A proposal to build a downhill mountain bike park in western Jefferson County, two miles west of Conifer on Shadow Mountain Drive, is meeting resistance from area residents who say it’s not an appropriate use in a forested area surrounded by mountain subdivisions.

The proposed Full Send Bike Ranch would create the first chairlift-served mountain bike venue in Colorado, comprising some 12 to 17 miles of single-track trails of varying difficulty on an undeveloped 500-acre mountainside parcel of state land managed by the Colorado State Land Board.

Co-founders Phil Bouchard and Jason Evans, who hail from New Hampshire, came to Colorado in 2020 and along with two other partners decided to “fill a void for Colorado’s mountain bike community in a way that is safe, responsible, and overall improves the local mountain bike experience.”

“The proposal is for a seasonal, day-use recreational development in the form of a trail access mountain bike park,” Bouchard told The Denver Gazette.

Asked why this location was selected Bouchard said, “From an elevation standpoint, from a topography standpoint, from an access standpoint, from a weather standpoint, basically all the things that you would look for in a development like this, the property meets those criteria.”

“This is not a property that we’re converting from protected wilderness to recreation,” said Bouchard. “It’s a property that’s firmly zoned for some sort of development.” 

Bouchard said the proposal is going through the regular Jefferson County planning and approval process where several public meetings before the Planning Commission and Board of County Commissioners will allow for citizen comments. In addition, if approved by the County, the project will also go through public review before the Colorado State Land Board for its approval.

Local residents, however, are not pleased with the proposal and want the property to remain as it is.

Barbara Moss Murphy, co-chair of Stop Full Send Ranch, LLC, has lived along Shadow Mountain Drive for 40 years.

“When I found out about the proposal, I immediately was concerned because I’ve lived on this road for 40 years,” Murphy told the Denver Gazette in an interview. “It’s a road that has very little margin for error, and in 2011 to 2013, and that’s back over 10 years ago, we had one fatality and 26 car accidents.

Murphy and several others began discussing the proposal and concluded that “Shadow Mountain Drive, as is, cannot handle the traffic that currently exists on our road, never mind adding a commercial development in a residential neighborhood.”

So, they formed Stop Full Send Ranch, LLC, which, Murphy said, “is about environmental concerns and safety concerns. We totally understand that there might be a need and a desire that the developers have to build a downhill bike facility, nobody objects to that. But what we’re very concerned about, and our opposition, is based on the fact that it would be an incredible safety detriment to us, and it would ruin that beautiful meadow.”

So far, said Murphy, they have 2,000 community petition signatures and “5,000 total on our website petition” opposing the project.

The proposal estimates an additional maximum daily vehicle load of 300 cars on the lower two miles of the road, and about 700 daily park users, mostly on weekends.

Murphy said that a 2011-2013 traffic study showed the road carries 2,600 vehicles per day.

Bouchard said Jefferson County requires a new traffic study, which has not yet been completed, but that he expects it to be done within a couple of months.

“I think when our traffic study is complete, there will be recommendations that we need to make improvements to the roadway in certain areas that might be considered higher risk. We’re certainly open to community concessions like that,” Bouchard said. “If there’s things that we can do to make people feel more comfortable or reduce the risk of any sort of accident on the road, we’ll certainly do it.”

“We have a lot of plans in place to make sure that we don’t break that 300-car-a-day maximum. And that’s a peak day. That’s not every day, right? We’re going to cap the amount of tickets that we sell on a given day, which will trickle down into how we’re managing the parking,” Bouchard said.

Murphy is concerned that injuries at the facility would overload the local volunteer emergency medical services. She said that a similar facility in New Hampshire, Highland Mountain Bike Park, reported that in its 27-week season, 256 medical incidents were reported and 53 ambulance transports occurred.

Bouchard said they will have on-site medical personnel and are consulting with the Elk Creek Volunteer Fire Department and the County on the emergency response plan. He said there will be a helicopter landing zone at the base facility for critical-care air evacuation. Bouchard also disputed the implication that mountain biking is unreasonably dangerous.

”The perception that mountain bike parks are riddled with grisly injuries is frankly untrue and misleading,” said Bouchard.

Bouchard noted that Jefferson County’s own Flying J Ranch Park has extensive mountain bike use, and the southwest corner of the park nearly connects with part of the state land that lies on the opposite side of Shadow Mountain Drive, leaving open the possibility of connecting the two areas.

Murphy also expressed concerns about the potential for a forest fire.

“So, what I would say to the developers is that mitigating one small portion, 275 acres, is not fire mitigation,” said Murphy. “And if we look at how fire spreads, that’s nowhere near a safety to the people that live in this community.”

The project lies roughly in the center of a strip of largely undeveloped land on the Northeast slope of Black Mountain, surrounded by four densely populated mountain subdivisions within a mile, all ensconced deeply in the same dense pine forests as are on the state land. From the forest fire risk perspective, the project’s forest canopy appears to be no different from that of the surrounding subdivisions.

Bouchard says one benefit is that the forest canopy will conceal the trails themselves, which would be only six to 12 feet wide. The only visible improvements would be the base lodge and the chairlift.

Bouchard responded to Murphy’s fire concerns saying, “It’s 500 acres of unmitigated forest. There’s dead and down underbrush everywhere. It’s honestly in a horrible, horrible state from a forest fire standpoint.”

Bouchard’s intent is to do fire mitigation on the entire 500 acres, which includes removing dead wood, trimming underbrush and ladder fuels such as low-hanging branches that allow creeping ground fires to jump to the canopy and “crown,” an extremely dangerous condition where the fire rapidly and uncontrollably spreads from tree to tree.

Bouchard said that their personnel would receive wildfire fighting training and there would be firefighting equipment on site. He also said that smoking will be absolutely prohibited on the property.

Asked if a water cistern at the top of the chairlift and a pipeline down the hill that can provide high-pressure water for firefighting might be useful, Bouchard said, “I think that’s certainly on the table. We’re going take our direction on most of that from the County.”

“It’s really not that much different than any other trail network that exists in the area. The key differentiator is the chair lift and the fact that people would be paying to use the park,” Bouchard said. “But at the end of the day, when you really look at the infrastructure that’s going in there, we feel that it’s an appropriate compromise (that) opens-up roughly 250 acres of forest to the community. It reduces forest fire risk. It’s seasonal, it’s day use, it gives people the opportunity to recreate in the outdoors. We think it’s a reasonable compromise and something that would ultimately benefit the Conifer area and Jefferson County more broadly.”

Asked if the opposition to the project is the result of “not in my backyard” attitudes, Murphy said no.

“We are about research, and we have really looked at this issue of safety and environment. And that is not a NIMBY issue because what I object to about the NIMBY part is NIMBY, to me, has a certain narcissism,” said Murphy. “Yes, we have a passion to save our beautiful meadow and preserve our mountain’s pristine community, but it’s based on fact; this is not a safe road.”

Bouchard hopes to have the formal zoning application submitted and have their first hearing with the Jefferson County Planning Commission by mid-summer. Assuming approvals from Jefferson County as well as the State Land Board after public hearings, their opening target date would be late 2023, but Bouchard says it’s more likely that it will be fully developed in 2024.