Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative · Article 11 of 24
After the first round of sessions and the survey, the team listed who was still thin in the data: southeast Colorado Springs, western Fremont County, the agricultural sector including private lands and ranchers, the military community, and Native communities. The plan treats that list as a correction, not a footnote.
Pop-ups, Spanish-language boards, and one-on-ones
Supplementary listening sessions, one-on-one meetings with private landowners, and digital surveys and boards in English and Spanish were added. Translators were on standby at pop-ups. The same questions were used on every platform so the answers could sit next to the January comments. Three pop-ups used dot-voting boards: Get Outdoors Day on June 3, 2023; Panorama Park on July 22, 2023; and a Health and Wellness Festival on August 19, 2023. Roughly 300 people voted on priorities for natural resources and recreation. The southeast Colorado Springs gap was a specific target. Additional outreach included the RISE SE Youth Advisory Committee, a military-focused survey, rancher and private-landowner conversations, and tribal-leader engagement described as listening and relationship building.
Elected officials
The project team also briefed nine local government bodies between 2022 and 2024, either in regular meetings or in sessions reserved for OPPI. The timeline names Cripple Creek and Victor, Fremont and Teller commissioners, a joint Teller County councils-and-administrators meeting, Colorado Springs City Council, El Paso County commissioners, Monument leadership, and Manitou Springs City Council with Teller County commissioners. The purpose was to inform them and test participation, not to seek a late endorsement of a finished book.
Big ideas from outside the outdoor shop
A separate visioning track invited leaders from higher education, chambers, economic development, public health, tourism, philanthropy, lodging, and land planning — people who are not in the outdoor industry but who treat the landscape as civic infrastructure. Two brainstorming sessions produced “big ideas”: a unified management entity, regional trail networks, and protection of sensitive habitats and biodiversity hotspots. The maps from those sessions are the watershed and greenway system, front-range and front-door access, a regional trail network, critical habitat, biodiversity significance, and the regional-possibilities sheet that draws Ring the Peak, the Front Range Trail, and the ranger-district boundary on one page.
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. Addressing the Gaps, Electeds Communication, and Community Visioning, pages 75–79.
