The rest area near the top of the pass, which has been closed since the spring of 2023, is finally set to reopen by the end of September.

Ongoing Interstate 70 construction at multiple locations on the pass will continue for a few more weeks until winter weather forces suspension of operations. Last year, that occurred on Nov. 22. The Vail ski area is scheduled to open this year on Nov. 14.

The new rest area will include updated restrooms capable of meeting present and future needs, a new drinking water system and expansion of the parking lots from 73 spaces to 248, according to CDOT spokeswoman Stacia Sellers.

That’s great news for winter backcountry users. In recent years, the recreation parking lot was frequently full on weekends by mid-morning.

Parking designated for recreation users will expand from 35 to 61 spaces. Rest area parking will increase from 32 to 53 spaces. In addition, there will be 19 “flex” spaces for recreation or rest area overflow and 95 snowmobile parking spaces.

Vail Pass has long been a favorite stop for summer tourists, too, but it’s the primary gateway to the Vail Pass Winter Recreation Area, which attracts 45,000 winter users annually. With Vail Pass marking its northeast corner and historic Camp Hale forming its southwest boundary, at 55,000 acres it contains more than 119 miles of motorized and non-motorized winter trails and six backcountry huts. User fees are required from November until May and are collected by the White River National Forest.

The rest area rebuild was scheduled to begin in May 2022, but was delayed a year because of “funding shortfalls,” according to Sellers. Short construction seasons in 2023 and 2024 also slowed the project.

The Interstate 70 project includes construction of an eastbound auxiliary lane with a widened inside shoulder, eastbound and westbound bridge replacements near mile marker 185, relocation of the Vail Pass bike path, westbound curve modifications with a widened inside shoulder near mile marker 188, five wildlife underpasses and a new avalanche mitigation fence, according to CDOT spokeswoman Austyn Dineen. Apart from the winter closure, CDOT expects construction to continue through the end of 2026.

Construction typically runs Monday through Friday mornings, but no lane closures are expected Labor Day weekend, Friday through Monday.

It’s not that business is bad at the , 10 miles north of Leadville at 10,500 feet on the Continental Divide. For example, stays in the toasty yurts are already sold out for next winter.

“We’re selling because it����ap that time of life,” said Ty, 59, who has spent more than half his life running the business with Roxanne, a Leadville native and former schoolteacher he met when they were students at nearby Colorado Mountain College. “I feel like my wife and I have taken it as far as we can at this phase of our life and our age. I would like to sell it to the next young Ty and Roxanne and watch somebody expand and grow the business even more.”

Candlelit multi-course dinners

The pair bought what was then a small, struggling cross country operation in 1993 for $5,000. With just a couple of trails and a trailer, the previous owner was on the verge of going out of business, they said.

A year later, the Halls added the cookhouse. In 2013 they erected two sleep yurts because cookhouse guests always seemed to want to lie down by the fire after dinner. Now they have , pillows and down comforters.

The trail from the Nordic center to the cookhouse is a brisk one-mile trip on skis or snowshoes, with panoramic views of snow-capped mountains. Housed in a solar-powered yurt, in a space that includes a potbelly stove that warmed 10th Mountain Division ski troops at nearby Camp Hale during World War II.

“It took a lot of time, it took a lot of effort, and every time we got a little bit of money we’d put it right back into the business,” Ty said. “It����ap funny, with the restaurant, when you need marketing or advertising the most, you can’t afford it, and when you don’t (need it), you finally can (afford it). It really was word of mouth.”

Jennifer Irey, a professor at Colorado Mountain College in Leadville, loves the serenity she finds on their 25 kilometers of trails.

“Anytime we have some people come from out of town, it’s the first place we take them,” Irey said. “Once you get out on skis or snowshoes, it’s really transformative. You don’t get any cell (service) or WiFi up there, which is lovely. It’s fairly rustic. It’s comfortable. Once you get onto the trails, you encounter people, but you’re not jockeying for position. You just feel alone, in a good way.”

In 1998, Ty built a backcountry hut three miles away that was a separate business from the Tennessee Pass operation. He sold it five years later to the 10th Mountain Division Hut Association, which renamed it the . The Halls used proceeds from that sale to replace the old . Light lunches and a café are available there.

The Nordic center is adjacent to with which it shares a parking lot, so downhill skiing is also an option for guests.

A recovering Leadville

Leadville is a very different place from what it was when the Halls began building their dream. When the Climax molybdenum mine effectively shut down in the 1980s, leaving only skeleton staff on site, thousands of miners lost their jobs. Roxanne was in high school then.

“It was pretty traumatic,” she said. “A lot of my friends had to move away because their dads or moms worked at Climax. When they shut it down, I lost so many of my friends, and I thought we were going to have to move away. I was just so scared that my dad would lose his job.”

He was one of the lucky few at Climax, kept on because he was working as a commercial artist for the mining company after having started as a miner. When Ty got to Leadville from Virginia in 1989 to attend Colorado Mountain College, he had his pick of places to stay. Buildings all over town were boarded up.

“I remember going to the realtor, and he gave me a sheet of paper with addresses and a handful of keys,” Ty said. “Every house was vacant. You could get whatever house you wanted. They wouldn’t even go with us. They handed you keys and said, ‘Go check it out, let us know which one you want.’ Now you can’t even find a place to rent.”

Bluebird mornings

The listing price for the Tennessee Pass complex is $2.2 million. The Halls have a realtor to handle the sale, but they’ve also used another tool to spread the word, announcing their retirement on Instagram in a Jan. 21 post that also appeared on their Facebook page.

“For the last thirty years, they’ve been caretakers and owners of Tennessee Pass, through late night snowstorms and bluebird mornings,” the post says. “They’ve built the business from humble beginnings into a thriving independent ski resort. It����ap your chance to own an established alpine retreat with over sixteen miles of trails, in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.”

The Halls figured that, since they had a loyal following, with many asking them over the years if they were ever going to sell, Instagram might be a good way to reach potential buyers. It was.

“It got a lot of response,” Ty said. “It just seems like a different time and age, a different way to do things than what has traditionally been done with selling stuff.”

While ready for retirement, they want to make sure they sell to buyers who will be good stewards of what they built nearly from nothing.

“It����ap just that time of life for Roxanne and I to retire, do some other things and enjoy ourselves,” Ty said. “We’ve worked really hard at building the business and it����ap turn-key. If someone comes today and buys it, it comes with sold-out reservations for next year. You don’t have to come up here and then try to figure out how to get customers to come. They’re coming, you just need to be here.”

Members of the “Protect the Dolores” coalition had hoped former President Joe Biden would designate the rugged canyonlands along the Dolores River in far-west Colorado as a monument before he left office. While Biden during his four-year administration, he did not take action on the Dolores River.

Biden’s lack of action means advocates for the river will now move forward amid a surge of challenges to , which cover hundreds of millions of acres of alpine forests and tundra, sagebrush plains, deserts and canyons. In Colorado, the federal government owns and manages 24 million acres of land — about 37,500 square miles — that cover about a third of the state.

State leaders in several Western states, including Wyoming, Utah and Arizona, have sought to wrest control of federal lands in recent years. On Monday, Trump’s newly appointed secretary of the interior ordered a review of national monuments created by previous presidents as well as lands withdrawn from energy and mining development.

With the new administration antagonistic to national monuments, advocates for greater protection of the river and its broader ecosystem will instead pursue the creation of a national conservation area. But they remain optimistic.

“While we may not have gotten a monument designation from the Biden administration, I still think we got something of enormous value: people wanting to come together and figure something out,” said Scott Braden, director of the Colorado Wildlands Project and one of the monument campaign’s organizers. “An enormous amount of ground has been covered. There’s a sense of inevitability around this, that something will happen for the Dolores.”

Conflict over federal ownership of Western land has existed for as long as federal public lands have existed. But the long-simmering conflict is reaching another boiling point as those who want to return federal land to state or private ownership see an opportunity with the Trump administration and a Republican-controlled Congress, public lands advocates said.

“Federal public lands strike at the very core of what it means to be a westerner,” said , executive director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment. “So people from all political viewpoints and backgrounds have very strong beliefs about what it means to live here in the West and the impact public lands have on their lives.”

Optimism around the Dolores River

Supporters of broader and more permanent protections for the Dolores River corridor say gaining them is critical. The form they take is less important, Braden said.

