser to annex their roughly 1,400-acre Rendezvous property where they planned more than 3,300 homes, 1,400 hotel rooms and nearly 500,000 square feet of commercial space on both sides of U.S. 40 between Winter Park and Fraser. The deal included a plan for a conservation easement to protect 467 acres around Cozens Meadow and Elk Creek Meadow as open space. 

The next year Koelbel split with his partner and carved off the property west of U.S. 40 for Cornerstone Holdings and the company’s head of real estate, Lipscomb. Lipscomb planned as many as 2,500 homes, 1,300 hotel rooms and 400,000 square feet of commercial space on 1,300 acres the company amassed for its Grand Park community. The deal included Cornerstone controlling the land around Cozens and Elk Creek meadows.

A 2005 agreement between Fraser and Cornerstone updates the Rendezvous development plan and notes 468 acres of open space around both Cozens and Elk Creek meadows. That 2005 agreement does not specifically reference a conservation easement plan. Lipscomb argues the 2005 agreement removes the conservation easement requirement and says all the development approved by the town since has not included requirements for  an easement around Cozens Meadow. The Town of Fraser disagrees. Twenty years later, this is the critical legal issue in the trial that starts Monday in Grand County. 

Lawsuits, stalled construction

As Cornerstone developed Grand Park, spending more than $100 million since 2005, homes were built around Cozens Meadow. In addition to homes, Lipscomb has built a gas station and a small market, a bowling alley and cinema, and donated land and infrastructure for the Grand Park Community Center. 

A legal battle over open space protection launched in 2020 between the Town of Fraser and Cornerstone. In 2021, the town stopped approving new construction projects in Grand Park. That year Lipscomb closed public access to Cozens Meadow, arguing the land is private property. He sells homes in a neighborhood of Grand Park called Cozens Meadow. 

“The town was trying to strong arm our company to stop these buildings — trying to get something they are not entitled to on our private land,” Lipscomb told the town board at its April 17 meeting.  

Lipscomb has always argued that Cozens Meadow is private land “where Grand Park was allowing public use,” he wrote in a September 2020 letter to the Fraser town board.

“It is unfortunate that a small minority of residents have determined to attempt to undermine long-standing agreements and that those efforts have resulted in personal threats against Grand Park, me and my family,” he wrote in the 2020 letter. “We are very proud of the many community-wide projects Grand Park has been involved in. Please stand up and protect private property rights as well as those agreements we have all worked tirelessly to follow.”

Lipscomb did not respond to emails, texts and calls from The Sun. 

Lipscomb sued the town, arguing the Fraser mayor’s 2020 approval of an 18-acre conservation easement for Elk Creek Meadow — not Cozens Meadow — met all the open space requirements for the community outlined in the 2005 agreement. The town sued Lipscomb, arguing the developer needs to follow the 2003 agreement and protect Cozens Meadow.

It was not the first lawsuit between Lipscomb and the Town of Fraser. Or the other town that borders Grand Park. The Town of Winter Park also sued Cornerstone in 2017 over infrastructure improvements, which resulted in a 2020 settlement. 

Lipscomb’s work on commercial space — about 45,500 square feet of concrete buildings called Market Street where he planned restaurants, shops, music venues, office space and an indoor putt-putt location — stalled in 2020. The buildings sat unfinished for more than four years as Lipscomb and town leaders in Fraser wrangled over expired permits and sales tax incentives. Last fall the town reinstated permits for construction on the Market Street buildings, which Lipscomb has said will be completed by October 2025 and open by next winter, when the permits expire. 

“Big picture we think this area is going to continue to grow and we want to be here and be a part of it and we want it to grow in a way that is healthy for the community, the residents and our tourists,” Lipscomb told the board at the April meeting.

Over the Christmas holiday last year, someone erected a large sign in front of the roofless, bare-walled buildings that read “It’s a beaut, Clark,” harkening to the quip from the movie “Christmas Vacation.”

