Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative · Article 7 of 24
The planning team refused the idea that OPPI was starting from a blank map. A PPORA working group had already flagged 48 plans. After the task force added the documents it considered essential, the list passed 100. Nearly 100 regional and statewide plans were reviewed. Summaries of 73 appear in the appendix. Another 20 were reviewed and left out of the bound document. Dates run from 1984 to 2022, with horizons out to 2050. Full documents were posted to the Outdoor Pikes Peak Data Hub.
How a plan was read
N.E.S. Inc. asked three questions of each document. Purpose: what need drove it, and what was it trying to accomplish? Roles and responsibilities: who was involved, and what was expected? Goals and recommendations: what outcomes were named, what strategies were proposed, and how often was the plan supposed to be revisited? Plans were then sorted into statewide, Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak region, El Paso, Teller, Fremont, creek, water quality, wildfire and community wildfire protection, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
Across that stack, the same context kept appearing: goals, growth, management options, partnerships, public participation, conservation and recreation, and implementation recommendations. A keyword matrix tracked how often objectives were cited. The categories were arts and culture, education, watershed, management, wildlife, tourism, recreation infrastructure, funding, communication, and forest health.
What rose to the top
Management was the most frequently mentioned category, at 16 percent. Watershed was second, at 15 percent. Fire and forest health, and recreation infrastructure, tied at 12 percent. The plan’s synopsis is that these documents were mostly public agencies or public-nonprofit partnerships, that they reach back to 1984, and that most are due for implementation or an update. They lined up with what stakeholders were already saying: management, watershed, wildlife, fire and forest health, and recreation infrastructure are the region’s standing subjects, not new ones.
The timeline graphic in the chapter makes the same point visually. The 1984 Land and Resource Management Plan, the 1997 Teller County Master Plan, the 1999 Pikes Peak Multi-Use Plan, the 2014 Colorado Springs Park System Master Plan, the 2015 Fremont County Master Plan, the 2018 North Cheyenne Cañon management plan, the 2019 Ring the Peak Master Plan, and the 2021 Your El Paso Master Plan are markers on a road the region has already been walking.
Source: Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative Vision Plan 2025, prepared through the Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance as the local Colorado Outdoor Regional Partnership, with support from Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Great Outdoors Colorado. Project team: PPORA, Trails and Open Space Coalition, N.E.S. Inc., Bachman PR, and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs Geography Department. The plan was written across a four-year process and released in 2025; some statistics reflect a point in time before publication. Existing Plan Analysis, pages 44–47; Appendix A list, pages 8–10.