Instead of a monument, advocates for the landscape will pursue the creation of a national conservation area. Monuments and conservation areas both allow for a spectrum of protections to be applied within their boundaries and for management by and .

A president can unilaterally create a monument, while a national conservation area requires an act of Congress. Colorado’s lawmakers are already pursuing a national conservation area to cover southern reaches of the Dolores River in Montezuma, San Miguel and Dolores counties.

Discussions last year about how the northern reaches of the river in Mesa and Montrose counties should be managed, and whether it needs more protection there, prompted fiery debates and name-calling.

A coalition of conservationists, business owners and recreationists said that making the area into a 400,000-acre monument would better insulate the land from growing recreational use and protect precious ecosystems while also allowing for mining, energy development and grazing in some areas. But some locals worried that a monument designation would draw more people to the sparsely populated area — or would inhibit livestock grazing and the development of a mostly dormant mining industry.

Conversations about the area’s future sparked such passionate debate because it is a special place that inspires deep feelings, Braden said.

“I don’t think it����ap hyperbole to say this is a Yosemite or Canyonlands level of specialness,” he said.

All the conversations over the last year have set the scene for more productive discussions about a potential national conservation area as well as different levels of protection for specific parts of the canyons, said , executive director of Dolores River Boating Advocates. The public process that is part of the creation of a national conservation area allows for conversations about which lands should be considered wilderness — where energy development and some types of recreation would be barred — and which could have more relaxed rules.

The monument campaign sparked visits from both of Colorado’s U.S. senators, to working with people in Mesa and Montrose counties “to find a sensible way to protect the Dolores River.”

The campaign also prompted the creation of working groups and town halls, which facilitated important discussions about the future of the river and its canyons.

“I’m an optimist for sure, but I think we have reasons to believe that we can work through that,” Clark said. “We’re all here. None of us are going to go away. We all care about this landscape in different ways.”

Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis opposed the creation of a monument but supports a smaller national conservation area, he said, because it would create long-term rules about how the land is used. In response to the monument proposal, leaders from Mesa and Montrose counties last year published a plan for a much-smaller conservation area covering 29,806 acres along the river.

A national conservation area designation protects the land from being designated a monument down the road — which would “rip the rug out” from under local communities, Davis said.

“Let����ap settle the debate once and for all,” he said. “I think that doing nothing is dangerous.”

Threats from a new administration

Optimism about the future of the Dolores River comes amid larger worry about the future of public lands in the West.

to reassess mineral and energy withdrawals on public lands — making them off limits — undermines the lengthy public process that was used to approve them, said , the public lands campaign manager at Conservation Colorado.

Burgum gave staff 15 days to review hundreds of withdrawals and offer opinions.

“Going back and blowing up these processes politicizes our public lands in a way they shouldn’t be, it ignores the stakeholding for these groups, it ignores the hard work that has gone on by agency staff,” Webster said.

One of the Colorado withdrawals finalized during the Biden administration that could be up for review blocked 224,713 acres from energy and mineral development on the Thompson Divide in southwest Colorado.

“We know that����ap a place that people love and that Republicans and Democrats and ranchers and recreationists have worked for decades to protect,” said Will Roush, executive director of , one of the lead groups that advocated for the withdrawal of the Thompson Divide from energy development.

Burgum also ordered the review of national monuments designated by former presidents under the Antiquities Act. Presidents have designated 163 monuments across the country, including nine in Colorado, like the Browns Canyon National Monument near Salida and the Colorado National Monument outside Grand Junction. The nine monuments in Colorado cover a combined 490,000 acres.

Biden in 2022 designated the 53,804-acre north of Leadville — the latest monument designation in the state.

It’s unclear whether a president can undo a monument designation by a predecessor because the courts have yet to settle the question, said Winter of CU Boulder.

“Thread of resentment” toward feds

Leaders in multiple Western states in recent years have attempted to undermine federal ownership of large parcels within their borders.

“There’s been this thread of resentment toward the federal government over federal ownership of public lands and how they’ve been managed,” Winter said. “While that����ap not a majority position, it is a very strong viewpoint held by some people across the West.”

Wyoming state lawmakers and mineral rights to state control, except Yellowstone National Park. The bill presses for control over 30 million acres — about half of the state’s land mass, including Grand Teton National Park — and on Friday with a vote of 16-14.

In Utah, state lawmakers introduced a bill demanding that the five national parks inside its borders: Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef and Zion. The bill follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last month in August, challenging the BLM’s control over 18.5 million acres, or about 28,900 square miles.

The legislatures of several western states filed briefs , including Wyoming, Idaho and Arizona.

The concept of giving federal land to the states is not new, but the incoming administration’s stances have likely renewed vigor in the movement, said Devin O’Dea, the western policy and conservation manager at . The state actions serve as a public relations campaign against federal public lands, he said.

“Legislators are emboldened perhaps to take another bite at the apple again,” he said.

The anti-public lands movement has not reached the mainstream political culture in Colorado, public lands advocates said.

“Colorado thankfully sees its public lands as an asset,” said Kate Groetzinger, the communications director for the Colorado-based . “Colorado is in a good place to protect its public lands, which is more than we can say for other Western states.”

A recent attempt by a group called the Free Land Holder Committee to seize 1,460 acres of Forest Service land in southwestern Colorado — based on the group’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the service — was met with fierce resistance from locals, noted , the Colorado state director for The Wilderness Society.

“That����ap a particularly heartening thing for me to see, when the public lands takeover attacks get very loud and serious … that people will show up, arm in arm, and say it should stay public,” he said.

In the days since Trump won, Colorado officials have cautioned that a sea of unknowns remain. It’s unclear whom he will choose for his cabinet or how closely he’ll follow the Republican-drafted , a guide for a second Trump administration from which the president-elect sought to distance himself during the campaign.

Still, state legislators and policy advocates have raised concerns about how potential swings on key national issues, like new abortion restrictions or the mass deportations Trump said he would start in Aurora, might wash over a Democratic state that’s positioned itself as fundamentally opposed to many of Trump’s positions. On multiple fronts, they said, they expect Trump to act more quickly and aggressively to impose his agenda in a second term.

“Obviously, this (new administration) is going to be more challenging,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said. “It����ap something we’re prepared for, something we’ve done before — and we’ll do it again.”

Uniquely Colorado concerns — like keeping the previously contested headquarters of the U.S. Space Command and protecting the state’s extensive public lands — suddenly feel imperiled. Democratic state lawmakers, who last week maintained their large majorities amid a national political shift to the right, braced to act as a bulwark against federal deregulation and conservative U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

Here’s how the second Trump term, set to begin Jan. 20, could impact Colorado’s immigrants, public lands, abortion access, statehouse agenda and the location of Space Command.

Immigration actions likely

In October, Trump traveled to Colorado and announced his plans to launch “Operation Aurora,” which would use a nearly 230-year-old law to deport undocumented immigrants with gang ties. He’s pledged to undertake a broader mass deportation operation to expel in the country — starting with Aurora.

Colorado is home to roughly 156,000 undocumented immigrants, according to by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston told The Denver Post last week that his city would “not participate” in Trump’s mass deportation plans.

State law prohibits local law enforcement from holding someone in jail beyond their release date solely on a “detainer” request, which is used by federal authorities to ensure they’re notified before an undocumented immigrant is let out.

Doug Friednash, who was chief of staff to then-Gov. John Hickenlooper until late 2017, predicted that immigration enforcement and deportations would be among the first legal fights that Colorado has with the new Trump administration.

Colorado could become “ground zero” for battles over Trump’s plans, he said.

“What happens when Trump decides on Operation Aurora, or that we’re going to start deportation, and he looks to the state? Not just with (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), but he looks to the National Guard to enforce that. What does Gov. (Jared) Polis do, and what does the state do?” said Friednash, a lawyer who’s now at the law and lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.

Through a spokeswoman, Polis, who made frequent national TV appearances during the campaign in support of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, declined requests for interviews about Trump’s potential impact on immigration and other issues in the state.

U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, a Democrat who represents Aurora in Congress, was defiant.

“If (Trump) wants to carry out mass deportations and break up families and devastate our economy,” Crow said Thursday, “then we will of course resist that with all of our force.”

Trump’s win brought disbelief and uncertainty to Colorado’s immigrant community, said Mekela Goehring, the executive director of . It also underscored the need for the group’s mission of providing free legal and social services to immigrant children and to adults in immigration detention, she said.

She expects new actions in line with immigration policies implemented by Trump during his first term.

