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.”

Colorado wildlife officials are celebrating some long-awaited good news — the mountain toads are making tadpoles!

For seven years, biologists have been toting tadpoles to high-elevation bogs and ponds in a massive effort to save the inch-long boreal toad. And for the first time at a mountain wetland above Pitkin, they’ve discovered that those transplanted toads are making their own babies in the wild. 

“It’s a really big deal,” native aquatic species biologist Daniel Cammack said in a Colorado Parks and Wildlife news release. 

Boreal toads, which live in wetlands around 11,500 feet and spend their winters buried under multiple feet of snow, have been dying off at a rapid pace across the Rocky Mountain states. A fungus that infects the toad’s skin with a cluster of spores, then bursts and spreads through the water to other toads, is to blame. 

Colorado biologists have been trying to stop the fungus by dipping the tiny toads in a wash nicknamed “purple rain” and have been taking new tadpoles from a hatching center in Alamosa and dropping them in wild ponds. 

This summer, when Cammack went to check on his transplanted toads above Pitkin, northeast of Gunnison, he found they were reproducing, a discovery that Colorado Parks and Wildlife called “potentially game-changing.” 

Cammack’s team has been bringing tadpoles to the wetland since 2018, which is about the length of time it takes for a female toad to reach reproductive age. 

The state wildlife agency has stocked about 20,000 tadpoles at the Pitkin bog, most of which began as eggs that were collected from the backcountry and raised to tadpoles at the Native Aquatic Species Restoration Facility in Alamosa. In 2022, biologists threw in 570 tadpoles from the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance. 

Before the relocation efforts, there were no boreal toads at the Pitkin bog. 

“Everyone who has been involved in this project has poured their heart and soul into it,” Cammack said, calling it a “really special day.”

Now, biologists will watch to see if the tadpoles turn into toadlets and then into adult toads. It will become only the second place in Colorado where transplanted toads have had tadpoles that grew into toads. The first is near Cameron Pass, outside of Fort Collins. 

Boreal toads are the only high-elevation toad in the Rocky Mountains and are an endangered species in Colorado. They live at elevations from 7,500 to 12,000 feet, just below treeline, and hibernate beneath the snow for six to eight months of the year. Researchers say that when the toads are stressed, they release a secretion that smells similar to peanut butter.

The toads were once abundant, even sitting under Buena Vista lamp posts at night in the 1960s to feast on insects that swarmed to the light, according to historical articles reviewed by CPW. Then the fungus came, killing off thousands of the tiny creatures in the 1980s and 1990s. 

The fungus — Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis— is blamed for the death of amphibians all over the world, including in Australia, Asia and South America. Aquatic biologists say the toads lived in Colorado before humans and are an important part of the high-elevation ecosystem, where they eat bugs and serve as food for snakes, birds and weasels. 

In Colorado, some transplanted tadpoles have received antifungal bacterial baths before they are packed into plastic bags and released into mountain bogs and ponds. The wash is called “purple rain” because of its lavender tint.

In one project, University of Colorado researchers injected boreal toads with either a spot of pink or green dye, visible through amphibian skin when they held a toad up to the sunlight. Green-spotted toads got the antifungal bath, while pink-spotted ones did not. Then they tried to capture the toads the following summer, searching for them in a pond above Buena Vista, to see whether they were infected with the deadly fungus. 

A “Boreal Toad Recovery Team,” which includes biologists from Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, has been working to save the toads for 20 years. 

“The boreal toad is a truly unique and resilient amphibian,” said Cammack, calling the discovery of the new tadpoles a monumental day in his career. “We are up at 11,500 feet, at timberline practically. They gut out big winters covered by multiple feet of snow and experience only three to four months of warm growing season.”

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.”

BERTHOUD — Parents everywhere hear the call of the wild, especially in the summer months, and one of the most common refrains is, “Can we go to the park?”

