Brief by Central Staff
Recreation – April 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Colorado Trail hereabouts will see a lot of work this summer as it gets a new route in the Clear Creek drainage.
This isn’t the better-known Clear Creek that flows through Idaho Springs and Golden, but a shorter Clear Creek which originates between 14,000-foot peaks in Chaffee County and joins the Arkansas River above Granite. This one boasts two ghost towns, Vicksburg and Winfield, and near its mouth is a reservoir that helps supply Pueblo with water.
This summer’s planned work involves seven miles of new path, to move the route off the private Clear Creek Ranch and onto public land, and the schedule calls for seven week-long trail crews and two week-end crews.
Because the work is in the same valley, the Colorado Trail Foundation will set up camp in one location, which allows for some amenities like a big kitchen tent and a shower tent with four stalls.
According to TreadLines, the Foundation’s quarterly newsletter, “we must build new trail down the rocky hillside on the north side of the valley and across the valley floor. We’ll install a large steel bridge to take the trail over Clear Creek and build new trail up the south side of the valley until it joins the current trail.”
Other trail segments scheduled for work this summer include Kenosha Pass, Mount Massive, Mt. Elbert, and Purgatory Basin.
If you’re interested in volunteering — for a day, weekend, or full week — you can get more information from the Foundation’s website at www.ColoradoTrail.org. There you can also read the article about “The Trail to Nowhere” that Ed Quillen wrote in 1984 for the old Sunday Denver Post Empire Magazine.
Not that Ed ever touched a shovel along the trail, but the article did get the attention of Gov. Dick Lamm, who was in a position to make things happen. The Trail appeared to be 10 or 20 years from completion in 1984, and then a route was completed in 1987. This allowed Ed to give a brief presentation, at the 2004 Trail conference in Buena Vista, on “How I single-handedly built the Colorado Trail without ever getting a callous or sprained muscle.”