“Now, the most critical component is ensuring there are lawyers in the system so there is some accountability and a check of due process,” Goehring said. “Separating children from their parents (or) forcing people to be in a prison-like setting while navigating immigration proceedings is incredibly harmful to community members.”

Pivot on public lands policies

“Drill, baby, drill” has served as one of Trump’s clearest and most consistent policy messages — and it’s a policy that will play out across some of the 24 million acres of federally managed public lands that cover nearly a third of Colorado.

Trump’s victory is a boon to oil and gas producers in the West, said Kathleen Sgamma, president of Western Energy Alliance, a Denver-based trade group.

“We’ll be working with the new administration to reassess some of the rules, some of which Western Energy Alliance is suing on,” said Sgamma, . “We’ll be looking to move forward on leasing, which the Biden-Harris administration has all but stopped” on federal land.

Sgamma hoped the new administration would reassess National Environmental Policy Act review processes that she said had slowed oil and gas development.

She also expressed hope that the administration would roll back the Bureau of Land Management����ap Public Lands Rule, which made conservation an equally important use of BLM land as grazing, recreation, energy development and other uses. The administration should also reverse a Biden administration change that increased BLM land-leasing costs for energy development, she said.

The BLM manages 8.3 million acres of land in Colorado, primarily on the Western Slope. Presidential appointees in Trump’s first administration moved the BLM headquarters to Grand Junction, a move that Biden later reversed.

A second Trump administration will likely act faster and be better prepared to roll back environmental regulations than its previous iteration, said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a Denver-based conservation and advocacy organization.

“I think you have to consider every conservation effort over the last three decades to be at risk, because they do not see any value in seeing public lands protected for recreation, fishing or hunting,” he said. “They look at public lands as sources of income.”

Weiss expects the Trump administration will open up more U.S. Forest Service land — which covers 11.3 million acres in Colorado — to logging under the guise of wildfire mitigation.

“That just means: If we chop down all the trees, they can’t burn,” he said.

National monuments, too, could come under scrutiny by Trump’s administration — especially those created by Biden, Weiss said. In his last administration, Trump slashed the size of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments.

Biden created one new monument in Colorado: the 53,804-acre north of Leadville. In western Colorado, a coalition of rafters and environmentalists for months have urged Biden to create a new monument along the Dolores River — an effort that would face a much steeper uphill climb under Trump.

Colorado depends on millions of dollars in federal funding for environmental protection work, so cuts to regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency could have downstream ripple effects here, said . She is a professor and co-director of the graduate certificate of environmental justice at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Trump pledged during his campaign to stop any spending from the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden’s administration called “the largest investment in clean energy and climate action ever.” But Trump may find that hampering the law — which has poured more than $1.7 billion into Colorado projects — is politically unpopular, Pezzullo said.

“I think a lot of things were said bombastically on the campaign trail, so we’ll see when the rubber hits the road,” she said.

Also unclear is the mark Trump might make on spending and grants under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which local transportation leaders have begun tapping for the Front Range Passenger Rail initiative. Federal officials have designated it as a priority transit corridor.

Colorado leaders and lawmakers’ strong bipartisan support of environmental protection for air, water and land gave Pezzullo hope that state policy could serve as a buffer to potential federal deregulation.

“I would feel much more worried if I lived in a state that didn’t have the leadership we had on the environment,” she said.

Space Command’s future

In the waning days of the first Trump administration in January 2021, the Pentagon announced that U.S. Space Command would move from its interim home in Colorado Springs to a permanent headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama.

Then, in summer 2023, the Biden administration reversed that decision and kept the headquarters in Colorado, where it achieved operational readiness late last year.

Now, Space Command may be set to move again. Wednesday that Trump is “expected” to move Space Command back to Huntsville.

U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, an Alabama Republican and the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, told Politico that Trump would enforce what two U.S. Air Force secretaries had determined: “That is, Huntsville won the competition … and that����ap where it should be and that����ap where he’s going to build it.”

Should that happen, it would be the latest turn in a series of ping-ponging decisions affecting the newly reestablished military command. Such a move would also jeopardize more than 1,000 jobs and $1 billion in annual economic benefits in Colorado, according to 2023 estimates from the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.

Any renewed effort to move Space Command from Colorado would spark a united and bipartisan fight from Colorado’s congressional delegation. U.S. Rep.-elect Jeff Crank, a Republican who will represent Colorado Springs in Congress, told The Post he hadn’t yet dug into Trump’s potential impact on Space Command. But he said he would defend its presence in his new district.

“Obviously, I believe that if it����ap down to military value, (then) Colorado is the place for it to be,” Crank said Wednesday. “And I think that continuous studies have shown that. If it����ap based on political decisions, it could move somewhere else. But I think it makes eminent sense to keep it here.”

Crow said he would “resist any attempt” to move the command’s headquarters, though he said it wasn’t yet clear if that could happen.

“With Donald Trump, you never know,” he said. “He changes his positions and his stance on issues by the day, and sometimes by the hour. If he wants to build out the Space Force and Space Command and have it meet the national security moment and our threats, then he will keep it here.”

Defending abortion access

Trump’s victory dampened celebrations by abortion-rights advocates in Colorado who, in the same election, ran a successful ballot initiative to place the right to abortion in the state constitution.

“Even though people thought we couldn’t do it — that we were being too bold — we stuck to our position because we know it����ap the right thing to do,” said Dusti Gurule, CEO of the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights. “Now it����ap even more critical that we did what we did.”

Although Trump’s stance on abortion has repeatedly shifted, he said in the final stages of his campaign that he would favor allowing states to decide whether abortion should be legal.

If he and Congress abide by that position, Colorado will have some of the strongest abortion protections in the country thanks to the success of Amendment 79, said Karen Middleton, the president of Cobalt Advocates, an abortion-rights group. But abortion providers and advocates are still preparing for regulatory changes that could impact access and options here.

“Yes, we’re worried, but we’re also prepared,” Gurule said. “We’re not going to stop fighting.”

Middleton said advocates in Colorado planned to pursue state legislation to protect against further challenges to a federal law that requires emergency rooms to provide care to stabilize patients, including emergency abortions.

The passage of Amendment 79 also could allow more Coloradans to receive insurance coverage for abortion, including state employees and people who use Medicaid. That will free up capacity for outside providers to care for people coming to Colorado for services from states where abortion is banned, said Nicole Hensel, executive director of New Era Colorado.

Other challenges to abortion rights and access could come through the revival of a century-old federal law, the Comstock Act, that, if enforced, would make it illegal to mail or receive medical equipment used in abortion procedures, said Jack Teter, regional director of government affairs for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains.

Weiser, the state’s attorney general, speculated about possible Trump administrative action to limit access to the abortion drug mifepristone. Any such effort, Weiser said, would lead to legal challenges from his office. Medication abortion using drugs like mifepristone , making it an increasingly common abortion method.

Despite the potential challenges in coming years, Planned Parenthood’s providers will keep working to care for Coloradans and people from all over the country, Teter said.

“We’ve been here for 100 years,” he said, “and we’re not going anywhere.”

How will the statehouse react?

In the days after Trump’s victory, Colorado legislators were still sifting through what a second Trump administration could mean for the state — and how that would affect their work and the very posture of state government.

House Speaker Julie McCluskie, whose Democratic caucus defended nearly all of its large majority in last week’s election, cautioned that it was too early to determine how the legislature may respond to a Trump administration. Affordability remains a top concern for voters, she said, and that will be the focus for legislators in 2025.

Still, she said, “there’s some issues that I think are clearly on the horizon for us. I would point to immigration (and) the statements that Trump made when he visited Colorado — that (his) mass deportation effort would start here. That is something where I think we will respond and react.”

Other Democratic legislators said Trump’s victory would change their agenda in 2025 and beyond, even if the exact contours of a second Trump term remain unclear.

“It will impact the legislative agenda. It will,” said Denver Democratic Rep. Jennifer Bacon. “I don’t know to what extent. But if it did (in recent years), when we were dealing with the residuals of his (first) term — imagine that we’re in it.”

She noted the likelihood that Trump will fill another Supreme Court seat, after his earlier appointees joined court majorities that “undid administrative law, they undid reproductive rights, and I do believe they’re going to come for civil rights, when it comes to law enforcement.”