For many parents it might be a relief, a chance to shoo them out of the house like a miller moth. Yes! Go to the park! But for Lauren Bowling, that refrain is anything but a chance to unwind. It means work. It means nearly two hours in the car. It means a whole afternoon. 

Lauren and her husband, Richard, have twin boys they call walking miracles. Miles and Mack had twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome and were week-to-week starting about 12 weeks into her pregnancy, Lauren said, until they were delivered by emergency cesarean section at 28 weeks. The babies scrapped and survived, and the boys are now age 7. Mack is as able-bodied as they come and Miles has no cognitive problems, which gives the Bowlings oodles of gratitude. It really could have been much worse.

But Miles has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to get around. This means not every park will work, including all the available playgrounds in Berthoud, where he lives with his parents, Mack and an older brother, Braxton.

This will change by next spring and possibly a lot sooner, thanks to the Berthoud Adaptive Park Project. The park will be Berthoud’s first inclusive playground of any kind, but this one will be one of the most inclusive in northern Colorado, with a surface he can roll on and swings, monkey bars and a merry-go-round, all adapted so Miles can have fun, too. Berthoud broke ground on the park on May 29. 

“The monkey bars are built so kids in wheelchairs can pull themselves through,” Lauren said. “Miles will be able to play on monkey bars with other boys.”

Berthoud launched the park thanks to the Bowlings, who raised money for it with a ridiculously successful lemonade stand (this year’s annual event raised more than $13,000, for a total of $53,000 over four years) and the help of Can’d Aid, a Longmont nonprofit launched in 2013 by craft-brew-in-a-can pioneer Dale Katechis. It also took some haranguing, the kind parents of disabled children learn to do as their offspring grow up enough to explore the outside world and realize some things aren’t the same for them.

Haranguing, even a few years ago, was how inclusive parks were built. Now parks departments realize that an adaptive park doesn’t mean building a ramp so kids can sit in their wheelchair while other kids run by them. Denver, in fact, tries to be inclusive with every new park. 

“Now people are realizing that accessible is not inclusive,” said Juliet Dawkins, who started LuBird’s Light Foundation with Jason, her husband, for their daughter, Lucia, after her nickname. “Even if you have a smooth surface, a wheel-able surface, if you don’t have a piece of equipment for them to play on, what’s the point?”

Most of Colorado’s larger cities have at least one inclusive park, and the movement is trickling down to towns such as Berthoud, with a population of 12,000. 

Yet parents still need to show up, speak up and make sure they are heard, Bowling said, despite emphasizing in her speech at the groundbreaking that she couldn’t have done it without the help of many others. She had to help push community fundraising for the park toward its $1.6 million goal, after all. 

“There were times I got intimidated by our grand goal, and anytime that happened, someone in the community reached out and would reinvigorate me,” Bowling said. “But I don’t think it would have happened without me pushing. It feels gross to say that, because so many helped lift me, but no, I don’t.” 

Where you belong (really)

This year’s theme of the National Recreation and Park Association is “Where You Belong.” That’s intentional, said Kara Kish, director of parks and recreation for the city of Loveland.

“A lot don’t feel they do belong,” Kish said. “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.” 

Cities across the country, including Loveland, Denver and many others, have revamped their recreation departments to not only offer programs specifically for those in disabled communities but adjust any class or sport to make it accessible if someone requests it. 

Parks are a harder commitment, but they are working on it. Loveland’s spent the past decade, Kish said, to make all its parks compliant with the American for Disabilities Act.

ADA standards, however, aren’t always fun, and that’s why parks departments are looking beyond them. Loveland broke ground April 22 on the 160-acre Willow Bend Natural Area and Universal Access Playground, which will feature the city’s first universally accessible playground — 12 acres. Loveland hopes it will be ready by spring. 

“Universal access goes beyond physical limitations,” said Bryan Harding, Loveland’s parks and recreation planning manager. “It runs the whole gamut. We won’t have everything for everybody but we will have something for everyone.” 