In May, a Grand County District Court judge ruled in the lawsuits, siding with Lipscomb and Cornerstone on some claims and siding with the Town of Fraser on other claims. But District Court Judge Mary Hoak did rule “there are genuine issues of material fact” regarding how the 2003 and 2005 agreements intersect concerning open space protection at Grand Park and Cozen Meadow. 

Hoak in 2021 ruled that Fraser had to continue reviewing Grand Park’s plans, despite the issue with Cozens Meadow. 

New plans for homes, hotels in Cozens Meadow 

And the most recent news in the Fraser vs. Lipscomb scrap landed last week when the Town of Fraser planning commission recommended the town deny the latest development proposal from Lipscomb.

Those plans for the Village at Grand Park — behind the unfinished buildings — shuffle and adjust allowed development and densities with two proposals seeking approval for an overall 245 homes, 550 hotel rooms and 175,000 square feet of commercial space along U.S. 40. The development would encroach on about 15 acres of Cozens Meadow.

More than 20 Fraser residents sent letters to planners before the July 24 meeting, urging a rejection of Lipscomb’s latest development proposals. Many letter writers own homes in Grand  Park and suggested the new development did not align with the 2003 agreement. Many asked that planners wait for a court ruling in the pending trial before approving development in Cozens Meadow.

The planning commissioners recommended that the town board deny Lipscomb’s latest applications, saying the buildings proposed inside Cozens Meadow deviated from original development approvals and Lipscomb should ask the town board to amend the initial 2005 plan — with public meetings — before proposing the new construction. 

Fraser Town Manager Michael Brack said Lipscomb plans to submit the plan to the town board — with the planning commission recommendation for denial — at either the Aug. 21 or Sept. 4 meeting. If the board rejects his plan, Lipscomb will  have to wait six months to reapply. Brack said the decision by the planning commission has nothing to do with the lawsuit.

The proposed development “is not in alignment with what was approved in the 2003 and 2005 agreements. It was such a large change in use,” Brack said. “The town is definitely supportive of development where it is agreed upon and where it has been approved.”

The cows and locked gates at Cozens Meadow and the most recent development plans have galvanized a coalition of residents in a fight to protect the 2003 plan for open space. 

“There was an extensive process in the late 90s and into the 2000s where all this was decided and if you start changing it now you are dishonoring that public process and those who came before us without a new, extensive public process going down,” said Fraser resident Joseph Landen, who supports the Restore Cozens Meadow campaign. “Will there be a settlement with Clark to put new development at the meadow? Or should we save every acre in the original agreement? That discussion needs to be very public.”

It’s important to note that the 2003 annexation agreement only included a plan for a conservation easement, not an actual conservation easement. (Lawyers for Cornerstone, in a trial brief filed last month, argued the statute of limitations bars the town’s complaints connected to the 2003 agreement.)

And there has never been a formal mapping with exact borders of Cozens Meadow. 

“When I read the annexation agreement, it says that the town is entitled to 466, 467 total acres of open space,” Fraser planning commissioner Parnell Quinn said at the planning board’s March 27 meeting. “Cozens Meadow has never really been defined as to what Cozens Meadow is, which has been an issue. If we resolve that, this wouldn’t be such a heartburn for everyone and it would not be such a contentious conversation every time we go to plat the meadow. But we have not resolved that yet.”

Colorado voters will get a chance to ban mountain lion hunting in November. 

The Colorado Secretary of State on Wednesday confirmed that the campaign to end mountain lion hunting in Colorado had gathered enough signatures to get Proposition 91 on the November ballot. The initiative asks voters to declare that “any trophy hunting of mountain lions, bobcats or lynx is inhumane, serves no socially acceptable or ecologically beneficial purpose, and fails to further public safety.” The measure would ban any shooting or trapping of wildcats but allows killing cats that are threatening livestock or people.

Representatives with the Cats Aren’t Trophies group submitted 147,529 valid signatures, more than the 124,238 that were required for ballot access. 

Samantha Miller, the manager for the Cats Aren’t Trophies campaign, said the organization has 900 volunteers who will now transition from signature gathering to outreach and advertising. 