Federal action has sparked state legislative changes in the past, among them the “residuals” Bacon referred to: Legislators enshrined for arrestees in state law after a Supreme Court decision undercut them. The legislature passed sweeping abortion protections ahead of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. And concerns about the future of marriage equality spurred the legislature to refer a successful ballot measure removing defunct language banning same-sex marriage from the state constitution.

Bacon listed Medicaid and Pell Grant funding as specific concerns for potential funding cuts. She and other Democrats also pointed to air quality and the future of the EPA, which will likely have different priorities under Trump. State lawmakers last session created state regulations protecting certain waterways after a U.S. Supreme Court decision undid federal protections.

If Trump rolls back regulations, Bacon said, the state may need to reconsider its role in oversight.

State Sen. Julie Gonzales, a Denver Democrat who has championed immigrants’ rights bills in the legislature, said Colorado officials will continue their work to protect marginalized communities, including immigrants and people who are transgender.

She called Colorado “a state that lives its values of treating people with dignity and respect” and said state-level results — showing Democrats retaining strong majorities in the Capitol — reinforced those values. Gonzales expects more work on that front in the coming months, though it����ap too early to say exactly what those policies might look like.

“Immigrant communities, particularly, have been down this road before,” Gonzales said. “We’ve seen the pain, division and fear-mongering that the first Trump administration wrought on our communities. This time we know what to expect. And it’s why, over the past several years, at the local and state level, we’ve worked to enact policies to protect all Coloradans’ safety and well-being.”

Staff writers Joe Rubino, Nick Coltrain and Elizabeth Hernandez contributed to this story.

Coloradans are already seeing the effects of in their communities and on beloved public lands. The 2024 presidential election — along with congressional and other races — will have implications for energy, federal lands and climate policies that will affect millions of people in Colorado and across the Rocky Mountain West.

“The differences between the two candidates are pretty stark,” said Robert Duffy, who studies environmental policy, of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Harris, the Democratic nominee, calls climate change an existential threat and helped pass a major funding package to address the issue; it has funneled millions of dollars to Colorado projects.

Trump, who’s again the GOP nominee, has said it’s all a hoax — and is among Republicans who prioritize energy development and the extraction of natural resources over the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change, the environment and natural resources as a category were among the top concerns identified in the Voter Voices survey conducted this year by 30 news outlets across the state, including The Denver Post.

In Colorado, scientists say climate change will result in decreased river flows, which will impact farmers and cities as well as businesses’ ability to obtain the water they need. It will extend the wildfire season and create conditions optimal for more destructive blazes.

“If nothing is done to stem the devastation of global climate change, none of the other issues, political or otherwise, matter because there will be no world left to fight about,” said survey respondent Kathy Donald of Lakewood, who identified environmental issues as her top election concern.

The president wields major power over climate and environmental policymaking by appointing heads of departments, setting budget priorities and overseeing rulemaking in regulatory agencies, Duffy said. The heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Agriculture, among others, set priorities on enforcement, the use of public lands and forest management.

The president also decides how much the U.S. will participate in international climate talks and goal-setting — or whether to participate at all.

Drastically different visions

Neither major presidential candidate has included in-depth plans or proposals on their websites to deal with climate change, energy, public lands or environmental issues. But their overarching plans contrast sharply.

references her record as California’s attorney general, in which she won millions of dollars in settlements against oil companies and polluters. She pledged to continue U.S. participation in global climate talks and “unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis.” If elected, Harris says she will protect public lands, improve the country’s resiliency to climate disasters and lower energy costs.

Trump’s says he promises to cut costly and burdensome regulations, and he wants make the U.S. “” by expanding oil, gas and coal power production. He would also end that cuts vehicle emissions — and encourages more sales of electric vehicles — by further limiting the amount of pollution allowed to escape through vehicle tailpipes through 2032. Climate change is neither named nor referenced in his platform.

Trump’s platform says he will end President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which “the largest investment in clean energy and climate action ever.” Harris, in her platform, touts her role as the tie-breaking vote that passed the act in the Senate.

The law poured more than $370 billion into clean energy, water projects, climate-resilient agriculture and forestry, and the protection of communities from climate-driven disasters.

Trump last month said that, if elected, money not yet spent by the time he takes office.

In Colorado, about $1.7 billion in Inflation Reduction Act money has funded expansion of projects that place solar panels on working agricultural land, has paid for tree planting in urban areas and has provided . The act also paid for better methane monitoring in the state, expanded solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing, and tax credits for more than 66,000 Colorado households to increase their energy efficiency, .

Water providers on the Western Slope are applying for $40 million to help pay for the purchase of Colorado River water rights they believe are critical for water security in the region. Across the seven-state Colorado River basin — which is struggling to adapt to flows shrunken by climate change and drought — the law provided more than $4 billion to address drought on the river, which provides water for 40 million people.

The Biden administration has made good strides over the last four years to adapt to climate change and protect Colorado’s public lands, said Rep. Joe Neguse, a Lafayette Democrat running for reelection who serves on the House’s Natural Resources Committee.

As examples, he cited Biden’s decision to dedicate Camp Hale as a national monument and his administration’s withdrawal of a broad swath of federal land from new oil and gas development across the Thompson Divide.

“There couldn’t be a more stark contrast when it comes to protecting our public lands and protecting our progress,” Neguse said.

Some seek less federal involvement

Two Republican candidates to represent Colorado in Congress have echoed Trump’s vision supporting increased production of pollution-heavy oil, gas and coal. Their concern includes the tens of thousands of jobs directly tied to oil and gas in the state.

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, who represents the 3rd Congressional District and is running for a seat in the 4th District, focused in her response to The Denver Post’s candidate questionnaire on her opposition to “the Green New Deal schemes that would crush our oil and gas workers and further regulate our rural communities into poverty.” She has previously denied the existence of human-caused climate change.

Jeff Hurd, a Grand Junction lawyer who is running for Boebert’s current seat, highlighted a need for domestic energy production as a matter of national security. Hurd wrote in his questionnaire response that the need to address climate change could be balanced with economic growth.

Permitting and regulatory reform can aid responsible energy production of all types, he said, including those that are renewable. His Democratic opponent, Adam Frisch, similarly advocates an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy.

“Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District is uniquely positioned to lead: we have key resources for responsible energy development, including high-quality coal, natural gas, uranium, and minerals crucial to renewable projects,” Hurd wrote. “This can result in reliable, abundant, and affordable energy that replaces higher-carbon fuels abroad.”

While Trump’s official campaign platform lacks many policy specifics, an outside plan for his presidency — created by former members of his administration and conservative thinkers — offer a broad swath of proposed policy changes that would greatly affect the West.

In , a former Trump-era EPA official wrote the chapter on the nation’s top environmental regulation body. Trump’s — who has — wrote the chapter on the , which manages 400 national parks, 560 national wildlife refuges and nearly 250 million acres of other public lands.

Project 2025 proposes reforming U.S. Forest Service wildfire management by increasing logging and timber sales to reduce fire fuels; reversing the ban on new gas and oil development in Colorado’s Thompson Divide; and moving the BLM’s headquarters back to Grand Junction, where it was during the Trump administration. Other proposals include enacting laws allowing the BLM to “dispose humanely” of mustangs, revisiting Biden’s national monument designations and reducing federal protections for some endangered species.

Trump has denied any connection to Project 2025, but Duffy said the people who authored the plan would likely be the same people Trump would hire into his second administration.

“It����ap basically a blueprint, though Trump is denying it,” he said.

Climate as a sidelined issue?

Voters in the West consistently rank the environment and climate issues as one of their top election priorities, multiple polls show.

Colorado College’s earlier this year found that 66% of voters across eight Rocky Mountain states, including Colorado, thought climate change had had significant effects on their states in the last decade. Voters from across the political spectrum said a candidate’s stance on conservation issues would be an important factor in their voting decision.

According to 2023 polling from , 72% of Americans believe global warming is happening and 58% believe warming is primarily caused by human activity. More than half of those polled said global warming should be a high priority for the next president and Congress.

Yet, so far in this election cycle, climate and environmental issues have taken a back seat to immigration, inflation and the direction of the nation, Duffy said.

He thought climate change would take its rightful place as a central campaign issue once people started experiencing its real-world effects.

“Usually the sort of things that put anything on the political agenda is an event or a crisis,” he said. “And we’ve had repeated climate-related disasters and catastrophes over the years, and people look at it and then look away. There’s never any sustained discussion about the causes. Maybe it’s because the solutions are complicated and expensive.”

