An Assessment of Informal Trails and Visitor Created Sites in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado: Project Summary Report on Bouldering Impacts in the Chaos Canyon and Emerald Lake Areas.

D'Antonio, Ashley; Monz, Christopher

Visitor activities in parks and protected areas lead to resource impacts of varying extents and levels. Certain recreational activity types—those that, by their nature, require off-trail access like fly fishing, rock climbing, and bouldering—often create a series of informal trails and visitor-created sites associated with these activities. Rocky Mountain National Park (ROMO), and particularly the Bear Lake Road Corridor, is a popular destination for such activities. The formation of resource impacts, like informal trails and visitor-created sites, can negatively influence both the ecology of the area and the recreational experience of visitors. This report summarizes preliminary results from a larger study to build a geospatial model to predict the formation of informal trails and informal trail networks. As part of this larger study, data was collected in ROMO in the Bear Lake Corridor at destinations where off-trail activities—specifically bouldering—were occurring at high levels. This report focuses specifically on describing the extent and level of resource impacts observed at bouldering areas near Emerald Lake and around Lake Haiyaha in Upper and Lower Chaos Canyons. A node and linkage system of resource impacts, organized around bouldering locations, were observed at both the Emerald Lake and Lake Haiyaha areas. Resource impacts were of moderate to severe levels with the Emerald Lake bouldering areas containing highly impacted sites and the Lake Haiyaha area containing a significant network of informal trails. Many of the resource impacts assessed in 2015 have formed since an intensive survey of resource impacts was conducted in the Bear Lake Road Corridor in 2008/2009. As such, it is recommended that continued monitoring of resource impacts associated with off-trail activities occurs in the Bear Lake Road Corridor. The results from this report will be used in the predictive model of informal trail formation and potentially be combined with social science survey results that were collected by researchers at Penn State University; those analyses will be completed at a later date and included in separate reports. This project summary report summarizes the resource assessment of bouldering impacts only.

An Assessment of Informal Trails and Visitor Created Sites in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado: Project Summary Report on Bouldering Impacts in the Chaos Canyon and Emerald Lake Areas.

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