The park will feature play equipment designed to be used with other people, with a concrete slide, for instance, that’s extra wide and doesn’t cause static that can knock out pacemakers and bother those with hearing difficulties, as well as bathrooms with oversized stalls and adult changing tables. There will be tools for sensory play as well, which can be soothing for those with autism and other similar issues. There’s even charging stations for mobility devices such as electric wheelchairs. 

Concrete slides are a new concept, but it’s likely able-bodied kids will like them better as well, Harding said, since they don’t get nearly as hot as metal or plastic slides. Inclusive swings and merry-go-rounds are still loved and used regularly by everyone as well. 

“Inherently when you improve upon something,” Harding said, “it serves everyone better.” 

“We want people to be together”

Denver Parks and Recreation now considers whether a park is universally accessible and inclusive instead of buying a piece of equipment and calling it good. 

“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. “We’ve had a lot of conversations with families and advocacy groups. They’ve helped us understand what makes parks inclusive. We’ve been learning over time.” 

Sometimes parks departments were the opposite of inclusive even when they meant well. Buying a single piece of adaptive equipment can be anything but inclusive.

“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.”

Parks and recreation departments and the equipment providers that serve them nationwide are doing their best to learn, Wells said. Denver’s focused on inclusive playgrounds for a bit now — Wells said it’s been a focus since he started working for Denver four years ago, and it was before he got there — and it’s now so commonplace that even towns such as Berthoud do their best. 

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

There are also limitations, Wells said. Some of Denver’s 175 parks were built during World War I and aren’t easy to retrofit, as accessible equipment can be much larger. Cost can also be an issue, although that may depend on the cities, as some said the equipment they found was a lot more expensive. Wells agreed that adaptive equipment costs more but also said fitting the equipment in older parks was a bigger constraint. 

“Is it backbreaking? No,” Wells said of the cost.

The fight continues

Yet with all the thinking on a citywide level about inclusive parks, there are still people fighting for more of them. Sarah Spiller, a physical therapist for Academy School District No. 20 in Colorado Springs, has a hard time recommending a park for her families in Colorado Springs. 

“Our closest one that’s accessible in our area is 30 minutes away,” Spiller said. 

There are three inclusive parks in Colorado Springs, she said, including Panorama Park, which she calls “wonderful.” But from the school district where she works, it’s 35 minutes away. 

Colorado Springs wants to work with her, she said, but said it is hamstrung by tens of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance on its parks. Many parks were built in the early 1990s, she said. But the city told her that if she could raise money for it, the city would match her contribution. 

She’s also spoken with an HOA that might be willing to donate money for a neighborhood park if they could use the grounds for free for events like Easter egg hunts. Maybe parks companies would donate a piece of adaptive equipment. 

“I need to create an organization and meet again with parks and rec,” Spiller said. “We will see.”

Spiller’s push is the kind of initiative that LuBird oundation wants to see, even if Dawkins does agree that parks and recreation departments are taking a lot more initiative on inclusive parks. 

“Whenever there’s a new park, generally cities will present plans to the public, and there are questions like, ‘Do you want a regular swing or a support swing?’,” Dawkins said. “Parents should advocate for that.”

There are certain pieces that LuBird pushes for nearly every time a new park gets built, such as surface merry-go-rounds and supportive swings, things that Dawkins calls “a slam dunk.” 

“It’ll be awhile before every park is inclusive every time,” Dawkins said. “But at the minimum, you can have those pieces and add more from there.” 

The park in Berthoud won’t be ready for kids until late fall, and it’s possible the rubber surface won’t be ready until the spring. They are planning a grand opening for Memorial Day. 

Bowling sees the park less as a way for her to avoid driving long distances as a real chance for Miles to be a typical boy whenever he wants. He can ask his mother if he can go to the park, and Bowling, finally, will be able to shoo him out the door. 

“He’ll be able to roll out the garage door and go down the block and play safely with his friends,” Bowling said. “That’s something I wish for every child.”