Update: In a previous version of this story, the caption of the second image misidentified the lake shown. It is Lake Granby.

Life in the West was often a struggle, and some places represent our ingenuity and perseverance. Some places harbor dark secrets, revealing shameful stories.

So, here are some places to visit on your summer travels to help you understand Colorado’s complex history. At some of these sites, you’ll need imagination to picture what occurred, while others have lasting physical evidence that has survived the centuries.

Mesa Verde/Canyons of the Ancients

Hundreds of years before Columbus, the Ancestral Puebloans, or Anasazi, a large and sophisticated culture thrived in the Southwest.

They built huge cities and lasting cliff dwellings, yet mysteriously vanished in the 13th century.

You can tour the cliff dwellings on guided tours in Mesa Verde National Park, learning from experts about their lives, society, and theories as to why they vanished.

Or you can venture on your own into Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and appreciate how tough life must have been in these arid canyons.

Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site

In 1833, there was nothing but wilderness between Missouri and the Mexican settlements of the Southwest.

The Sante Fe Trail was a grueling journey between the two.

That year, William and Charles Bent and Ceran St. Vrain built the fort, the only major white settlement along the trail for 16 years.

In addition to creating a thriving empire, the fort served as a meeting place where different cultures could connect, including fur trappers, Mexican traders, white settlers, and the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes.

The fort has been rebuilt, with living history exhibits that let you appreciate life on the edge of the map.

It also represents a shining lost moment because it wouldn’t be long before the United States was at war with Mexico, as well as the Native Americans.

The clashing civilizations perhaps could have built a better future here. William Bent himself married a Cheyenne woman and tried to show that peaceful coexistence was possible.

Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site

Members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes were camped along the banks of Sand Creek in 1864 when 700 men of the Colorado State Militia emerged from the morning fog.

The volunteers began shooting and didn’t stop until 230 were dead, mostly women and children.

The tribe had been trying to report to a reservation peacefully, but confusion and conflicting orders marred the process.

The event was celebrated in Denver at the time, but history has viewed it differently. Governor John Evans’ name was stripped from the famous mountain.

Today, you can see exhibits in the visitors center and take a short walk to an overlook, but you’ll have to use your imagination to picture the horrors of that day.

Relations between the tribes and whites never recovered.

Leadville

No other place illustrates Colorado’s history better than Leadville.

The city at 10,158 feet rose practically overnight after prospectors discovered gold and silver in California Gulch in the 1860s.

Soon, Leadville had elegant hotels, a famous opera house, and a population of 30,000. It nearly became the state capital.

But it suffered the fate of most boomtowns in 1893 when the U.S. switched from a silver standard.

Today, you can stroll through town, admiring the beautiful Victorian architecture and touring the numerous former mines while imagining living at 10,000 feet without GORE-TEX.

Independence Pass

Colorado has many mountain passes that will make you marvel at the fortitude of those who built them, none more so than Independence Pass, the route that connects Aspen with Twin Lakes.

The pass gets so much snow it’s only open half the year, but that didn’t stop the settlers of the Independence boom town from carving out the rugged track at 12,095 feet.

Today, you can tour that ghost town three miles west or hike among the tundra and wildflowers, enjoying the stunning views and pondering life in such an extreme environment.

Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad

Deep in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado, few Colorado towns are as isolated as Silverton.

It was often cut off entirely in winter until the construction of this famous railroad in the 1880s.

The train, today reimagined as a tourist attraction, runs 3 hours through improbably rugged terrain.

To ride in a historic rail car past such scenic beauty is an experience you’ll never forget.

Ludlow Massacre site

In the early 1900s, labor relations were tearing the country apart, and the southern Colorado coal fields were to become a flashpoint in the conflict.

The Colorado National Guard came to supposedly keep the peace between striking miners and the owners’ men. But on April 20, 1914, violence broke out in the Ludlow camp that left 25 miners dead, including 11 children.

While nobody knows who fired the first shot, the massacre led to an all-out war that ended when the U.S. Army intervened.

The site, about 12 miles north of Trinidad, still has original buildings and a large memorial, a testament to the mistrust and violence of the day.

Amache National Historic Site

In the barren prairie of southeast Colorado, near Granada, lies evidence of one of America’s most shameful episodes.

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, hysteria led to the relocation of 110,000 Japanese-Americans to remote internment camps around the West.

Some 10,000 of them were sent to Camp Amache, held as prisoners from 1942-1945, far from the American public.

Little remains of the buildings, but the area became a national historic site in 2023. Guides and interpretive signs help visitors imagine the pain of being labeled a threat strictly because of your ancestry.

Camp Hale National Historic Site

As World War II raged, the U.S. Army realized it needed specialized troops for the mountain fighting ahead.

The Army chose this large valley north of Leadville as the training ground for the 10th Mountain Division.

From 1942 to 1945, the mountain troopers endured brutal cold and deep snow, learning to ski and fight on flimsy wooden skis while climbing mountains under fire.

At its peak, 15,000 soldiers trained in what became a virtual city. The division would suffer 5,000 casualties, including 999 killed.

Today, you can take a self-guided tour with interpretive signs to ten stops, including a handful of restored buildings.

Eisenhower Tunnel

You’ve likely driven the Eisenhower-Johnson Tunnel, perhaps cursing the heavy ski traffic or frequent closures for hazardous materials trucks.

Building an interstate highway through these mountains was initially considered impossible, and proposals included I-70 ending at Denver.

Colorado officials knew the state would become an economic backwater without a route crossing the Continental Divide and successfully lobbied the federal government to build the tunnel at 11,112 feet. When it opened in the 1970s, it was the highest tunnel in the world.

It took 5 years to build and remains the highest tunnel in the interstate system. As frustrating as driving may be, it is a crucial corridor connecting the Front Range, the mountain communities, and the nation.

Denver and Colorado became the economic heavyweight of the Rockies, which likely would never have happened had the interstate ended at the foothills.

The tract encompasses staggering red rock cliffs, broad valleys and rolling hills that burst into green in the spring. Cutting through it all is the beloved river, which sometimes dwindles to a trickle.

Nobody wants to see it overrun with tourists and trash, like so many of the West’s wild places.

But disagreements about whether to designate some of the river and its canyonlands as a national monument have driven a caustic rift between the people who love the area. What those protections look like, and who gets to shape them, are at the center of a fiery debate that, in some instances, has sunk to name-calling and declarations of evil doing.

Recreation and conservation organizations want to designate nearly 400,000 acres, or 625 square miles, of the federal lands along the river as a national monument, allowing for more robust management and protection of the land. If approved, the monument would be the largest in the state and would nearly double the total acreage of monuments in Colorado.

The Dolores River canyonlands are one of the largest, most biodiverse swaths of lands without federal protections, advocates for the monument say. They worry that without further federal regulations, increased recreation, mining and development could threaten the integrity of the landscape.

“It����ap a pretty incredible, intact landscape,” said Mike Fiebig with American Rivers, a nonprofit group that supports the monument designation. “We don’t have a lot of that anymore.”

Sean Pond, organizer of the Halt the Dolores Monument campaign, agrees. He can drive and hike for dozens of miles in the area outside of his home in Nucla without seeing anyone.

But Pond and thousands of other campaign opponents worry that a monument designation eventually would impact livestock grazing and limit a decades-dormant mining industry that could be revived with the recent rise in the price of uranium.

Or, worse, that creating a monument would draw the hordes of tourists that the landscape needs protection from.

“They come with a noble cause — they want to protect the Dolores River canyon,” Pond said of monument supporters. “So do we. We live here.”

Two efforts to protect river corridor

The monument proposal is one of two efforts to offer greater protection to the lands around the Dolores River.

The Dolores springs from headwaters in the San Juan Mountains near Telluride and flows southwest until it reaches the town of Dolores. From the small town, it turns north and meanders, eventually nearing Colorado’s western border, before crossing into Utah and joining the Colorado River northeast of Moab.

Colorado’s two U.S. senators introduced nearly two decades in the making. It would designate a smaller swath of 68,000 acres along the southern Dolores River as a national conservation area and special management area. The area  in Montezuma, San Miguel and Dolores counties.

The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in December approved the widely supported bill and .

Two counties — Mesa and Montrose — dropped out of conversations about the national conservation area years before the bill was introduced, however.

In response, a coalition of recreation and conservation nonprofit organizations crafted the monument proposal for the lands around the northern sections of the river in those two counties. In 2022, the coalition began organizing support for the monument designation in Mesa and Montrose counties, home to about 202,000 people.

