A Short History of The Colorado Trail
Written by Quentin Septer
Note: This is a modified excerpt from my book, Where Land Becomes Sky: Life and Death Along the Colorado Trail, available now.
The Colorado Trail. It’s a 485 mile-long path of singletrack, hiking trails, logging and mining roads extending from the mouth of Waterton Canyon, where the Rockies rise with prominence above the high plains of Denver, to the town of Durango, in the southwestern corner of the state, on the western slope of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. In the space between, the Colorado Trail traverses eight mountain ranges, six National Forests, six Wilderness areas, and five major river systems. It rises from an elevation of 5,520 feet in the foothills of the Front Range and climbs to heights of 13,280 feet in the San Juan Mountains. It rolls along valleys and canyon floors beneath cliffs of igneous stone, and passes over towering peaks of Archean granite and Leadville limestone. It weaves through forests of ponderosa and limber pine, Douglas and white fir, Engelmann and Colorado blue spruce, quaking aspens and narrowleaf cottonwoods, mountain alders, piñons, and junipers. It crosses seas of sagebrush and montane meadows abloom with the brilliant hues of wildflowers, and it climbs into the clouds atop dramatic, desolate landscapes of stone and tundra.
The Colorado Trail has many beginnings. Where, exactly, to begin the story of the Trail’s genesis is just a matter of perspective. The Colorado Trail was first biked in 1990, first hiked in 1988, officially constructed in 1987—the same year the Colorado Trail Foundation, the non-profit organization overseeing all things Colorado Trail, was founded. According to the Colorado Trail Foundation, the Trail was “born” in 1974 when its mother-organization, the Colorado Mountain Trails Foundation, was founded and the Trail’s route was charted, though not yet completed. Bill Lucas, a forester with the United States Forest Service, first envisioned what was to become the CT back in 1970. Miners, loggers, and trappers have traveled sections of the path for centuries. Indigenous peoples have traveled paths that would one day comprise the Colorado Trail for millennia.
The Clovis people were long considered the earliest inhabitants of the Americas, and they are the first peoples for whom archeological evidence exists in Colorado. It’s worth noting, however, that more recent findings suggest that human beings inhabited the continent at a much earlier date. People may have lived near Monte Verde, Chile as long as 18,000 years ago. Human footprints embedded in the exposed rock outcrops of Lake Otero in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park were recently dated at 21,000 to 23,000 years of age. A set of hammerstones and stone anvils in southern California, which appear to have been built by hominids, suggests that people—or a hominid ancestor of ours—may have lived in the continental United States as long as 130,000 years ago. The point is: the peopling of the Americas is a mysterious chapter of human history, and one in which the science is anything but settled.
What is known with certainty, however, is that the Clovis people inhabited North America at least 13,000 years ago. They, along with the later Folsom peoples, were predecessors to many of the indigenous tribes of the continent—the Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Pueblo, Shoshone, Utes, Comanche, Kiowa, and Navajo, among them. From the metamorphic walls of Waterton Canyon to the high peaks of the San Juans on the eastern flank of Durango, the Colorado Trail travels through the homelands of these indigenous peoples. And these indigenous peoples quite literally laid the groundwork for the Colorado Trail. They followed game trails across the Rockies, which later became footpaths as generations of nomads traveled the landscape. In sections, these ancient trails were incorporated into the Colorado Trail itself.
But that wasn’t for centuries to come. In the late sixteenth century, Spanish explorers Antonio Gutiérrez de Humana and Francisco Leyva de Bonilla were among the first Europeans to pass through present-day Colorado. Generations of European explorers followed in their footsteps, and eventually, the mountain men came. Throughout the 1800s, market hunters and fur trappers explored remote reaches of Colorado’s wilderness, hunting and trapping game for sale in markets across the Western frontier, as well as those back east. By 1850, gold was unearthed in the Rockies. Miners and prospectors flocked to the region. Geologists took to studying the landscape. They discovered a mineral-rich layer in Earth’s crust that traverses the mountains of Colorado in a southwesterly direction, from the foothills northwest of Denver down and out toward the town of Durango. This band of precious stratigraphy became known as the Colorado Mineral Belt. Settlers and frontier folk, drawn to the Rockies by this mineral wealth, established towns along the Colorado Mineral Belt—Breckenrige, Leadville, Buena Vista, Salida, Creede, Lake City, Silverton, Durango. Trails turned into wagon roads and railways. Some became segments of the Colorado Trail.
Colorado’s mining industry rose and fell with the value of gold and silver, iron and molybdenum. And as the prices of these minerals crashed in the early 1900s, tourism and a burgeoning ski industry became cornerstones of the Coloradan economy. Outdoor conservation groups like the Colorado Mountain Club began to form, building trails and extolling the virtues of the wilderness to the public. Around that time, Depression-era labor programs—the Civilian Conservation Corps, among others—began constructing trails across Colorado, too. Many of these trails were built for practical purposes: fire-management in remote regions of the state’s forests and fish stocking of alpine lakes and streams. In the decades to come, miles of these trails would be linked, giving shape to the CT itself.
