Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative · Article 4 of 24
The legal geography of the Vision Plan is simple. PPORA represents El Paso, Teller, and Fremont counties, so the plan does too. Those three counties hold urban neighborhoods and backcountry, city parks and national forest, utilities land and working ranches. That is the full study area.
Why the massif rose to the top
As research moved forward, the task force kept returning to a smaller geography. “A consensus among the task force indicated this area needed to be prioritized to address conservation, recreation, and long term management and sustainability.” The plan calls it a deeper-dive focus: Pikes Peak and its recreation sheds.
The focus expands the footprint of the 1999 Pikes Peak Multi-Use Plan, Colorado Springs to Cripple Creek, to include most of the Pikes Peak Ranger District. The northern boundary takes in a small piece of Douglas County because that ground sits inside the ranger district and matches the data sources. The plan is explicit that Douglas County was not engaged in OPPI. The western boundary runs to the Teller–Park county line. The southern boundary captures portions of Fremont County. The eastern boundary is the edge of developed urban areas and the base of the foothills.
Why the line matters
Readers who live in Canon City, Monument, or southeastern Colorado Springs are still inside the plan. Community sessions were held across all three counties on purpose. But the management conversation — the one that later produced a letter of intent about the Ring the Peak corridor — is aimed at the mountain and the sheds that feed it: North Slope, South Slope, Waldo, the highway, the communities of Manitou Springs, Cascade, Green Mountain Falls, Woodland Park, Cripple Creek, and Victor.
That is also why a beautiful regional trail line is not, by itself, a project. Ownership inside the deeper-dive area is a mosaic of Forest Service, BLM, city, county, utilities, state, mine, and private land. The plan’s later tools, especially the Areas of Opportunity map and the conservation summary, exist so a proposal can be read against that mosaic instead of against a single agency boundary.
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. Boundary and Area of Interest, pages 33–34.