PARK COUNTY — Miles of sagebrush-covered ground and a soaring cloud puff-dotted sky dwarfed Gov. Jared Polis and other officials as they addressed a crowd gathered before them July 29 on a sweeping piece of land about 10 miles northeast of Fairplay. 

Surrounding them but invisible save for a few droppings was an elk migration corridor. On a plain below a gently sloping hill was Tarryall Creek, a trout fishery and riparian zone favored by moose, elk, deer and beavers, plus hawks, songbirds and the occasional bald eagle. And visible from nearly anywhere they stood were big, beautiful mountains. 

The group was there to celebrate the latest land acquisition by Colorado Parks and Wildlife, 1,860 acres of the Collard Ranch 60 miles west of Denver now designated as a protected state wildlife area. In December, CPW joined forces with Great Outdoors Colorado to purchase the land, spending $2 million and $6.5 million, respectively. Or rather, proceeds from the Colorado Lottery paid the $6.5 million and hunters and anglers mostly picked up the remaining $2 million. 

GOCO and CPW bought the land from the Western Rivers Conservancy who “jumped at the opportunity” to buy it after Allen Law, their Interior West project manager, fell “in love at first sight” with it in 2022. “Western Rivers’ motto is ‘Sometimes to save a river you have to buy it’ and that’s exactly what we did at the Collard Ranch,” he said. 

Now, Polis was hailing it as the next “premier hunting and fishing opportunity for all Coloradans,” added to the 558,000 acres the state says it has acquired for state parks, state wildlife areas and state habitat areas since Polis took office in 2019.

But as history has shown, state wildlife areas aren’t devoid of problems. 

Paying for limited play on public lands  

Like the other 350  or so state wildlife areas across the state, Collard Ranch was purchased partially with proceeds from CPW’s Habitat Stamp Program. 

Since 2006, Habitat Stamp funds have conserved millions of acres of key Colorado habitat. Some of those acres are designated state habitat areas and are off-limits to humans. But on state wildlife areas hunters and anglers are allowed to blast and cast, and each area has different “allowed activities” for nonconsumptive users such as hikers and birdwatchers. 

That has suited hunters and anglers who regularly access the state wildlife areas. But a coalition of animal advocacy groups sued CPW last September over regulations they said favored hunters and anglers over other users. 

Their complaint: Since 2021, all visitors to state wildlife areas — not just hunters and anglers — have had to pay to play, and nonconsumptive users deserve equal rights. The plaintiffs had a point: Bikes are prohibited, but wheeled carts hunters use to pack their dead game out aren’t. Hunting dogs only, if you don’t mind. And horseback riding is off-limits unless the horse is helping you hunt.

The case is ongoing and Collard Ranch reflects the plaintiffs’ complaint. Although it has been billed as the next big thing for hunters, anglers and recreators, only hunting, fishing and wildlife viewing are allowed per state wildlife area regulations.   

CPW is planning a soft opening for hunters only in October while others will have to wait until next spring for access to Collard Ranch, Kara Van Hoose, agency spokesperson, said. 

The number of visitors allowed at a time will also be limited by the number of cars that can fit in a parking lot CPW plans to build at the entrance, Mark Lamb, area wildlife manager for the region Collard Ranch sits in, said. CPW offers a limited number of hunting licenses in all of its game management units regardless of whether parts of them are designated state wildlife areas or not, so this new designation won’t increase overall hunter numbers. 

But Dave Gottenborg, whose 3,000-acre Eagle Rock Ranch lies near the Collard Ranch and who sits on CPW’s Habitat Stamp Committee, says he has some concerns about the big herds of elk that migrate through the Tarryall Valley bottom throughout the winter looking for forage and refuge. 

Do state wildlife areas concentrate hunters?  

Gottenborg is one of several ranch owners in Colorado who participate in CPW’s Landowner Preference Program, which encourages private landowners “to provide habitat that increases wildlife populations for the benefit of all hunters,” “discourage the harboring of game animals on private lands during public hunting seasons” and “relieve hunting pressure on public lands by increasing game hunting on private lands.” 