“Our message remains, Coloradans know that the cruel and inhumane trophy hunting and fur trapping of Colorado’s wild cats has no place in our state, and many of them have been outraged to learn this practice continues despite measures in the ’90s that stopped leg-hold traps, hounding of black bears and spring bear hunting,” Miller said in an email. 

The Cats Aren’t Trophies group has raised $414,000 since the beginning of the year — with the largest contributor, Washington D.C.-based Animal Wellness Action, providing $147,000 — and spent $335,000, according  to the group’s Aug. 1 filing with the Colorado Secretary of State. 

California is the only state in the U.S. where voters have banned mountain lion hunting. 

The last time voters weighed wildlife issues was in 2020, when a narrow margin of Coloradans required Colorado Parks and Wildlife to reintroduce wolves on the Western Slope. Before that, voters in 1992 approved a constitutional amendment that limited black bear hunting, and in 1996 voters approved an amendment that banned leg hold and instant-kill traps. 

Hunting advocates challenged the ballot initiative last year, arguing the wording of the measure was misleading and the state’s Title Board erred when approving it for signature gathering. The Colorado Supreme Court in January denied the challenge and affirmed the Title Board’s decision. 

Two years ago animal conservation groups supported legislation that would have banned the killing of mountain lions and bobcats in Colorado. Hunting groups opposed the bill and flooded lawmakers with opposition statements. The bill’s top sponsors pulled their support before the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources committee rejected the legislation in February 2022.  

CPW has managed lion hunting since 1965 

Colorado Parks and Wildlife estimates there are between 3,800 and 4,400 mountain lions in the state. The agency has managed lion hunting for decades with annual caps on how many cats hunters can kill. In 1980, hunters took 81 mountain lions. In the 2022-23 lion season, 2,599 hunters spent 1,635 days hunting lions and killed 502 animals, including 298 males and 204 females. That was below the annual limit set by the agency, which is updated daily during lion hunting seasons. Colorado Parks and Wildlife requires hunters to take an online class and exam before securing a license to hunt mountain lions. 

Colorado Parks and Wildlife rarely takes a side in political issues and the agency did not take a position on Initiative 91. But the agency supports mountain lion hunting as a tool for managing populations. 

“For many people, hunting is a continuation of the hunter-gatherer traditions and a way to connect to nature. It also helps maintain healthy wild animal population,”  reads a statement on the agency’s website. “There is no evidence of managed hunting leading to the extinction of any species in Colorado, or of well-regulated hunting negatively affecting the population stability of the state’s mountain lions.”

The agency this year held public meetings to update its management plan for lions on the Front Range, where development into mountain lion habitat is increasing human-lion interactions. The Front Range management plan — which was last updated in the mid-2000s — mirrors 2020 updates to the West Slope Mountain Lion Management Plan.  

In January, Colorado Parks and Wildlife commissioners cut the 2023-24 lion hunting season — which typically runs from December through March with a second season in April — by eliminating the April season. Commissioners also voted to prevent hunters from using electronic calls to lure lions in the two hunting areas on the Western Slope where calls were allowed.   

The changes came as animal advocates decried a slightly higher-than-average  number of female cats killed in the early portion of the season. 

Hunting groups and others behind the Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project have worked against the hunting ban, arguing that voter initiatives can sidestep management by state wildlife biologists. The groups point to healthy mountain lion populations in Colorado since 1965, when Colorado Parks  and Wildlife began managing wildcats as big game.

Opponents of Proposition 91 will continue an educational campaign “to let the conservation-minded public at large know why mountain lion hunting is important and what this hunting ban is bad for science-based management in Colorado,” said Bryan Jones with Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. 

“We will certainly talk about ballot-box wildlife initiatives and how they can be a negative for wildlife management in Colorado,” said Jones, who expects the opposition campaign will include the challenges that followed the introduction of wolves to the Western Slope this year. “We can see there have been problems and mistakes that have put folks at odds with Colorado Parks and Wildlife and we don’t want to see that again.”

Sneak Peek of the Week

Colorado resort towns lining up plans for a tax on vacant homes

There are very few short-term rental homes that do not pay special lodging taxes in Colorado. Most communities have limits and regulations governing vacation homes. State lawmakers have considered quadrupling property taxes on the state’s 24,000-plus short-term rental homes.

