Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative · Article 6 of 24
The acknowledgments open with a claim the rest of the plan depends on: success came from commitment “not only in the forming of this Vision Plan, but also carrying it into implementation.” The task force was built to hold natural resources, recreational users, wildlife, agricultural lands, and both urban and rural communities in the same conversation.
The task force
Members included Angler’s Covey, Trout Unlimited, and Colorado Springs City Council; the Bureau of Land Management Royal Gorge region and Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area; the City of Cripple Creek; the Coalition for the Upper South Platte; Colorado Parks and Wildlife; Colorado Springs Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services; Colorado Springs Utilities; El Paso County Parks; an outfitter; Fremont Adventure Recreation and the Royal Gorge Bighorn Roundtable; Great Outdoors Adventures; Medicine Wheel Trail Advocates; Palmer Land Conservancy; Pikes Peak — America’s Mountain; the Pikes Peak Marathon and Ascent; Rocky Mountain Back Country Horsemen; Rocky Mountain Field Institute; Trails and Open Space Coalition; the U.S. Forest Service Pikes Peak Ranger District and the Pike and San Isabel forests; and Visit Colorado Springs. Several of those seats also serve on the PPORA Advisory Council.
A second bench
The Advisory Council is the wider bench: photographers, outfitters, climbing, youth corps, motorized trail riders, hang gliding, Nordic skiing, chambers, Colorado College, UCCS, Generation Wild, Hiking Bob, and the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Industry Office among them. The plan points readers to ppora.org for the current list. Joint quarterly meetings with stakeholders were the formal link between the two groups.
Who staffed it
The project team sat at PPO, with Trails and Open Space Coalition, N.E.S. Inc., Bachman PR, and the UCCS Geography Department, including Matt Gottfried’s students on the data hub. A leadership team drawn from the PPORA board — Jeff Mosher, Walt Hecox, Toby Gannett, and David Leinweber — sat over the work. Focus groups later pulled advisory-council members, task-force members, and added subject-matter experts into twelve working meetings on recreation, management, natural resources, and education.
That roster is the practical answer to a question locals ask about every regional plan: who was actually in the room. The Vision Plan’s answer is land managers, user groups, conservation nonprofits, businesses, and the communities of all three counties — with gaps the process later went back to fill.
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. Acknowledgments, pages 2–4; Stakeholder Engagement, page 43.