Yet, he thinks public access on the formerly private Collard Ranch could put extra pressure on the elk.  

Gottenborg is selective about which hunters he allows on his property through the landowner preference program, often giving his allocated number of vouchers to “neighbors, friends, and/or cowboys/cowgirls who come and help with branding, gathering, fence work, manual labor, etc,” he said in an email. He likes to do what he can for those who “may have some trouble putting food on their table at today’s grocery prices,” saying, “this is our way of helping them in return for their help on the ranch.”

He has also installed wildlife-friendly fencing on his land to assist elk in their winter journey that starts in Summit County and heads over Boreas Pass and Georgia Pass into the northern part of South Park near the Cline Ranch State Wildlife Area. 

From there, they migrate south across U.S. 285 into such areas as the Collard Ranch and points south, he said. “Elk also come over Kenosha Pass and through the Lost Creek Wilderness into the Tarryall Valley near my place. They seem to favor the bottom land along Tarryall Creek,” along with “‘working lands’ but also across recreational properties and now increasingly CPW-owned land as well,” he wrote in an email. 

Overall hunter numbers, which CPW manages, aren’t Gottenborg’s concern, he says. It’s that the state wildlife area designation, with its requisite signage and parking lot, could concentrate more hunters on the newly accessible public land and negatively impact the elk.  

Van Hoose said that’s not likely to happen because “this land is 1,860 acres, which is plenty of land for hunters to spread out.” 

But Gottenborg worries some hunters will try to “push the elk” he has seen “bedded down on a big piece of private property” and resting from private property onto public property — “entirely legal,” he says, — toward other members of their hunting party within the boundaries. And he says “elk are just running out of places to rest. This is simply my opinion – I’m not stating it as fact. It’s just what I observe here in this valley during the months in which hunting is permitted.”

CPW will discourage that kind of behavior the same way it does on the Cline Ranch State Wildlife Area, Lamb said, by limiting access to the entrance at the parking lot “because we want to prevent people shooting from the highway.” 

“What people try to outsmart on this property is predominantly elk,” he added. “So if they saw some elk up on [a] hill, they might try to drop somebody off to try and push them. We didn’t want to have those kinds of issues, so we figured, let’s try only letting people in at the parking lot. We’ve had people get angry about it, but it’s worked really well.”

Van Hoose in an email said CPW’s regional wildlife officers will enforce the rules Lamb mentioned as well as others within the boundaries. 

“A major task of the District Wildlife Managers (or Wildlife Officers) is to contact hunters and anglers in the field to ensure they have the proper licenses and tags while recreating. Officers do these daily checks on many types of lands, including SWAs,” she wrote. 

And to keep enforcement close, CPW plans to house some of the officers in a building that came with the property, Lamb said.  

Letting the new designation play out

Time will tell if turning the Collard Ranch into a state wildlife area will impact the elk that overwinter there one way or another.

But Gottenborg is adopting a “we shall see” stance, saying he thinks CPW has done a great job managing the elk herds he’s familiar with in the past. 

“I believe they will continue to do so,” he wrote in an email. “I have nothing but respect and admiration for the job they do. Same goes for the USFS locally. We all work together in this valley, both private landowners and CPW — to protect private lands from overgrazing — and maintain healthy wildlife populations — and their respective migration corridors.  We consider it a privilege to work with them — all for the good of Colorado hunters, anglers, and yes, wildlife.”

A Native American tribe in Washington that promised 15 wolves to Colorado has rescinded its offer saying the state has not honored concerns of the Southern Ute Tribe involving wolf reintroduction. 

Since soon after Colorado voters approved reintroducing wolves west of the Continental Divide, the Southern Ute Tribe has been trying to get Colorado Parks and Wildlife to acknowledge the tribe’s sovereignty in managing wolves on its land under an agreement covering hunting and fishing in the southwestern corner of the state. 

