Public open space is hard to come by in parts of Colorado’s San Luis Valley. But it’s growing thanks to a grant from Great Outdoors Colorado.

The agency spreading lottery funds to outdoor initiatives around the state recently announced $825,000 toward a recreation oasis in Costilla County. In partnership with the county, Colorado Open Lands will buy nearly 400 acres straddling Rito Seco Creek — what GOCO called “critical to the growth of recreation opportunities” in the area.

The property connects what the county calls its only two formal trail networks. The northwest side of the parcel meets the Greenbelt trail system while to the east looms Rito Seco Park, where about 8 miles of new trail were celebrated last summer.

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The nearly 400 acres cover close to a mile of Rito Seco Creek. That “will expand public access to fishing and other water activities,” according to GOCO.

The agency called it an expansion of Rito Seco Park, which Costilla County established in the 1970s for locals lacking public land close to the town of San Luis. In the wake of Mexican land grants after 1821, the county has considered itself 99% private, subdivided land.

One of Colorado’s poorest counties, improvements to Rito Seco Park have long stalled while locals have bushwhacked to creek banks and negotiated overgrown hillsides. Shirley Romero Otero, a native and activist in San Luis, said the trails that opened last year were the first professionally built trails her town had ever received.

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“It took too long, way too long,” she previously told The Gazette. “And my reasoning for that is we are a rural, brown community, and anything that has to do with communities of color, things just take forever. It’s part of the lack of responsibility to care for such communities.”

The Rito Seco Park trails were spearheaded by San Luis Valley Great Outdoors, which gained nonprofit status in 2018. That group’s director, Mick Daniel, said he hoped momentum could continue for this end of the valley, following something of a trail revolution around Del Norte.

“We saw what happened with Del Norte and those downtown businesses,” he said. “It’s funny, the things a trail can begin to move in a community.”

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