Eric Galatas, Producer
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
By Ilana Newman for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Eric Galatas for Colorado News Connection for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration
One rural Colorado town is working to turn an irrigation ditch into a walking trail to connect the community, get people outside, and grow their recreation economy.
In 2022, Monte Vista, Colorado received a Recreation Economies for Rural Communities (RERC) grant, which helped the city strategize to revitalize main streets and grow their outdoor recreation economy. What’s now known as the Lariat Ditch Project came out of the RERC planning process.
The city of Monte Vista, population 4,070, sits in the middle of the San Luis Valley, a high elevation valley known for agriculture and access to some of the tallest mountains in the state. The region is known for their potato production, as well as growing barley, hay and alfalfa, according to their city manager, Gigi Dennis.
Dennis saw developing the local economy through tourism and recreation as a way to support agriculture and get people to “think about Monte Vista in a different light.” She wants people to think of the city as an active, enjoyable place to visit and not just an agricultural community.
Local nonprofit organization San Luis Valley Great Outdoors (SLV GO!) applied for and received the RERC grant on the city of Monte Vista’s behalf in 2022 and has since been involved with creating the plan to develop more of a recreation economy in the area. Mick Daniel, executive director of SLV GO!, said they saw a lot of potential for Monte Vista to benefit from more planning around outdoor recreation.
“We were sitting in the middle of like 8 million acres of public land….it kind of felt like there just wasn’t a lot of coordination between our public land managers, our communities, our recreationists,” Daniel said. The planning grant created an opportunity for all of those disparate groups to come together and create a cohesive strategy for the future of the city.
RERC is a program in partnership with the EPAs Office of Community Revitalization, the Forest Service, the USDA, the Northern Border Regional Commission, the Appalachian Regional Commission, and the Denali Commission.
It provides planning assistance for rural communities to grow their recreation economies. This can look like Main Street revitalization to support bringing visitors into the community, building infrastructure like trails, or creating community consensus on how to attract visitors and manage natural resources.
The Lariat Ditch Project takes a two mile stretch of open irrigation ditch that Daniel said is often filled with trash, pipes it, and places a trail on top.
In conversations with the ditch company, Monte Vista city planner Dwayne Enderle said “they were more than happy to look at placing the ditch into a concrete culvert and placing the walkway on top”. Especially because, according to Daniel, the company was experiencing a huge loss in water due to “seeping through the walls of the ditch”.
The trail would connect main street businesses in Monte Vista to their homes and other recreation opportunities around the area, including passing a half mile from the recently renovated Sky Hi Complex, a conference and event center that hosts Colorado’s oldest professional rodeo.
“What if we can connect this community to these valuable recreation resources? Maybe we don’t think about them as outdoor recreation, but a rodeo pretty much is outdoor rec,” said Daniel. The ditch also passes near downtown, the high school, the golf course, tennis courts, and through several neighborhoods.
The idea to build a trail along or on top of the ditch has been floating around the community for over a decade, Daniel said. But funding has, and continues to be, a challenge. The city of Monte Vista applied for a grant through the University of Colorado in 2024 to fund the project, but as of early January 2025, Dennis said that they have not yet been awarded any funding.
“It’s a $12 million project, which is phenomenal for Monte Vista because my general fund tax base is only about four and a half million dollars…It will be hard to fulfill if we don’t get the grant funding.” Dennis said.
Building trails to connect communities to the outdoors is something that SLV GO! is doing around the region. The Lariat Ditch trail would become a part of the “Heart of the Valley”, a system of trails that will connect the communities of the San Luis Valley to each other and to the public land that surrounds the area.
“You could potentially get on a bike or an e-bike and ride to the BLM or the Forest Service or ride over to dinner in Del Norte or lunch in Del Norte and maybe ride back,” said Daniel.
While these trail systems might also add appeal to tourists visiting the towns, for Daniel, developing the region’s recreation economy looks mostly like appealing to locals, not visitors.
Other towns in the valley, like South Fork, close to Wolf Creek Ski Area and located on the Rio Grande river, and Alamosa, the larger town closer to Great Sand Dunes National Park, see more tourism than Monte Vista. But Daniel knows that small business owners in Monte Vista would also love to see more visitors.
“I think by making it more livable for the people who live there, tourism will be a very pleasant side effect, not a bad side effect. The great thing about tourists is that they go home. They spend money, they go home,” he said.
Ilana Newman wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.
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