Great news for the southern end of the Pikes Peak region: the City of Cripple Creek has secured a $150,000 Great Outdoors Colorado Community Impact grant for the Southern Teller County Coordinated Recreation Master Plan, covering Cripple Creek, Victor, and surrounding communities.
GOCO announced the award on June 12, 2026, as part of $14.5 million in funding for 35 projects across 27 counties. The Cripple Creek City Council later approved the grant agreement, with the City of Victor and Teller County each committing $5,000 in matching support. The project is expected to begin in early 2027, starting with a competitive process to select a consultant.
The timing is right. Southern Teller County is working to diversify its economy and build on outdoor recreation and heritage tourism .The new plan is meant to set shared goals for conservation, connectivity, forest health, and economic resilience, and to identify grant-ready projects and a practical path to build them.
Community engagement is built into the work. Outreach is expected to reach seniors, low-income households, people with disabilities, rural residents, working families, and youth, with a focus on barriers that keep people from getting outside and on projects that make year-round recreation safer, more accessible, and more affordable.
For the wider region, this plan fills a real gap. Ring the Peak is a roughly eighty-mile vision looping around Pikes Peak, and one of the missing pieces is a mixed-use spur from Gillette Flats to Cripple Creek and Victor, including motorized recreation. A coordinated southern Teller plan can help turn that idea into a defined, fundable project instead of a line on a map. It also sits alongside work already underway farther north, including the Ute Pass Regional Trail extension from Cascade toward Teller County, which is on track to open a new trailhead and Ring the Peak portal later this year.
Cripple Creek’s own 2025 Comprehensive Plan already calls for an updated parks, recreation, and open space plan, a regional look at road-bike and off-highway connections, and continued partnership with the Southern Teller County Focus Group and Pikes Peak Outdoors on trail maintenance and new trail ideas. This GOCO grant is the first real step toward that update.
Pikes Peak Outdoors will be looking for opportunities to line this work up with the larger regional trails master plan. A stronger plan in Cripple Creek and Victor makes the whole Ring the Peak network stronger.
Sources: https://goco.org/news/goco-awards-145m-for-parks-land-conservation-and-wildlife-habitat, https://www.goco.org/about/funded-projects, http://www.cityofcripplecreek.com/media/5011
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