Unlike conservation areas, the designation of a new national monument on federal land doesn’t need congressional approval and can be created unilaterally by the president. Presidents have designated 163 monuments across the country, including nine in Colorado.

The Dolores River monument designation is necessary to protect wildlife, ecosystems and tribal connections and resources, monument supporters said.

“This landscape is one Instagram influencer away from being overrun, so let’s get the conservation right before it a problem,” said Scott Braden, director of Colorado Wildlands Project and one of the monument campaign’s organizers.

According to the proposal, the lands would be managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service — as they are now — and subject to a management plan created by the entities with an opportunity for public comment. The monument would not charge entrance fees, according to the website. Livestock grazing would still be permitted, as would biking and use of motorized vehicle routes.

The government would honor existing and valid mining claims, though it would not allow new mining claims. The draft map of the proposed monument was crafted to exclude the majority of the existing mining claims, Braden said.

“We think there are places that shouldn’t be mined in this landscape … but we’re also leaving (out) a ton of areas that we think are most likely to see future mining,” he said.

So far, the coalition has collected more than 85,000 signatures and letters of support from 150 businesses, as well as some state and local politicians. Both of Colorado’s senators this year have traveled to the Western Slope to hear about the plan and talk with locals.

The Native American tribes with land in Colorado support the monument, too. Both the Ute Mountain Ute and the Southern Ute lived in the area of the proposed monument, said Regina Whiteskunk, a member of the Ute Mountain Ute and a former tribal councilmember.

The land needs to be kept as close to its natural state as possible, she said.

“This landscape provided everything for us and we survived that way for hundreds of years,” she said. “And now we’re trying to do right by the land.”

Advocates are hoping President Joe Biden will turn his attention to the idea before the November election. While Biden has designated five new national monuments — including the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument north of Leadville — former President Donald Trump, who’s the likely Republican nominee again this year, created a single monument and reduced the size of another while in office.

The coalition believes the monument would help local communities by boosting outdoor recreation economies, while continuing the mining and ranching industries.

Distrust and name calling

But some in the small towns along the proposed monument’s boundary don’t buy those claims.

Pond is not sure the land needs more protections. The area’s minimal tourists need little management now, he said, but he fears that designating a monument would act as a siren call to the hundreds of thousands of RVers, bikers, motocrossers and hikers that descend on nearby Moab every year.

Visitation to the area increased in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic prompted many people to seek wilderness solitude, Pond said. People were camped “every-freakin’-where” that year, Pond said, but the fervor has since calmed. There is no true tourism industry in the area, he said.

Pond and others with Halt the Dolores fear that despite promises from the monument advocates, access and use regulations will change in the future. Nearly 8,000 people have signed Pond’s petition to halt the designation. County commissioners from and passed resolutions opposing the monument, though the mayor of Grand Junction — the largest population center in the area — supports the monument and to lobby for its creation.

Even if grazing is still allowed on the land, changes to motorized access could affect the feasibility of reaching cattle or maintaining ranching equipment, Pond said. Or, if the monument designation grandfathers a mining claim, blocked access could make it useless.

“They’ve said we’re spreading misinformation,” Pond said. “But I’m just spreading the other side of the truth.”

Pond also opposes a ban on new mining activity. With the price of uranium rising, the towns along the uranium belt could see a mining boom. Minimum-wage tourism jobs are not the same as the potential six-figure mining jobs such a boom could bring.

In a post on social media, Pond alleged that a monument designation would lead to entrance fees and closed-off lands, roads and trails.

Colorado’s nine national monuments cover a combined 490,000 acres and vary widely in size and management. The five created before the turn of the century are managed by the National Parks Service and the four created since are managed by the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service. Five of the nine charge an entrance fee.

Braden, from the Colorado Wildlands Project, said the monument, as proposed, would not be operated similarly to the Colorado National Monument, which is heavily developed and sits just outside Grand Junction. A better comparison would be to the Camp Hale or Canyons of the Ancients national monuments.

The debate over the monument has resulted in name calling and harassment, both sides said.

On Facebook, Pond has called supporters of the monument “eco-terrorists” and called Braden a “parasite” and “the embodiment of evil.” Others opposing the monument have called local businesses that support the monument a “cancer on the community.”

When asked about the posts, Pond said his emotions have sometimes gotten away from him and that he’s trying to be more politically correct.

He did not apologize and said that if his language brings attention to his cause, “then so be it.”

Pond said he also has faced harassment, including a death threat he said he reported to law enforcement. He also cited a woman who screamed at him from across the room at a community meeting last Sunday in Nucla.

The inaccurate talking points and name-calling from those who oppose the monument have been disheartening, Braden said. But he believes compromise is possible.

“We’re ready to come to the table and meet people where their concerns lie and try to figure something out that’s workable for everybody,” said Braden, who lives in Grand Junction. “But at the end of the day, we’re committed to permanent protection of this landscape.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

One of them was his great-grandfather, Wayne Peters, who was killed while fighting German forces in northern Italy in the final weeks of the war.

“Very emotional,” Daniels said, five hours into a 15-hour backcountry ski tour he and nine other soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division — now based at Fort Drum in western New York — undertook last week to honor their World War II predecessors.

They would ski from Camp Hale to Vail to commemorate the arduous D Series exercises that unfolded there over three weeks in 1944. D Series was, in effect, the 10th’s final exam before they fought in Italy’s Apennine Mountains. Peters was one of 975 10th Mountain soldiers killed in Italy.

“This has just been an absolute honor to be here,” Daniels said at the foot of Shrine Mountain, taking a break during the 24-mile “Hale to Vail” journey. “Just to be able to continue not only the 10th Mountain Division’s legacy — why we’re all here — but a really special moment for me to continue my great-grandfather’s legacy; kind of follow in his footsteps. Maybe hook onto the same pitons that he did here at Camp Hale, ski in the same tracks. Super special to be here.”

After the war, 10th Mountain Division vets helped found dozens of U.S. ski resorts including Aspen, Vail, and Arapahoe Basin. Today the area where the 10th prepared for war from 1942-44 is prime recreational backcountry terrain as part of the , annually attracting an estimated 58,000 skiers, snowshoers, and snowmobilers according to the U.S. Forest Service. Parts of the area were designated the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in 2022.

For 10th Mountain today, it remains sacred ground. During the D Series, the ski troops held war games lugging heavy packs, rifles, and gas masks up steep 12,000-foot mountains and schussing down ravines, night and day, on seven-foot-long wooden skis. They slept in snow holes, enduring blizzards and sub-zero temperatures.

In combat, the 10th is probably best known for a February 1945 battle with Nazi forces occupying strategic Riva Ridge in Italy, a surprise attack described in a 32-page :

“On the evening of the 18th, 700 men … make a daring night climb and successful assault on Riva Ridge, which rises steeply 1,700-2,000 feet above the rushing Dardagna River. The attack utilizes five carefully prepared climbing routes, including two that require fixed ropes. Surprise is complete, and by daybreak the mountaineers have taken Riva Ridge at the cost of only one casualty. But ferocious counterattacks immediately put the achievement in jeopardy. Not until Feb. 25 is the entire Riva Ridge in our hands.”

In the battle to hold Riva Ridge, 21 10th Mountain troops were killed. After Riva, the 10th fought its way 100 miles north to Lake Garda, where the Germans surrendered on May 2, five days before the end of the war in Europe.

The Camp Hale D Series was designed to push troops to the limits of their endurance, and it did. A plaque quoting ski trooper Bruce Campbell currently hanging in the Winter Warriors marquee exhibition at the History Colorado Center, which honors the 10th, makes that clear:

“Except for being shot at, the conditions were much worse during the D Series than anything we would face in combat,” Campbell said.

Daniels’ great-grandfather was killed in the Po River Valley when his grandmother was 2 years old.

“What these guys were doing here at Camp Hale was no easy feat,” Daniels said. “It took a lot of training, a lot of expertise and a lot of good instructors. It’s eye-opening when you see (the landscape) first-hand. Those guys were the real deal.”

PFC Rylan Parsons, who is from Jackson, Wyo., came to appreciate the exploits of the World War II 10th when she took her mother to a 10th Mountain Division museum at Fort Drum.