But the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Nation says a lack of agreement between the Southern Utes and the state is a deal-breaker. On June 6, Jarred-Michael Erickson, chairman of the Colville Business Council, wrote a letter to Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis saying the Colville Tribes were withdrawing their resolution because “necessary and meaningful consultation was not completed with the potentially impacted tribes” when the state created and implemented its wolf reintroduction plan. 

The Southern Ute Tribe’s concerns date back to at least 2020, when the tribal council approved a resolution drafted by its wildlife advisory board to oppose reintroduction. 

The resolution cited potential impacts on both the Southern Ute Reservation and in the Brunot Agreement Area, approximately 3.7 million acres of the San Juan Mountain region the confederated bands of Utes were forced to cede to the federal government in 1873. 

Included in the 1873 Agreement was a provision reserving the right of Utes to “hunt upon said land so long as the game lasts and the Indians are at peace with the white people.” In 2008, the Southern Ute Tribe entered a historic agreement with CPW that expressed the intent of both governments to work cooperatively toward long-term conservation of wildlife within the Brunot Area. The Brunot Area Hunting Proclamation, which includes bag limits and permit numbers, is updated yearly.

The 2020 resolution to oppose reintroduction cited the impact of wolves on tribe member livelihoods, livestock on the reservation and wildlife including elk, deer and Shiras moose. Steve Whiteman, a fish and wildlife biologist who was wildlife division head for the Southern Ute Tribe from 2002 to 2022, represented the tribe on the stakeholder advisory group that presented recommendations concerning reintroduction to CPW. 

Among key recommendations were recognizing “the Brunot Agreement lands (i.e., consideration of management and Tribal consultation needs)” and developing “new intergovernmental agreements or memoranda of understanding with Tribes.”

But the Colville Tribe’s letter indicates CPW hasn’t done enough. 

Early communications with CPW 

As reintroduction efforts continued to move forward, the tribe in 2021 sent a letter to CPW communicating its concern that wolf restoration would “present an unacceptable risk to our hunting resources.” The letter highlighted the problem of declining elk calf numbers in the San Juan Basin, attributed to drought, habitat loss and degradation, disease, recreation impacts and other predators. 

“Additional pressure from an apex predator like the wolf would likely drive down the elk population further and reduce hunting opportunities,” the letter said. “Any effort at wolf population management will only be possible many years into the future.” 

Tribal officials also were concerned big-game populations could be severely impacted by then, reducing hunting opportunities in the Brunot Area. They were critical of CPW’s “arbitrary compensation cap” on livestock lost to depredation. They wanted assurance of critical funding for a restoration program, research and monitoring, education and outreach as well as a conflict mitigation and compensation program. 

And they said that while the wolf management plan signaled “support of tribal self-determination and self-governance,” they wanted CPW to recognize a “broader recognition of tribal sovereignty” through the adoption of a tribal management plan or memorandum of understanding that would govern the management of gray wolves on the reservation and Brunot Area. 

The tribe sent another letter on Feb. 22, 2023, the last day for the public to submit comments on the proposed wolf management plan. By then the agency had held five public meetings about the proposal to hear community feedback, with a meeting Gunnison being the closest to the Southern Ute Reservation. That letter mentioned the June 4 letter as well as a request by Melvin J. Baker, chairman of the Southern Ute Tribe, asking CPW to limit releasing wolves to the Interstate 70 corridor north of the Brunot Area. 

In fact, the first five wolves were released Dec. 18 north of I-70 on state land in Grand County. Another five were released Dec. 23 in Grand and Summit counties, also north of I-70. 

As of July 23, some of the wolves had ranged north to the Colorado-Wyoming border, east into Larimer and Clear Creek counties, west into western Routt and Rio Blanco counties, but only as far south as the border of Eagle County and Lake County, according to on CPW’s Collared Gray Wolf Activity Map. 

However, CPW’s planned release area includes Montrose and Gunnison counties south of I-70 to the northern border of the Brunot Area. That may be one reason the Colville Tribe decided to rescind its offer of Washington wolves to the agency. Representatives did not respond to requests for an interview. 

