Park + Town

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Creating Colorado’s newest state park

Things began to change in the fall of 2017, when Trinidad called on The Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land (TPL) for help. The new mayor and other leaders had a vision to remake the town as a thriving recreation hub, and conservationists had long sought a continuous wildlife corridor from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the scoured plains of Oklahoma. The ranch, which had been on the market for years, was central to both ambitions.

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That February, TNC and TPL purchased the property for $25.4 million. Eight months later and with help from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, as well as Great Outdoors Colorado—a trust fund that invests a portion of Colorado Lottery money in state parks and outdoor spaces—Governor Jared Polis announced that it would become Colorado’s 42nd state park. Suddenly, a mountain whose local value for generations had been little more than a background aesthetic has become the centerpiece of an effort to save a town and preserve its landscape.

The property sits where the mountains meet the plains—an alluring location for both humans and wildlife. TNC has invested heavily in southern Colorado, purchasing properties like the Baca Ranch northwest of Trinidad, to protect a migration corridor critical for elk, bears and cougars. The addition of Crazy French Ranch places a 19,200-acre piece in a puzzle that will amount to just over 55 square miles of protected public land.

Fishers Peak blends conservation and recreation to build an economy

With Fishers Peak and its surrounding lands permanently protected, conservationists will be closer to realizing their long-held dream of a largely continuous wildlife landscape from the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming south and east to the plains of Oklahoma.

For Trinidad, the goal is to harness the exploding outdoor recreation industry, which contributes $62 billion to the state annually, and deliver itself from economic insecurity. The brick and stone outpost sits northwest of the peak, just above Raton Pass on the storied Santa Fe Trail. Wyatt Earp came through here; so did Billy the Kid. And when striking miners took on John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in 1913, in what became known as the Colorado Coalfield War, the railway through Trinidad was a strategic location for both the miners and the Colorado National Guard.

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The town has ridden many booms—cattle, coal, oil and gas—and weathered just as many busts. Since 2000, with the gas market slipping, its population has dropped by about 10%. “The city was flat, it had no vision and was losing a lot of young people” in recent years, says Mayor Phil Rico.

Seeking the next sure thing, Trinidad bought into recreational marijuana when it was made legal in Colorado in 2014, and these days, instead of cattle rustlers haunting its streets, retired New Mexicans and Texans drop by for grass. There are more than 20 dispensaries in a town of about 8,000 people, and the industry provides about 400 jobs.

Taxes on sales account for a quarter of the city’s annual revenue. But Trinidadians know a good thing won’t last.

“We’ve always relied on the coal and gas industries. That’s been up and down, and now we don’t have coal, [and] the gas industry is on hold. We need to diversify into a good, clean industry,” says Rico, who can see the writing on the wall. New Mexico decriminalized pot in 2019, around the same time Texas let out the leash for medical users. It is only a matter of time before those states go fully legal and this town’s shops go quiet.

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Despite the economic boom, some locals feel that the good times incurred a cost. The town originally intended to license five stores, “but the city let them all through. Now it’s like a stinkin’ mall. Pot shop to pot shop to pot shop,” says Nicole Paradisa, the 29-year-old owner of Colie’s Cakes & Pastries. A Trinidad native, she opened a business on Commercial Street to supply her neighbors with the treats her family has baked here for four generations. “I’m so excited for the park. Even walking to the bank I can see the peak,” she says.

Like others, Paradisa is optimistic that recreation will do for Trinidad what it has done for places like Fruita, a small Colorado farming town turned mountain biking mecca replete with vibrant breweries, bike shops and breakfast cafes.

“This community has been starving for this kind of public investment,” says Wade Shelton of TPL. The task before the coalition is to create lucrative recreational opportunities while preserving the healthy habitat draped across Fishers’ flanks.

In this, the park is uniquely positioned.

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Land managers rarely have the opportunity to plan for recreation and conservation in tandem, says Matt Moorhead, who directs conservation partnerships for TNC in Colorado. “Here, we have a blank slate. We can plan and adapt to meet conservation goals.”

Planners are working hard to ensure that trails skirt around sensitive habitat, and they hope to concentrate recreation on the northern side of the property, while leaving the more unspoiled southern section nearly pristine. Moorhead hopes the steps taken here will provide a template for designing recreation that works in concert with conservation.

Scientists and residents plan—and hope—for the future

The last significant use of Fishers Peak ended in the early 20th century, and since then the land has been used only for grazing and hunting. Below the iconic peak, there are miles of pinyon-pine habitat and forgotten stands where Gambel oak have stood for 300 years. For TNC senior conservation ecologist Chris Pague, the unknowns are wildly exciting. “It’s truly a mixed conifer forest,” he says, and ecologists have differing opinions about how to manage such a complex mosaic of mixed conifers.

To fill in the gaps and inform plans, Pague and his team, which includes volunteer experts, are cataloging everything growing in or moving through the scrubby, rocky property. There are elk and deer, peregrine falcons and eagles, flammulated owls and New Mexico meadow jumping mice, American hognose skunks (which hadn’t been seen for decades in Colorado) and four forms of butterfly that live nowhere else in the world (read more about the wildlife on the property here). On the upper mesas, which have just been lightly grazed, the only scars are from lightning strikes.

Given climate scenarios, Pague says, the park is an even more important linkage. The heat, drought and extreme weather in store for the West as a result of climate change could push flora and fauna north out of the desert and uphill from lowlands. “The biodiversity will either need to find refuge or a path to a place that is a refuge,” he says, and Fishers Peak may provide both.

In town, behind the Old West facades, residents anxiously await the park’s opening, which could happen in 2021. When asked what they envision for the property, they suggest campgrounds, picnic spots, a visitors center and perhaps even a zip line. But locals are also resolute in appeals that the land remain as undisturbed as possible. History has held Fishers Peak intact through so many turbulent years, and they intend to keep it that way.