“It����ap super special to me,” said Parsons, a geospatial engineer whose job includes map-making. “It����ap super motivating. I don’t think many people get the chance to follow such historic people and do such historic things. It����ap been really inspiring, and honestly I’m very grateful for the experience to take my skiing skills and be able to emulate what my ancestors did.”

Early in the Hale to Vail traverse, the soldiers climbed 2,600 feet to Ptarmigan Pass, which is connected to a towering 12,000-foot ridge known to today’s backcountry mountaineers as Machine Gun Ridge. They call it that because spent shell casings and other Army paraphernalia from the 1940s still turn up occasionally.

10th Mountain veteran Harris Dusenbery described climbing that ridge one night in 1944 in his book “Ski the High Trail,” a personal account of the D-Series maneuvers.

“Traverse and kick-turn, traverse and kick-turn, repeat and repeat it,” Dusenbery wrote, “herringbone up this slope, traverse again, side-step up this icy spot, rest — oh, so rarely did we rest — sweat and struggle on, gulp hard at the thin life-giving air, strain to keep up, utter a hundred vain curses for the 50 pounds of rucksack on your back, for the ache in your shoulders, the sweat in your eyes, the skis on your feet, but ‘keep moving’ is the order of the day.”

Despite the hardships, his description of the view that night on top of the ridge came straight from a mountaineer’s heart.

“I stood facing toward snowy peaks and the pyramid that we called Ptarmigan Mountain,” the Montana native wrote. “Behind me abruptly rose the shoulders and peak of Sugarloaf (Peak). Around me the distant horizon was circled with jagged summits and snow-covered ridges, range after range of glorious mountains, all sparkling in the moonlight. … The wind whistled softly about my parka hood and blew whirling wisps of snow along the surface. I knew that this was a perfect spring night at 12,000 feet of elevation in the Colorado Rockies.”

Ptarmigan Pass, with its view of Machine Gun Ridge, was the toughest climb of the day for the Hale to Vail soldiers. They climbed on alpine touring gear designed for ski mountaineering.

“I’m not going to say it����ap the easiest thing to do, but it����ap been very doable,” said Parsons, the only female soldier on the mission. “But, I say that as I’m skiing on 2023 ultra-light skis, whereas the original 10th Mountain people did this on wooden planks. They’re the real athletes.”

The Hale to Vail traverse was followed by the 49th annual reunion of 10th Mountain Division veterans and descendants with festivities at Copper Mountain, Ski Cooper and Vail. The Vail event included lectures, a Black Hawk helicopter landing, a parade, a ceremonial ski down the Riva Ridge trail and a ski troopers race.

While visiting the “Winter Warriors” exhibition in downtown Denver last week with a few of his troops, Lt. Col. Marc Cleveland described the objective of the Hale to Vail trek — to “Link the Legacy” between the original 10th Mountain troops and those who serve today. The 10th is currently deployed in Iraq and Syria, and was deployed in Afghanistan during the U.S. presence there.

“Being at Camp Hale, skiing and snowshoeing and climbing and doing avalanche training in the same location where the people who came before us did the same things, it����ap a reminder that while a lot of things change, some things stay the same,” Cleveland said.

“We’re always going to have a need for people who are experts at operating in a mountainous environment in the cold and the wind and the rain and the snow,” he added. “They’ve got to be tough and resilient and confident and competent. The outdoorsmen, the skiers, the climbers, the muleskinners that came together (during World War II) to put together this division — to go and do a job that was necessary — our soldiers have the all of those same characteristics.”

The Hale to Vail route took the soldiers from where Camp Hale was located, at the foot of Tennessee Pass, northeast to Ptarmigan Pass, then on a northward traverse along Shrine Mountain — a familiar landmark visible today from Interstate 70 at Vail Pass — to Shrine Pass (11,178 feet). From there they skied northwest to the eastern limits of the Vail ski area above the back bowls, then down into Vail Village.

Accompanied by members of the National Ski Patrol — which was deeply involved in the formation of the 10th Mountain Division and subsequent recruitment efforts — the Hale to Vail skiers arrived at the bottom of Gondola 1 in Vail shortly after 7 p.m.

Parsons, the mapmaker, had the trip data on her GPS watch: 24.4 miles with 5,602 feet of climbing, elapsed time 15 hours, 16 minutes, 47 seconds.

“I enjoyed the beauty the entire time,” Parsons said. “It was definitely a challenge, and it pushed all of us mentally at times, but it was so exciting to be part of the first group to bring back that traverse and bring back alpine to 10th Mountain.

“I think the coolest moment was getting on Ptarmigan Pass together as a group, because that was really our biggest hurdle,” she said. “Getting to the top, seeing the mountains, seeing the sunrise, was probably my favorite moment in the entire thing.”

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Adventurist, to get outdoors news sent straight to your inbox.

So we decided to come up with our own list of places to go in 2024, but with more manageable goals — and with a nod toward Colorado connections. We also leaned heavily on road trips or because travel is already difficult these days — prices, crowds, cancellations. Why make it any harder?

Here are 24 places for Coloradans to travel this year, broken down into destinations in Colorado, elsewhere in the United States, and other countries or overseas.

Bon voyage.

IN COLORADO

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Colorado’s fourth and least-visited member of the nation’s most prestigious open-space club. Named for the depths of the steep and narrow canyon that splits it, Black Canyon can be tackled in a variety of ways, from scenic drives and rim-side hiking to challenging treks to the bottom. And you will find far fewer people than at Rocky Mountain National Park or the Great Sand Dunes. Montrose, about five hours from Denver, is a popular kickoff point.

Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument

Designating the 84,500 acres where Colorado’s famed 10th Mountain Division trained for its role in World War II as a national monument in 2022 didn’t change it much. The area southwest of Vail is still used for camping and fishing, snowmobiling and ATV riding. But it’s gorgeous country, . Want to learn more about it? There is a new exhibit at History Colorado in Denver that delves into the story of the 10th and the legacy it left behind.

Boulder

Boulder doesn’t really need the attention, but it got plenty in 2023 with the arrival of Coach Prime at the University of Colorado. But the city is more than football and cliches. In fact, in November Fodor’s named it as one of 24 places to visit in the entire world in 2024 (only one other U.S. destination was included). The travel guide honed in on Boulder’s scenery, open space and accessibility to recreation and nature, as well as the Pearl Street Mall’s dining options. We would add that there are plenty of awesome breweries, as well as a Michelin-starred restaurant (Frasca).

Craft beer highway

The origins of Colorado’s craft beer culture date back to 1979, when Boulder Beer Co. was founded in a goatshed in Hygiene (about 10 minutes west of U.S. 287 in Longmont). There are now more than 420 craft breweries in the state, a surprising number of which are located just a mile or two on either side of 287, between Broomfield and Fort Collins. In fact, you could call this 50-mile stretch the Colorado Craft Beer Highway. Wanna get a taste? Find a designated driver and hit up a couple of dozen of these treasures, some of which — like Liquid Mechanics, Cellar West, Verboten and Zwei — are among the best small breweries in the state.

Mount Blue Sky

It’s not the tallest mountain in Colorado, but it’s the closest fourteener to Denver and one of the best-known peaks in the state. And last September, Mount Evans (at 14,130 feet) was renamed as Mount Blue Sky after years of campaigning by Native American groups. With the change, it’s a good time to remember that this is one of the few Colorado fourteeners that motorists can drive to the top of (although not in winter). The views up there are gorgeous, and there is a good chance you’ll see mountain goats and wildflowers along the way.

Glenwood Springs

There’s nothing quite like boarding Amtrak’s California Zephyr at Union Station and riding it to Glenwood Springs, peering out at not just the stunning expanses of Glenwood Canyon, but also the less-often-seen backside of Denver and its suburbs. Glenwood itself has evolved quite a bit in the past few years, with big changes (already completed or still on their way) to some of its hot springs, like Glenwood Hot Springs Resort and Iron Mountain Hot Springs, among others. The little downtown strip beneath the overpass is also a charming spot for a bite, a stroll, some entertainment and a beer, perhaps from Casey Brewing & Blending’s lively taproom.

Amache National Historic Site

Wanna get away? You don’t need Southwest Airlines. Just drive east from the Front Range — at any time of year, really — in the opposite direction of where most people are headed. One fascinating destination is the , which became part of the National Park System in 2022. Amache was one of 10 forced relocation centers in the United States where tens of thousands of Japanese citizens and people of Japanese descent were imprisoned during World War II. Today, there is a cemetery, a monument and landscaping to explore — and to remember.