Across Colorado, dozens of cities, towns and counties are working to slow the explosion of vacation rentals while simultaneously squeezing more tax revenue from them. This year, a coalition of resort communities is planning to lobby lawmakers to help ease the process for taxing vacant homes. The Colorado Association of Ski Towns, or CAST, also hopes to secure legislation enabling local governments to impose a fee on every real estate sale.

There are no communities in Colorado that tax empty homes, but the growing challenge of building affordable housing for workers in mountain communities where real estate prices are soaring and as many as 40% of homes are unoccupied is fueling creative thinking around new revenue sources.

“We are not asking the legislature to make it so. This just clears some potential land mines for communities who might want to do this,” said Jonathan Godes, a councilman in Glenwood Springs and president of CAST, which is promoting the legislation for the coming session.

There are other vacant-home taxes under consideration outside the state as destinations grapple with a housing crisis in areas with large numbers of vacation homes.

In South Lake Tahoe, voters this fall will weigh a tax on homeowners whose properties are empty more than 182 days a year. The tax — $3,000 per unit for the first year of vacancy and $6,000 for subsequent years — would support building more housing for working locals. In Hawaii, lawmakers have spent two years debating legislation that would impose a 3% tax on the assessed value of homes that are vacant for more than 180 days a year. The legislation is meant to deter real estate speculation in a state where investors from afar now spend as much as $5 billion a year on homes, up from $500 million in 2008.

Most vacancy tax proposals point to Vancouver in British Columbia, where a 3% annual tax rate based on the assessed value of empty homes that launched in 2017 has raised $142 million in revenue for affordable housing in the city while reducing the number of vacant homes in the city by 54%.

The proposal from CAST says the vacancy fee legislation would authorize local governments “to disincentivize those vacancies with local taxes.”

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

In Their Words

Thousands of dead fish in Sloan’s Lake ignites calls for action at the shallow, warm lake

It’s not uncommon to see dead crappie bobbing along the shores of Sloan’s Lake. Last weekend, there were about 2,000 rotting fish in the lake as temperatures neared 100 degrees for several days in a row.

Park officials blame a toxic algae bloom in Denver’s largest body of water for the fish die-off. Same as they did in 2020. And 2015. And 2007.

Sloan’s may be large, but it’s shallow. So when temperatures get hot, so does the lake water.

Park officials try to cool the lake with water from the Rocky Mountain Ditch, which stretches 19 miles across the metro area from its origins on the banks of Clear Creek below the Coors brewery. That ditch traverses Lakewood and Wheat Ridge and, along with 23 storm drains, it’s filling Sloan’s Lake with sediment. And probably a lot of other stuff as it drains the metro area.

The solution for Sloan’s Lake is digging, says the Sloan’s Lake Park Foundation, a group of citizens working to restore the watery gem in Denver’s park system.

Filling it with irrigation water or water from Rocky Mountain Ditch is “fighting a losing battle,” the foundation’s spokesman Kurt Weaver told Sun reporter Tracy Ross.

“The lake’s demise is imminent if we do not act to dredge it back to a healthy depth and improve the water flow,” Weaver said.

>> Click here to read Tracy’s story

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Breaking Trail

A place to play for everyone

“Something for everyone.” That’s the mission of a growing movement to develop more parks, playgrounds and programs for kids with disabilities.

The National Park and Recreation Association’s theme for its annual monthlong celebration of parks is “Where You Belong” and champions recreation that can foster community.

“A lot don’t feel they do belong,” Kara Kish, the director of parks for Loveland told Sun freelancer Dan England. “But in the last five years, universal access has been the new standard. The primary drive is the commitment to be in service to everyone.”

A new park under construction in Berthoud, for example, will offer a smooth surface, swings, monkey bars and a merry-go-round that will work for Miles Bowling, a 7-year-old with cerebral palsy who uses a wheelchair. His parents, Lauren and Richard Bowling, helped raise funds to develop Berthoud’s first inclusive playground.