In early May, Southern Ute Tribe council member Andrew Gallegos gave the CPW commission a presentation on the history and establishment of the Ute reservations, the Brunot Area, wildlife management and the Brunot hunting program. Some key takeaways were the need for a strong government to government relationship and that the tribes know how to best manage their resources.

But the Colville Tribe in its June 6 letter wrote: “It is further recommended that all directives regarding the request from the State of Colorado that the Tribes provide wolves, that were passed up to the date of this recommendation be rescinded, including, but not limited to those passed on Sept. 19, 2023, and Oct. 3, 2023.”

The Colville Tribe’s natural resources and wildlife division indicated a letter would be coming June 11 and it was sent on June 18, Gonzales said in an email.  

“Because the original agreement has only been rescinded at this time and does not close the door to future conversations or opportunities to work with the Tribe, CPW chose not to release this information,” she added.  

State statute doesn’t require the agency to share communications with the public, but some ranchers are unhappy about CPW withholding this one. 

“I guess it isn’t part of their building back trust program,” Grand County Commissioner Meritt Linke said, referring to promises Davis made during a commissioner’s meeting Jan. 25. “Once again, I would question what would be the benefit of keeping this secret. It’s really not about wolves anymore. It’s about politics.” 

Davis said in a statement last week that while the Colville Business Council, tribal government and natural resources committee’s decision is “disappointing,” we have a “strong relationship” with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and “hope to continue these conversations in the future.” 

CPW will continue working with other potential sources for wolves and isn’t “contemplating halting our implementation of the plan,” he added. 

Southern Ute Tribe’s statement 

On Friday, the Southern Ute Tribe released a statement on Colville’s decision, saying that since the passage of gray wolf reintroduction, the tribe has been “actively engaged in collaborative efforts” with CPW and the attorney general’s office to address its concerns “including potential impacts of wolves on livestock, deer and elk herds, and the exercise of Brunot Area hunting rights reserved for Tribal Members.”  

“The Southern Ute Indian Tribe deeply values its progressive and strong relationship with Colorado Parks and Wildlife,” it continued, “and will continue to collaborate with them to establish a framework for working together that enables the state to implement its reintroduction program while simultaneously recognizing the sovereign authority of the Tribe on tribal lands and the interest shared by the Tribe and the state in the Brunot Area.” 

In an email Friday, CPW said, “the nature of tribal governance and state/federal governance can present valuable learning opportunities. CPW is committed to working with our tribal partners to find solutions and move forward.” 

Collared wolves in the news

Meanwhile, the agency has other pressing matters to address, including the confirmed killing of eight sheep by wolves in Grand County July 28.

In news pleasing to wolf advocates, on July 19, Rocky Mountain Wild’s Colorado Corridors Project captured the first official documented image of an introduced wolf staring directly into a camera on Vail Pass. (Ranchers have many of their own images.) 

At its commissioners meeting the same day, Reid DeWalt, CPW’s deputy director, announced the members of a new ad hoc working group formed to focus on “promoting and scaling up non-lethal wolf deterrent measures while providing additional resources to ranchers affected by reintroduction.”

The group includes ranchers, wolf advocates, hunters and a rangeland wildlife conflict specialist along with Davis, DeWalt, CPW wolf biologist Eric Odell, Dustin Chiflett from the Colorado Department of Agriculture and Travis Black, CPW’s northwest region manager.

Missing: Two experienced backpackers 

Clothing: None

Facial Hair: Yes

Nose: Prominent

Last seen: 12,000 feet, East Fork Cimarron Trail

Answer to: ‘Rones’ and ‘Vio.’ 

Hang on, we’re being told these are llamas. Llamas don’t really answer to anything. Should you spot them, try “Hey, llama!” 

Lisa Balcomb realizes her runaway llamas are likely fat, happy and indifferent to human intervention, grazing somewhere in the high meadows and rock-strewn cliffs of the high San Juans. But she’d appreciate it anyway if you called in notice of her best friends upon sighting them while hiking. 