Mountain Plover Festival, Karval

Speaking of eastern Colorado, one of the most unusual birding festivals in the world takes place every April (it’s April 26-28 this year) in Karval. What makes different? There are no motels or restaurants in Karval, so reservations are required and attendees stay with local ranching families (meals and entertainment are provided). So, in addition to bird-watching tours (mountain plovers are a rare breed and difficult to see), you learn about the history and community of the area. Karval is about 2 hours southeast of Denver in Lincoln County.

IN THE UNITED STATES

Spring training in Arizona

No matter how you feel about baseball or the Colorado Rockies, Major League Baseball’s Cactus League Spring Training in the Phoenix/Tempe/Scottsdale area can be a magical experience. And, as we wrote in our recent travel guide on Scottsdale, it’s also “a nice excuse to slip away to the Sonoran Desert,” where springtime temperatures are in the mid-70s — a nice break from cold Colorado weather — and there are pools aplenty.

Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument, Arizona

Grand Canyon National Park is the second most visited park in the system, with nearly 5 million visitors per year, but the land around it received a special designation in 2023 when President Biden banned mining on nearly 1 million acres in order to protect the ecosystem and preserve Native American sacred sites. The national monument isn’t that easy to “visit,” since it consists mostly of open space, .

Hatch, N.M.

The great chile debate rages on between Colorado and New Mexico about which state produces the biggest and best peppers. Why not find out for yourself on a road trip to the area around Hatch, N.M., an agricultural community that many consider to be the Napa Valley of chiles. Other things to see in the area: White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains national parks, along with the Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge and plenty of historic sites featured in the recent movie (and Oscar nominee) “Oppenheimer.” (Make sure to stop in Pueblo, Colo., on your way back up Interstate 25, though; that’s the heart of Colorado’s own green chile country, so you can settle the debate for yourself.)

Asheville, N.C.

DIA added a new nonstop flight to Asheville, N.C., in September, and 2024 is a great time to visit since (Fort Collins-founded New Belgium also has a taproom there.) But Asheville, set along the dreamy Blue Ridge Parkway, should be on any Coloradan’s list anyway, because in addition to its incredible craft brewery scene, it’s an outdoor lovers mountain playground.

New York City

There’s never a bad time to visit the Big Apple, but 2024 will offer a couple of enticing draws, including a game between the Denver Broncos and the New York Jets at MetLife Stadium (the date is still TBA); the June 28 opening of the brand new visitors center at Stonewall National Monument; and a highly touted exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “” (Feb. 25–June 28). Plus, you can get your fill of ramen, pizza, bagels and dumplings — which is always a reason for joy.

Cleveland

Ah, the Land. A city on the comeback, Cleveland is a shortish trip by air, and in 2024, it happens to be in the path of a full eclipse (), which will cut northeast from Texas to New England on April 8. Why Cleveland? Well, there is a small and lesser-known national park just 30 minutes away, called  the eclipse with ranger-led activities. And while you’re in the vicinity, take in a Cleveland Guardians game at beautiful Progressive Field, as it opens the baseball season against the Chicago White Sox on the same day.

The Big Island

The mountains here are stunning, certainly, but let’s face it: Sometimes we need the smell of coconut oil, the sound of waves and the expanse of the ocean. Airlines offer direct flights from DIA to all four of Hawaii’s major islands, but — and Hapuna Beach — might be the most beautiful of them all. Expansive, warm and a great place to snorkel, Hapuna is truly mesmerizing. But don’t stop there. In addition to Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park and gorgeous shorelines, the Big Island also boasts white sand, green sand and black sand beaches. Set against the backdrop of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, a visit here is the cure to cabin fever.

OVERSEAS

Paris

Maybe it doesn’t sound appealing to fly to Paris at the hottest, busiest, most congested time of the year. Or maybe seeing the Olympic games while sipping cafe au lait and eating baguettes is exactly what you need. Either way, there will be plenty of athletes with Colorado connections in the City of Light when the games start on July 26. in recent years, and if the Olympics aren’t your thing, then consider this: Notre Dame Cathedral, which nearly burned down in 2019, .

Dublin

For being the , DIA doesn’t have many direct nonstop international flights. So it’s worth celebrating each and every new one. In May, Irish airline Aer Lingus will begin connecting Denver with Dublin, Ireland’s lively capital city. The historic sites here go back more than 1,000 years — and you can (and should) tour the Guinness beer and Jameson whiskey plants. Dublin is also the kickoff point to the famed Irish countryside, including the Cliffs of Moher, Giant’s Causeway and Killarney National Park.

Iceland

Also on the slim list of international destinations accessible by a nonstop flight from DIA is Iceland, with its waterfalls, blue lagoons and adorable puffins. The island national has been on a lot of bucket lists for at least a decade now. But 2024 and 2025 hold particular appeal since , or Northern Lights, which appear more colorfully on a cyclical basis — and which are fairly easy to catch in Iceland.

Tokyo

Japan’s capital may be the only destination in Asia to which you can fly nonstop from Denver, and it’s worth the trip. The city is like no other place in the world, and you could spend months just getting to know a single neighborhood. It’s also full of just about any kind of activity you could want, from visits to spectacular cultural and historical sites to dining, recreation, or just people-watching. There’s also craft beer, whiskey, manga and .

Jamaica

Last February, Frontier Airlines began flying direct from Denver to Montego Bay, Jamaica, “cutting down to around five hours a trip that used to take all day, with a stopover,” as we wrote in a travel guide to the country’s tourist capital. So, for laid-back beach bars, sizzling jerk chicken, swimming holes and, of course, music, this might be the year for a trip to the Caribbean.

Puerto Rico

Not to be outdone, United introduced a daily direct flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico, in October, slashing travel time to the island by several hours. Even better, you don’t need a passport to visit this U.S. territory. You will need to bring an appetite for spicy codfish fritters, plantains and tropical rum drinks, however. Read more about this sunny destination — along with its beaches, rainforests, history and culture — in our recent travel guide.

Mexico City

Mexico City has always been one of the most complex and richly dynamic cities in the Americas, but it has also become , with several neighborhoods teeming with art, culture and cuisine. Some of the most rewarding activities include Wandering the Roma Norte neighborhood in search of blue corn tortillas, churros or cute coffee shops; catching the spectacle of lucha libre; visiting the Frida Kahlo Museum or the Museo Nacional de Antropologia; and trying chapuline with your mezcal. Oh, and at 7,200 feet in altitude, it’s one of the few capital cities that is higher than Denver, so you should feel right at home.

Costa Rica

The “pura vida” never goes out of style, but recently as more and more people discover this lush, friendly country where adventure and easy living seem to blend perfectly. The airlines only fly nonstop from Denver to four countries in Central America, but this is one of them. Whether you want wildlife, scenery, great coffee, rainforests, beaches or culture, Costa Rica offers one of the easiest, most beautiful ways to take a tropical vacation.

Banff National Park

To get some perspective on Colorado’s rocky peaks, take a bucket-list trip to Canada’s Banff National Park, where “the mountains have rock faces at a scale you just don’t see in Colorado. And every lake is a different hue of vibrant blue or green,” according to The Denver Post’s extensive travel guide on how to travel to, and camp in, the park. A two-hour flight to Calgary, followed by a 90-minute drive, will land you in stunning beauty that you have to see to believe.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, In The Know, to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox.

“Being a Hispanic man, there weren’t that many in the 10th,” his son Val told The Denver Post while he was in Denver for the opening of the new History Colorado exhibit about the 10th, “Winter Warriors.” “It made it really special. To be selected as one of them was really an honor. He absolutely loved it. And the prejudice that existed at the time, he didn’t experience any of that with the 10th guys. They just welcomed him as a brother, as he would say.”

Rios, who died in 2016 at the age of 97, is featured in History Colorado’s new exhibit “Winter Warriors,” along with some color photos he took during his time in Italy during the war. He visited Italy with his wife in 1994 and again in 2005 with his son. They visited a church where Rios had attended mass on Easter Sunday in 1945, five weeks before the Germans surrendered.

“He had no idea where it was,” said his son. “Through the internet I was able to find it, and we went back on Easter Sunday for a service, which was quite special for him. A couple of the pictures he took of the church (in 1945), one of them had some little girls, and two of those little girls — who are now elderly — were at this church service in 2005. It was quite special for him. It����ap just a wonderful story.”

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Adventurist, to get outdoors news sent straight to your inbox.