“Miles will be able to play on monkey bars with other boys,” Lauren said.

Denver park builders now infuse inclusive access into all new parks.

“It’s a conversation we are going to have every time a park is in the planning stage,” said Owen Wells, the district park planning supervisor for Denver Parks and Recreation.

It isn’t about a single piece of adaptive playground equipment as much as incorporating inclusive and accessible features across the entirety of the park.

“The idea is we want people to be together,” Wells said. “It doesn’t meet that goal if a kid is playing on a piece of equipment in a section of the park by himself.”

After years of work by parents and advocates, more towns, big and small, are weighing accessibility and inclusivity when developing parks, recreation programs and playgrounds.

“I think we are in a moment where the industry is evolving a little bit,” Wells said.

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read Dan’s story

The Playground

Historic Cozens Meadow is battlefield pitting residents against community developer in Fraser

The sheriff of Central City, Billy Cozens, was ready to settle someplace quiet. The idyllic home he and his new wife, Mary Cozens, built in the late 1800s was among the first homesteads in the Fraser River Valley. It became a popular stagecoach stop and ended up on the National Register of Historic Places.

Now the meadow along Highway 40 that was once the Cozens’ backyard is a battlefield pitting Fraser residents against a developer. That developer, Clark Lipscomb, has plans for homes and hotel rooms there. The residents say a 2003 agreement promised that Cozens Meadows would be forever protected in a conservation easement.

The fiery fight over the historic meadow is headed to a jury trial as Lipscomb pushes proposals for more development in his Grand Park community in Fraser, just outside Winter Park.

When Amanda Erath moved to Grand Park in 2019, she would go cross-country skiing in the winter in Cozens Meadow. In the summer her neighbors play Frisbee golf there.

Now Lipscomb has fenced and gated the area and filled the meadow with grazing cows. The latest proposals for homes and hotels in the meadow pushed Erath — and about two dozen of her neighbors — to publicly plead with town planners to better protect Cozens Meadow.

“He is, piece by piece, destroying one of the most beautiful areas in our community,” Erath said in an interview. “We shouldn’t have this level of development without also thinking about how it will impact the community and addressing that at the same time.”

Trail sabotage near Telluride

It’s been almost three weeks since dirt bikers on Forest Service singletrack near Telluride found two wires strung across Wilson Mesa Trail.

“It’s an irrational act so it’s probably an irrational motivation,” said San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters, who bumped a $500 reward for information to $1,000 after dirt bikers reported a second wire.

Masters and Forest Service rangers said dirt bikers reported the wires in different locations on the Wilson Mesa Trail on July 2 and July 10. Deputies closed the trail briefly to search for clues between Forest Service Roads 645 and 623.

The trail is one of the few in eastern San Miguel County that are multiple use, open to hikers, mountain bikers, dirt bikers and horse riders.

“Is it someone who doesn’t like motorcycles? Is it someone who knows someone who rides that trail everyday and the guy ran off with his girlfriend? We don’t know much right now,” said Masters, who has been the sheriff of San Miguel County for 45 years. In social media statements seeking information and warning trail travelers, Masters called the wires “an act of indiscriminate violence” by a “malicious individual.”

Trail sabotage pops up in Colorado every few years. In 2016, mountain bikers found boards with protruding nails on Bureau of Land Management bike trails outside Eagle. That year, mountain bikers also found spike-embedded bricks on mountain bike trails in the Pike National Forest. In 2014, there were spiked boards buried on the Prince Creek trails outside Carbondale.

A British Columbia woman was arrested in 2015 after mountain bikers set up trail cameras to capture the avid hiker dragging tree limbs across trails near her home. In 2013, a 57-year-old Oregon psychiatrist went to jail for booby-trapping mountain bike trails on Forest Service land.

“People get upset with different trail users. Hikers with dogs, ATVs, Jeeps, bikers, people riding their horses and motorcycles. They definitely come into conflict with each other,” Masters said. “Since I moved to Colorado 51 years ago the population has tripled. There are a lot more people out here and we are getting more and more in each other’s way.”

