Park offers different days for hikers, bikers
By Sara Havig
Boulder Daily Camera
April 25, 2007
Tucked away in the foothills western Jefferson County, Centennial Cone Park is one of the newest and largest open space parks in the county. It's also part of a new experiment in trail use management.
The park opened a year ago with a unique "alternating-use" schedule. Every weekend day allows either hikers or mountain bikers, but not both. If hikers get Saturday, mountain bikers get Sunday.
"We wanted to preserve the remote backcountry feel of the park," as well as protect sensitive elk habitat, said Thea Rock, citizen outreach manager for Jefferson County Open Space. "And we decided the way to do that was to not have everybody there at the same time."
Most Jeffco parks have historically been open to multiple uses. A handful of trails don't allow mountain bikes or horses. But in general, hikers, bikers and equestrians have to share space.
While conflicts do inevitably occur, Rock says this new idea didn't necessarily come out of a need to reduce conflict. Instead, it came more from a sense that no single user group was getting an ideal experience.
The purchase of Centennial Cone Park in 1999 offered a brand new park with no existing use patterns. It was a perfect chance to try something new.
Open space officials worked with the Trails Use Task Force, a group of volunteers who act as the department's eyes and ears on the trail, to come up with ways to manage the new park. Some of the suggestions included assigning separate users to different trails within the park, requiring hikers and bikers to travel in opposite directions, scheduling separate times of day for different uses or simply limiting the amount of park visitors.
Alternating hiking and biking on weekend days won out because it was a solution that allowed everyone to use the whole park. Everyone is still sharing the trails. They're just doing it on different days.
Hikers use the park on odd-numbered weekend days. Mountain bikers get the even days. Weekdays are still multi-use, and equestrians are allowed on all days.
Rock says the new system was a little shocking for people in the beginning, but once they used the park they started to come around.
"Users get more benefits at the times when they do get to be at the park, and have a better experience while they are there," she says.
Officials tried to make the rules easy to remember, and if you forget, the schedule can be found on the county's Web site (www.co.jefferson.co.us/openspace).
Rangers do patrol the park and will ticket people who don't follow the rules. If you show up on an "off" day, Golden Gate Canyon State Park and White Ranch Park are nearby alternatives.
Paige Mackey, policy chairwoman for the Colorado Mountain Bike Association, says her group has mixed views about the new system.
On one hand, it's a good opportunity for bikers to get the solitude that hikers have enjoyed for a long time. But on the other hand, Mackey says the schedule does reduce everyone's access to the park, and doesn't promote cooperation among users like the traditional system does.
"I don't know that it's the right direction to take across the board," Mackey said. "The concern is that this happening on other trials will be an abandonment of the multi-use concept."
COMBA is waiting out the experiment, Mackey says, and the group will be tallying responses from bikers this summer before taking an official position.
Jeffco Open Space employees will also be taking surveys from users this summer to evaluate the success of the park.
