Parks & Public Lands

Located near Calhan , about thirty-five miles northeast of Colorado Springs , the Calhan Paint Mines are an area of clay deposits that have seen extensive prehistoric habitation and historic quarrying of the clay for pottery and bricks. In the 1990s, archaeological fieldwork at the site revealed...

One of the jewels of Denver’s park and parkway system , Cheesman Park (1601 Race St, Denver, CO 80206) sits on land that originally served as the city’s first cemetery. In 1890 the cemetery was closed, many—but not all—graves were relocated, and a park designed by Denver’s first landscape architect...

Established in 1882, City Park is Denver ’s largest urban park, occupying nearly 320 acres between East Seventeenth and East Twenty-Third Avenues from York Street to Colorado Boulevard. Designed primarily by civil engineers Henry Meryweather and Walter Graves in the 1880s and by Reinhard Schuetze...

On May 24, 1911, President William Howard Taft established Colorado National Monument in Mesa County , near Grand Junction . Today the monument, one of eight in Colorado, encompasses more than 20,000 acres of sandstone cliffs and monoliths, scenic canyons, and sparse vegetation. The area draws...

Daniels Park (8682 N Daniels Park Rd, Sedalia, CO 80135) is a unit of the Denver Mountain Parks system located in an area of grassy buttes and ravines just west of Castle Pines in Douglas County . First established with a thirty-eight-acre donation from Florence Martin in 1920 and expanded to 1,000...

The Denver Zoo started in 1896 with a single bear in City Park and has grown to an eighty-acre campus. There are 350 employees overseeing a total of about 3,700 animals from more than 600 species. The zoo draws more than 2 million visitors per year, making it one of Colorado’s most popular cultural...

The controversy over the proposed Echo Park dam in the mid-1950s was a crucial episode in the conservation history of Colorado and the West and proved to be a milestone in American environmental history. Following years of debate, the US Congress decided not to authorize the dam, signifying the...

Established in 2019 as Colorado’s forty-second state park, Fishers Peak State Park covers 19,200 acres south of Trinidad near the New Mexico border. The mountainous area includes a cluster of hills and mesas that give way to the Colorado plains to the north and Raton Pass , a historic gateway to...

The beautiful and imposing mountain scenery of Colorado’s Great Divide has led to the common belief that the state is home to a singular “Continental Divide.” The divide in Colorado, however, is only a piece of the larger Great Divide, a geologic crest that runs from Alaska through South America...

In 1891 the young Swedish scientist Gustaf Nordenskiöld (1868–95) arrived in Colorado, seeking both a cure for his tuberculosis and a look at the wonders of the West. His experiences over the next two years set in motion a series of events that would ultimately lead to the passage of the first...

Horsetooth Reservoir is located in the foothills just west of Fort Collins . The Bureau of Reclamation began construction of the reservoir in 1946 as part of the larger Colorado–Big Thompson Project , which provided additional irrigation water for the northern Front Range . Horsetooth Reservoir was...

Julie Villiers Lewis McMillan Penrose (1870–1956) was one of the primary benefactors of Colorado Springs institutions in the interwar years. Her husband, multimillionaire Spencer (“Speck”) Penrose , profited from Cripple Creek gold and Utah copper in the early twentieth century. He used his wealth...

La Junta City Park is a prime example of a New Deal project on Colorado’s eastern plains. As a result of work carried out between 1933 and 1941, a poorly drained park became the city’s primary outdoor recreation space, complete with stone walls, benches, and buildings; a new lake; picnic shelters;...

Mesa Verde National Park was established on June 29, 1906. It is the largest of the National Park Service parcels protecting cultural resources in Colorado, with nearly 5,000 documented sites, including about 600 cliff dwellings . A majority of the sites are associated with Ancestral Pueblo...

The town of Mount Vernon was established in 1859 at the base of Mount Vernon Canyon, west of Denver . The town is best known as the home of Robert W. Steele , who made it the de facto capital of the unofficial Territory of Jefferson while he was governor in 1859–61. Today two early stone houses...

Mesa Verde National Park was established in 1906 as the country’s ninth national park. The site was visited and considered sacred by multiple Indigenous nations before it began attracting interest from white Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While male scientists and...

The Public Lands History Center (PLHC) is a special unit of the History Department at Colorado State University in Fort Collins . Since 2007 it has partnered with students, communities, and land management agencies of all types to document the history of the nation’s public lands. While the PLHC’s...

Built primarily by New Deal work programs in the 1930s, Rim Rock Drive is a twenty-three-mile scenic road through Colorado National Monument . Connecting Fruita and Grand Junction , the road increased tourism to the monument by allowing travelers to drive through and continue on their journey. The...

The Roxborough State Park Archaeological District contains one historic homestead and a variety of prehistoric rockshelters and campsites dating back to at least the Early Archaic period (5500–3000 BCE). It is located at the southern end of the valley between the hogback ridge and the foothills,...

Developed primarily between 1919 and 1924, the Squirrel Creek Recreation District in the San Isabel National Forest near Pueblo was one of the earliest recreational developments in a national forest and served as a model for many others to come. The recreation district is also notable for its...

Located at an elevation of 12,830 feet on Mt. Evans , Summit Lake is a forty-acre alpine lake known for its scenic beauty and unique ecosystem. Acquired by Denver in 1924 as part of the city’s system of mountain parks , it is the highest Denver park as well as the highest city park in North America...

Developed in the 1890s and early 1900s, Washington Park is a scenic recreational area occupying about 160 acres southeast of downtown Denver . Designed around a portion of City Ditch by landscape architects Reinhard Schuetze and Saco DeBoer , the park features two lakes and a large meadow and has a...

Willow Creek Park in southeast Lamar was built primarily by the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration from 1933 to 1938. Using local labor and materials, the New Deal agencies built a series of dams for flood mitigation and constructed several rustic stone structures for...