— j

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SALIDA — Sarina Perret takes a seat on a concrete block next to the tall glassy wave on the Arkansas River. A friend holds the nose of her surfboard as she positions her feet and begins to stand up. She glides across the wave, carving smooth turns on the flowing wedge of green water. The line of waiting surfers cheer.

“You are a surfer!” someone yells as she returns to the line at the Scout Wave on the Arkansas River in Salida. 

It’s Perret’s first day on the Scout Wave. This is her first season river surfing. 

“I grew up in Colorado so it’s not like I grew up saying ‘I want to be a surfer.’ I mean I watched surfing on movies but that was it,” the Evergreen physical therapist says. “It’s so cool to be part of the river surfing culture that has exploded here in Colorado. Everyone is so supportive. It’s such a great sport.”

There are about a dozen surfers in line at the Scout Wave on a recent Monday morning. Over the previous weekend, there were several dozen waiting for their turn. At night, surfers haul battery-operated lights to the banks of the Salida whitewater park and carve the Scout Wave through the dark. Even in winter, the surfers flock, girded in thick wetsuits.

The Salida whitewater park was conceived in 1999 by Salida locals — paddler Mike Harvey, restaurateur Ray Kitson, excavator Fred Lowry and businessman Jerry Mallet — who eventually recruited Recreation Engineering and Planning, the pioneer of Colorado river park designs, to build a river park that has transformed Salida and inspired dozens of other communities.

“When they decided to turn and face the river instead of turning our backs to it like everyone had done for the last 100 years, that’s when everything changed,” says Mike “Diesel” Post, the head of Salida’s parks and recreation and a former administrator at the high school in Buena Vista. 

Post is standing amid the wave riders. Their heel-side carves sprinkle the crowded banks with curtains of mist.

Sarina Perret of Evergreen surfs the Scout Wave in the Salida whitewater park on the Arkansas River on July 22, 2024. It was Perret’s first day surfing the Scout Wave. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)

Post is getting a debrief on how the revamped wave has worked so far this summer from the designers: Recreation Engineering and Planning’s engineers Harvey and Spencer Lacy. Lacy’s father, Gary, started the company in the 1980s.

Last year, Harvey and Lacy scrambled through June and July to temper the Scout Wave as the Arkansas River flows peaked, turning the wave into a violent, boat-flipping hole when flows crept above 1,250 cfs. They used a crane to plop 4,000-pound sacks of sand into the river to adjust the river’s flow over the concrete slab they built into the river bed in 2022 as the second iteration of the Scout Wave, which they initially built in 2010. What could have been a disaster for Salida turned into a gem as Salida officials gave the wave sculptors another shot at refining the Scout Wave.

Last fall, Harvey and Lacy pulled the sandbags and made permanent changes to the river bed for a third time, creating what everyone calls the Scout Wave 3.0. And then they held their breath as high flows on the Arkansas River in June peaked well above 4,000 cfs in Salida. 

After last fall’s adjustments with giant concrete blocks and rocks — and the reworking to build a river-left boat chute for paddlers in smaller boats who want to avoid the turbulent high-water hole, the Scout Wave’s third iteration is about perfect. 

“It is the best river wave in the world. Period,” says Denver musician Eric Halborg, who has spent several weeks camping and staying in hotels this summer so he can spend a few hours a day surfing Salida. His favorite time: 5 a.m. under the lights “when the line is shortest.”

Last year, when no one surfed the Scout Wave for two months during peak flows, the city counted 9,000 people with mobile phones on the banks of the river. So far this summer, the city has counted 20,000 cellphone pings from the river park. On a recent Monday morning, guided anglers and commercial rafters floated through the wave. Upstream, very young kids on boogie boards surfed the Kindergarten Wave under the watchful eye of moms standing on the shore. Visitors donned life jackets from riverside loaner station and swam near the kayak hole. 

And a growing crowd of board-riders is flocking to the Scout Wave 3.0. The wave is the equivalent of a ski area for a mountain town, with people coming from far away for a playful holiday. It was only a few decades ago that Salida had a long, high wall in its Riverside Park that kept people away from the river. Now the river “is the lifeblood of the city of Salida,” Post says. 

