Official support is rising for new management over one of Colorado’s most iconic mountains.

As part of his State of the State address, Gov. Jared Polis sounded in favor of Colorado Parks and Wildlife managing recreation on Pikes Peak. This was an idea floated last year in local talks about how best to serve recreation enthusiasts across the complex landscape largely owned by the U.S. Forest Service and spotted by several other government and commercial interests.

Now the idea has more traction than ever.

CPW announced receiving a letter of intent signed by supporting parties including the Forest Service, the cities of Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs, El Paso and Teller counties and Colorado Springs Utilities.

The intent: for the agency overseeing state parks and designated recreation areas to explore bringing its model to the 14,000-foot America’s Mountain.

Specifically, the letter seeks CPW’s muscle in finishing the Ring the Peak Trail, a long loop touring the mountain that has been decades in the making. 

“This is just the first step in a multi-year plan to improve and expand world-class recreation opportunities like camping, fishing, hiking and more on the majestic mountain in a way that benefits the landscape, our way of life and local economy,” Polis said in a statement. “Anyone who visits our state parks knows exactly what CPW is capable of delivering.”

No one is calling it Pikes Peak State Park.

“Some people, when they think of the term ‘state park,’ they think every state park has to be super busy, highly developed, where it’s gonna be like Lake Pueblo or Chatfield or Cherry Creek,” Frank McGee, CPW’s local southeast manager, said in a previous interview. “We have a large portfolio, and ‘state park’ can mean a lot of different things.”

The portfolio includes Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area. CPW’s news release suggested that to “compare the possible CPW presence on Pikes Peak.”

While the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service own much of the area along 152 miles of the Arkansas River, CPW manages the surrounding trails, campgrounds and fishing holes. Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area is also one of the nation’s busiest commercial rafting scenes — calling to mind public-private dynamics on Pikes Peak.

The city of Colorado Springs enterprise Pikes Peak-America’s Mountain collects fees from drivers to maintain the highway up the summit. The Broadmoor Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway also ferries passengers to the Summit Visitor Center, where another private operator sells doughnuts and souvenirs. And Colorado Springs Utilities oversees drinking water sources on the mountain, including the North and South Slope reservoirs with varying levels of recreation access.

“Not changing any of that ownership,” Becky Leinweber has emphasized.

The executive director of Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance has put it this way: “CPW manages wildlife and has authority across the landscape for that layer regardless of jurisdiction. What would that look like for them to potentially manage the people?”

It’s been a question of years-long meetings that Leinweber’s nonprofit has hosted between land managers, advocates and local outdoor industry leaders. With grants from CPW and the state’s Great Outdoors Colorado lottery fund, Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance has gathered interested people, distributed surveys and commissioned studies as part of a process called the Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative.

Talks have often returned to the resource-strapped Forest Service being ill-equipped to serve rising recreation interests — the local Pikes Peak Ranger District is acutely focused on wildfire mitigation — and Utilities standing by its mandate to protect water and provide it, not recreation.

The jointly-signed letter of intent “is a great next step,” Leinweber said. “There’s a lot still that’s gonna have to happen, but I couldn’t tell you how excited we are that (land managers) came together, put aside their differences and, you know, that pride of ownership and management of our public areas and said, ‘We need to work together.’

“The public sees this as one big space,” Leinweber continued. “Just like with wildlife and wildfire, there just aren’t those lines on a map that the public sees either. So trying to work across lines and build up a partnership is really what the community asked for.”

Over decades, the community has also asked for a complete Ring the Peak Trail. The effort has long been stalled at a final gap in Teller County around municipal watersheds and private lands.

Other possibilities of CPW’s potential management are uncertain. Stan VanderWerf, for one, has sought more summit paths up Pikes Peak, in part to take pressure off Barr Trail and the backside route via Devil’s Playground.

The El Paso County commissioner and longtime outdoor advocate mentioned this at a recent commissioners meeting, where he called the massive mountain’s place against a major, growing metro “completely unique” and worthy of “special consideration.” Recreation development has always been a struggle as part of “a broader strategic issue,” VanderWerf said.

“There are so many encumbrances, so many equities, and this is why it’s always been hard to deal with,” he said.

Was CPW the answer? Another trail advocate, Steve Bremner, wasn’t so sure.

“When I think of Colorado Parks and Wildlife, I think mainly of restrictions,” the president of nonprofit Friends of the Peak said in a previous interview.

One restriction, he said, was in the form of fees — park passes and camping fees, for example, that CPW relies on for management, among other licenses and permits. “Pay to play” is the model, Bremner said, and he worried about that impacting freedom on Pikes Peak.

“Do we need new management? I’m not sure we do,” he said.

There would be many more conversations to be had, Leinweber said.

“Nothing is gonna happen tomorrow,” she said. “This is just the beginning of a process.”