Brief by Central Staff
Recreation – June 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Colorado Trail, which extends for more than 450 miles from the Denver suburbs to Durango, is looking for volunteers to work on trail crews this summer.
The Colorado Trail Foundation, based in Golden, schedules the work sessions, which can be an entire week or just a weekend. The trail is open for foot and horseback travel, as well as pack stock like burros and llamas, and some segments are also open to cyclists.
The weekend session in Central Colorado will be July 12-13 in the Johnson’s Gulch area near Kenosha Pass. It’s planned as a father-son outing.
The Kenosha Pass area will be seeing another trail crew July 21-28, to finish a reroute that was started last year and continue trail improvements. This will be a women’s only crew.
A Lost Park trail segment, on the northeastern part of South Park, will get culverts to channel the many small streams that cross the trail, with work scheduled June 14-21.
The Angel of Shavano zone, west of Salida, will get some small reroutes from June 28 to July 5. From Raspberry Gulch to Little Brown’s Creek, crews will work on improvements July 19-26 and July 26-Aug. 2. Rerouting of the trail along the base of Mt. Elbert, the tallest of the Rocky Mountains, is scheduled for Aug. 16-23.
Trail crews generally camp near their work for the week, and provide their own sleeping and eating gear. The Foundation provides food, group camping and cooking equipment, training, and work tools, and there are registration fees.
If you’re interested in a few days of physical work at high elevations, contact the Foundation at 303-384- 372 or ctf@coloradotrail.org. And if you’ve volunteered for one of these crews and would like to write about your experiences, please contact Colorado Central. That’s an article we’d love to publish.