“Perhaps the true genesis of The Trail can be traced back to the Roundup Riders,” United States Forester Bill Lucas wrote of the Colorado Trail, “a group of business and professional men who in the 1940’s decided they wanted to see the Rocky Mountains from horseback.” In 1970, Lucas met with a man named Hal Dahl, “head honcho of the Roundup Riders,” as Lucas describes him. The men envisioned a long distance trail spanning the width of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Bill Lucas called it “The Rocky Mountain Trail.”
Lucas soon met with the Colorado Mountain Club. A woman by the name of Gudy Gaskill attended the meeting. A long-time member of the Colorado Mountain Club, Gudy shared Bill Lucas’ dream of building a long-distance trail traveling across the Rockies. She would soon spearhead the project. With time, Gudy Gaskill became known as “The Mother of the Colorado Trail.” In 1972, Gudy and Bill traveled to Washington D.C. By then, the duo had rechristened their prospective footpath, “The Colorado Trail.” In Washington, they shared their plans to create the CT with Forest Service officials, and their efforts culminated in the passage of the Volunteers in the National Forest Act. The Act forged a partnership between the Colorado Mountain Club, the United States Forest Service, and the many volunteers needed to construct a trail the likes of the CT.
It was around then that magazines began promoting the Trail to the public. “It will be called, simply, the Colorado Trail,” a 1973 Colorado Magazine article proclaims, “and it will climb, bend, twist, weave, and drop through some 350 miles of constantly changing landscape.” Today, the Colorado Trail spans nearly 485 miles from Denver to Durango. But then, in the early ‘70s, the precise path remained terra incognita: “As yet, no final lines have been drawn on the map—but this summer the Forest Service will have an exploratory crew of young people in the field as a first step toward nailing down the project.”
The project: a long-distance trail with a northern terminus somewhere on the Front Range and a southern terminus somewhere on the Western Slope. That’s about all that was known of the Colorado Trail at the time. Several prospective routes for the CT were considered, and teams of volunteers were tasked with traversing the state’s basins and ranges to identify the most practical (and aesthetically beautiful) path. “Whatever the route that’s finally adopted,” the Colorado Magazine piece continues, “one thing is sure: the new Colorado Trail will be a lot more than just another high-country hiking path.”
By 1974, the Colorado Mountain Trails Foundation was founded and the route had been more or less settled. The Trail would begin in Denver’s Waterton Canyon and terminate near Durango’s Junction Creek. “Especially heartening is the fact that some 70 percent of the trail may already exist,” a journalist named David Summer wrote in Colorado Magazine that year. “Numerous old hiking paths, logging trails, mining roads, railroad grades and stock driveways already weave and meander through the forests and just need to be tied together with comparatively short, connecting links.” Meanwhile, Gudy Gaskill—executive trail director at the Colorado Mountain Trails Foundation—and her legions of volunteers were busily sculpting these connecting links of singletrack into the landscape. Private landowners got on board with the project, too, permitting the Trail to pass through their property lines. The Colorado Trail was well on its way to completion.
But by 1979, the Trail’s construction began to wane. Progress proved slower than expected, and after an early wave of excitement, support for the Colorado Trail dwindled. Funding dried up. Volunteers came few and far between. Hope for the Trail’s completion languished.
For years, the Colorado Trail sat fragmented and partially constructed in the Rockies. Journalist Ed Quillen deemed the faltering Colorado Trail “The Trail to Nowhere” in a 1984 article for the Denver Post’s now defunct Empire Magazine. The article outlined hurdles standing in the way of the Trail’s fruition. Quillen’s piece caught the attention of Colorado’s then Governor Dick Lamm. Inspired by the article, Lamm put the support of the Governor’s Office behind the project. Soon, volunteers began to assemble en masse.
More than 400 volunteers labored to complete the project in 1986, joined by nearly a thousand more the following year. And that year, in 1987, the Colorado Trail was born, linking Denver and Durango in a winding ribbon of singletrack, hiking trails, logging and mining roads. The Colorado Trail became a trail to somewhere, though the end destination wasn't exactly the point. From the early days of the Trail’s construction, the true ethos of the Trail was to be found in the beauty of the landscapes through which the path travels; a celebration of Colorado’s wild places.
Merril Hastings wrote of the Trail’s charm in a 1994 Colorado Magazine article: “It will leave you with romantic visions of unspeakable beauty. It will intoxicate you with anticipation so that you can’t wait to get started. You’ll talk about your plans to everyone who will listen and you’ll dream constantly about your upcoming adventure.” Each year, an estimated 150 people travel the length of the Colorado Trail, though the true number of thru-hikers, mountain bikers, and horse-back riders remains unknown, even to officials at the Colorado Trail Foundation. The Foundation doesn’t record these data. Suffice to say, thousands have traveled the Colorado Trail to date, and thousands more travel portions of the path every year.