“We are a river town. We are about as OG of a river town as it gets. This has been a whitewater park for 25 years … kind of a kayaker surf spot we called a whitewater park,” Post says. “But eight years ago we started seeing people on tubes, people in little boats and stand-up paddle boards and now surfboards and all of the sudden, it became a park. And now with this wave, it’s all coming together in such a beautiful way that everyone can see and recognize.”

Record high flows this season on the Arkansas River

Last year’s high flows gave Lacy and Harvey a good guide for a second tweaking of the Scout Wave. They adjusted the boat chute and worked on permanent edges — boulders and concrete blocks flanking the wave, which was designed as a “surfing treadmill” known as a sheet flow wave with carefully directed river water flowing over a smooth slab of concrete.  

But, as with most wave-making features built in moving water, it was unclear exactly how the wave would take shape this season when the river rose. There were more than a few sleepless nights for Post, Harvey and Lacy as they waited for daylight to check the live webcam and make sure the feature survived the night’s surging flows. 

The upside of the record-high flows in June is “now we know,” Harvey says.

The wave “is way less gnarly this season. If we had a (smaller) peak like the last few years, we would still be wondering,” Harvey says. “We ripped the Band-Aid off for sure.”

Harvey and Lacy stroll through the clutch of giddy surfers and examine the downstream sidewalk with Post. Riverside springs are leaking below concrete steps. A few years ago the springs simply made the banks muddy, but now that thousands of people are there, the seeping springs are a problem. In the winter, surfers and people who like to sit by the river and watch the surfers must navigate ice. The park designers are thinking about dog walkers and river watchers as much as the surfers. 

Recreational Engineering and Planning counts the Salida park “as definitely our star project” out of more than 100 river parks the company has designed across the country, says Lacy.

“Salida is the project where people come to us and say we want what Salida has,” Lacy says. “And we are continuing to lead here.”

The energy around river surfing is growing. There are two parks on the South Platte in metro Denver with adjustable flaps that sculpt surfable waves at a variety of flows. A new surf wave atop a demolished dam on the Arkansas River near Pueblo’s City Park is drawing surfers this summer. The surf wave at Glenwood Springs on the Colorado River offers big-water surfing when flows top 10,000 cfs.  

Harvey and Lacy are planning to renovate a wave in the Buena Vista River Park this fall to allow surfing at a wider range of flows. 

Park planners and local communities across the country are asking for surf features in their downtown rivers. Parks are evolving to accommodate the new wave of river users. Designs built for kayakers — a sport that requires a base-level of expertise (like knowing how to roll) and a big investment to even start — are changing to accommodate the much more accessible sport of river surfing.  

“There are towns all over the country where this could be just a ginormous thing. This sport is bringing in more women, more kids and just attracting more people who have never really spent time in rivers,” Harvey says.   

There’s a level of trust around Salida’s whitewater park that is uncommon. Harvey has lived in the city for several decades and has guided every step of the park’s design. His son, Miles, is considered one of the world’s top river surfers. Badfish SUP, the company Harvey and his friend Zach Hughes formed more than 15 years ago, makes the top boards in the sport and its downtown surf shop is always busy. (Nearly everyone at the Scout Wave is riding Badfish boards.) Council members surf the wave. Or their kids do. 

Larry Sherwood, the longtime owner of Lowry Contracting, has spent countless hours moving tons of rock — at deep discounts — to sculpt the river park and Scout Wave. Harvey and Lacy often work for free on their hometown river park. Harvey created the Arkansas River Trust in the late 1990s to help raise money for park improvements. The park builders have a close relationship with local leaders. 

Those relationships have given the park designers room to adjust a feature when most other towns would opt for removal after fielding complaints from soggy boaters who flipped in the churning feature at high water. 

“It’s hard being the light on the engine, you know,” Post says. “We take a lot of bugs but the view is really sweet. It’s great being at the front of all this but you do take a lot of shit. But this is what we do as a river town — we try it out.”