Seeing a heightened stream of High Country recreators, Summit County’s Open Space & Trails department says outdoor management and conservation will remain a key goal in 2024 and beyond. 

During a Tuesday meeting with the Summit Board of County Commissioners, officials discussed how the county’s open space landscape has changed in the nearly 30 years since the department was founded — and what it means for the future. 

“Over time, a lot’s changed in Summit County,” said Open Space and Trails Director Katherine King. “We have a lot more people. We have people wanting to recreate in different ways and in different places. We have ecological changes like climate change and wildfire … and now our biggest challenge is, ‘How do we manage all that?”

Following its inception in 1995, the department’s original focus was on acquiring land to use for recreational opportunities. As of today, the department manages more than 17,800 acres across 370 properties with large amounts focused around Breckenridge and Green Mountain Reservoir north of Silverthorne. That includes 100 miles of natural surface trails and 41 miles of paved recreational paths. 

While land acquisition “has always been an important part of what we do and will continue to be,” King said the department has developed a greater focus on managing those parcels amid higher use. 

Those goals are laid out in the department’s 2022 master plan which contains community surveys showing that protecting recreational opportunities and conserving natural habitats remain top priorities of the public. 

“They clearly wanted to see a balance between recreation and natural resource protection,” King said. 

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One of the department’s largest repair projects in recent years was the restoration of a publicly-owned portion of Swan River that had been impacted by dredge mining in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The two-phase effort, completed in 2022, revived about 40 acres of habitat in the Swan River Valley and restored nearly 2 miles of river channel, according to King. 

In 2023, officials rolled-out changes to the parking and shuttle system for Quandary Peak and McCullough Gulch trails, which in 2020 was deemed the most-visited 14er in Colorado. Foot traffic flattened in 2023 following the changes, which included increased parking costs while incentivizing more shuttle use by making ridership free for county residents and cheaper for non-residents. 

Looking to the rest of 2024, the department is planning to improve signage at paved recreational paths to shore up user safety and etiquette. Officials will also continue improvements to the Dillon Valley trail system as well as add dog waste stations at high-use trailheads for the first time, King said. 

The department is also pursuing a state grant to launch a comprehensive plan for areas of Summit County that are now part of the Camp Hale National Monument. Signed into law by President Joe Biden in October 2022, the national monument status gives increased protection to more than 53,000 acres of White River National Forest Service Land in Summit and Eagle counties. 

King said it was critical to look into recreational management in that area given that the monument will likely be bringing “additional visitation to an area that’s already pretty inundated.”

Visitor-use monitoring, which began in 2015 with the installation of recreational path trail counters, will also continue to ramp up this year. One of the newest initiatives has been adding trailhead cameras that take a photo of the parking lot every hour to gauge how many visitors are using the trail, King said. 

Commissioners applauded the open space department’s efforts, calling many of the completed and ongoing projects an important community need. 

Commissioner Eric Mamula, who served as an inaugural member of the Open Space Advisory Council in the late 1990s, said the group has come a long way. 

Passing the initial tax funding for the department wasn’t an easy feat, Mamula said. But in the decades since it has cemented a permanent funding structure that has brought in tens of millions in open space funds. 

“It’s amazing to see what has happened in those 30 years to today,” Mamula said. 

Commissioner Nina Waters called trails and outdoor open space “essential for our way of life in Summit County” for full-time residents and visitors alike. Amid the transition from land acquisitions to trail management, Waters said it will be important to consider how to integrate outdoor access with housing.

“As we increase in density in some of these centralized locations, I think that the reason why all of us live here is because we want to have access to the outdoors,” Waters said.