Making summer camping plans in parks and forests along the Front Range has become increasingly exasperating in recent years due to surging demand and unforgiving reservation policies. But take heart, campers, a modicum of relief may be in the offing.
Planners at the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests are studying ways to add campsites. They’re also considering ways to make selecting and reserving them a little less onerous.
The Arapaho and Roosevelt forests, which are jointly administered, stretch along the Continental Divide from just south of Interstate 70 to the Wyoming border. They include Clear Creek, Gilpin, Grand, Boulder and Larimer counties. They have 59 total campgrounds with 1,400 campsites.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to meet all the demand for people who want to camp on the Front Range,” conceded forest spokesman Reid Armstrong. “We have a limited amount of land, and we want to protect it. We want to preserve it for future generations.”
Still, public officials feel your pain, and some are exploring creative solutions.
“We have more than five million people along the Front Range, many of whom live in Colorado because they love the outdoors and the access to camping opportunities,” Armstrong said. “In addition, this is a destination for a lot of people. A lot of our camping opportunities are serving people who come from across the country, and even internationally, to visit Rocky Mountain National Park and other well-known sites in Colorado.”
Addressing the supply side of the problem can be difficult because of budgetary and environmental constraints. There are no plans to build new campgrounds in Rocky Mountain National Park, for instance, which attracts more than four million visitors annually, in part because it has a deferred maintenance backlog in excess of $200 million, said park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson.
Nor are there plans to add campgrounds in the White River National Forest, which stretches across the central Colorado high country from Summit County to Glenwood Springs and beyond. White River is the busiest national forest in the nation.
But over the past three years, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has added 181 campsites statewide, bringing its inventory to 4,403. This year, about 40 new sites will open soon at Boyd Lake State Park near Loveland. CPW spokeswoman Bridget O’Rourke said revenue from Keep Colorado Wild passes, which are sold through motor vehicle registration renewals, will help cover the cost.
Arapaho and Roosevelt officials also are thinking about more equitable ways to roll out reservations. Under the current system, campground reservations become available six months in advance, meaning people begin grabbing them for the summer in January and February. But many people don’t get vacation approval from their employers that early in the year, and by the time they’re ready to book reservations, popular campgrounds are fully booked.
“We recognize that many people are booking up all the campgrounds in January, and they don’t necessarily know when they’re going to go, so maybe they’re canceling at the last minute — or they’re eating the (no-show) cost,” Armstrong said. “We want to make the opportunities more equitable for people who work in careers where they don’t necessarily know they’re going to have that particular week off until they get closer to it, and they want to be able to make reservations more last-minute. We’re looking at how we can design more of a rolling reservation system that maybe issues some opportunities in January, and then more as we get closer to the actual date.”
Forest officials are also brainstorming with other public land agencies in the Front Range including Rocky Mountain National Park, CPW and county land managers, through their partnership in a coalition called NoCo Places, to find ways of making the process less confusing. NoCo Places was created specifically to address the impact of Front Range population growth on public lands and the visitor experience.
Under the current system, camping reservations for Rocky Mountain National Park and national forests are made through recreation.gov. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has its own site for camping reservations. Each agency has web pages and maps for locating their offerings with thumbnail descriptions.
“When people look for campgrounds, they know they want to go camping along the Front Range but they don’t necessarily understand all the different agencies and the different camping opportunities,” Armstrong said. “Right now they have to search up camping on state lands on one site and reservations for the forest service on another site. Counties may have opportunities on a different site entirely. So, something we’re talking about is, is there a way for us to create one portal across all public lands where people can find camping opportunities in the northern Front Range of Colorado?”
NoCo Places already has an interactive map that highlights selected public lands attractions in northern Colorado with information about those areas and links to the official information pages of the agencies that manage them.
Arapaho and Roosevelt will add a handful of sites to its camping options in the next two years or so. The Jack’s Gulch campground in the high country west of Fort Collins was heavily damaged in the Cameron Peak of 2020. It is being redesigned for a rebuild, and forest officials are hopeful they can reopen it in 2026. It would have 90 campsites.
West of Empire near Berthoud Falls, the small Mizpah Campground has been closed for more than a decade because of damage to an access road. Forest officials are hopeful Mizpah can reopen in 2026, but it would only add 10 sites.
One creative solution forest officials are considering is converting “under-utilized” picnic areas into campgrounds.
“They already have a lot of the stuff we need,” Armstrong said. “They have the picnic (table), they have the grill. What would it take to convert these places to new campsites? In some cases that might require a little bit of environmental assessment. I don’t have numbers for how many that will add, but there are some great opportunities across the forests to convert some of those sites.”
Armstrong said none of the solutions under consideration are likely to be implemented next summer. They could take from two to five years.
“We do want to create that diverse opportunity and try to have the most balanced approach we can to help people book reservations and get access to these places,” Armstrong said. “We also hope people will look elsewhere to discover camping in other parts of the state that maybe aren’t as well known.”
Originally Published: August 12, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.