“It’s sad,” Balcomb said Saturday afternoon, back home at her ranch in Silt, posting “Lost Llamas” messages on 14ers.com and any other site she could think of. They’ve left handwritten “missing” placards at trailheads, and tucked notices stuffed into plastic sandwich bags under the wipers of cars from Lake City to Ouray.

“My sister and her husband just spent six days up there looking for them, really hard, you know. And they never saw them. It’s just really sad.” 

Balcomb, 69, and her sister Barbara are expert llama packers, having given up their own backpacks to save their knees years ago. They’ve llama-packed the entire Continental Divide Trail, and frequently take two-week hiking trips in the San Juans. 

On July 27, Lisa and Barbara were on the second day of return from a five-day pack-in through the valleys and over the saddles connecting majestic 14ers like Wetterhorn, Uncompahgre and Redcloud. They crested a high ridge with a sublime view into a valley, which included a distant herd of grazing sheep on National Forest meadows. 

Not their first rodeo, the sisters armed themselves for encounters with aggressive sheep dogs and tried to prepare their own dog, Nick. Bear spray at the ready, llama leads held tight, leash on the dog. 

Suddenly a shepherd’s dog lunged from a wash gully and attacked Nick. “We’ve dealt with sheep dogs before. This one was unbelievably ferocious. I thought, ‘He’s going to kill him.’ And I started pounding him on the head.” 

Barbara aimed the bear spray but was reluctant to pull the trigger and spray all of them with the virulent cloud. One llama, Vio, saw greener, quieter pastures and took off, dragging Lisa across the rocks on her stomach. Lisa feels bad that in fearing for her dog, she lost track of Rones, who also had had enough. 

The llama’s pack panniers, holding the sisters’ food and shelter, were gone as well. They spent hours looking for their mates, but also knew the snacks in their daypacks would only last so long. Lake City was the closest hike. 

As they crossed the valley where they’d seen the sheep, a shepherd emerged from his tent and offered them binoculars. But they couldn’t trade information in English or Spanish — the shepherd spoke only the Basque of the remote portion of Spain that supplies high-country ranches with migrant sheep specialists. 

Back in Lake City, the sisters alerted the sheriffs in Hinsdale and Ouray counties, whose dispatchers told them of other protective-sheepdog problems. But search parties for llamas — currently eating like kings, wherever they are — are not a thing. 

The families will make the long trek from Silt and keep going back to the San Juans in coming days, taking binoculars on more hikes.

Sunday morning, Balcomb texted she was jumping back into her pickup again for the long drive south. “Got a good sighting and we’re headed down there. Keep your fingers crossed.” 

If not found sooner, she hopes the llamas will eventually make their way down to a ranch or a town when snow starts covering up the high mountain grass. If anyone else spots them, she wants them to call the Hinsdale or Ouray County sheriffs’ non-emergency dispatch, or email newsroom@coloradosun.com and we’ll forward the news.

In the meantime, the sisters have other llamas safely at home, inside fences. They too largely ignore their names (Fox and Bud). They won’t go out packing, though. 

“They’re retired,” Lisa said.

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.”

Colorado is a wildfire state.

There are the notable ones — the Cameron Peak fire, a 208,000-acre inferno, and the Marshall fire, which burned about 6,000 acres and destroyed hundreds of houses and businesses. And there are the smaller ones, such as the Devil’s Thumb fire that burned 81 acres in 2023. 

As fires explode around the Front Range, we wanted to map out where they were in relation to each other. But taking it further, we stepped away from the minute-by-minute updates to take a historical view of fires and where they burn. 

We looked through the National Interagency Fire Center’s records on fires since 2009 and plotted them on a map — all 10,849 of them. What resulted was a galaxy of blazes, but one with a clear message: Reported fires tend to happen most often where people live. 

Take a look for yourself. You can search this map by fire name or by year. Fires from this year are shown in red.

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.”