Brief by Central Staff
Recreation – November 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Colorado Trail, which extends for about 470 miles between Durango and Denver, celebrated its 30th anniversary on Sept. 25 with a spaghetti supper in Buena Vista.
The trail was the idea of Bill Lucas, then regional director of the U.S. Forest Service, and Gudy Gaskill, who chaired the Trails and Huts Committee of the Colorado Mountain Club. They laid out a tentative route which connected existing trails (such as the old Main Range Trail on the east flank of the Sawatch Range), and volunteers went to work on the ground.
New construction was slow, however — less than 10 miles a year. That changed on account of an article written by our publisher, Ed Quillen, in 1984 for the old Empire magazine that came with the Sunday Denver Post.
While at the Mountain Mail, Quillen had written about the volunteer trail crews at work near Salida. He quit to free-lance in 1983, and in 1984 he pitched an article about the trail to Empire editor Mike Rudeen (who now writes the Wacky Question column for the Rocky Mountain News).
Rudeen said to go ahead, so Quillen spent a day with the trail crew west of Buena Vista, and wrote a sort of “feel-good feature” about the trail crew. Rudeen liked it enough to dispatch a photographer for another day on the trail, but not so much that he didn’t make Quillen rewrite it.
Ed recalls that “I thought there was one central Colorado Trail headquarters, but I had to call every ranger district between Denver and Durango to get its status, and it wasn’t good. The Gates Foundation had cut off funding, some rangers weren’t co-operating, and they were building less than a dozen miles a year. Rudeen made me take what was a light-hearted recreation feature and turn it into some hard journalism.”
The resulting article, “Trail to Nowhere,” was the lead story in a December edition of Empire in 1984, and had a pessimistic tone, doubting that the trail would ever get built, even though the volunteers worked so hard on it.
The article inspired many people to volunteer for the following summer. It also got the attention of Dick Lamm, then governor of Colorado. He decided the trail should be built, and he started lighting fires and rattling cages. Thanks to Lamm’s action, the trail was completed in 1987, years before anyone thought it could be done.
Invited to speak briefly at the Buena Vista banquet, Quillen explained how the Empire article came about, in a speech modestly titled “How I Built the Colorado Trail Single-Handedly Without Getting Callouses Anywhere except on my Fingertips.”
He and Martha have walked nearby stretches of the trail, and in the summer of 1999, their daughter Columbine hiked half the trail from Denver to Vicksburg with Hal Walter’s donkey Virgil, who ingested all reachable vegetation when he was tethered for the night. Someone passing by later might have thought a UFO had landed there, since Virgil formed Rocky Mountain crop circles by consuming everything that was remotely biodegradable down to the bare gravelly soil.
The trail is a work in progress, with revisions to its route, and it always takes maintenance, so volunteers remain welcome at www.coloradotrail.org. And if you’d like to write about your adventures on the Colorado Trail in this part of Colorado, we’d like to hear from you.
