When warm weather arrives in the Ute Pass region, what visitors experience as leisure requires sustained, largely unseen effort from a core group of local professionals. Trails, mountain weddings, community festivals and sidewalks all depend on workers whose most demanding stretch of the year is now underway. A Pikes Peak Courier feature this week spotlighted several of those workers and the logistics they manage.
In Woodland Park, the chamber of commerce president has spent two decades steering the organization through the rhythms of a mountain economy. Summer's surge of activity functions as a financial lifeline that local businesses rely on to sustain themselves through slow, snow-heavy winters. Now in her 20th year leading the 425-member group, she said the spike in seasonal business requires careful advance planning. "The business owners know that summer is going to be our high season," she said. "They spruce their businesses up, they run specials. The events, what I call our signature events, have been going on for several years. Those organizers have their events like a well-oiled machine." The role itself, she said, covers far more ground than any single title suggests. "Oh gosh, it's everything, you're the janitor, you're the CEO, you're the person who deals with volunteers … you wear all hats," she said.
A comparable mix of glamour and grit defines the work at the Ute Pass Cultural Center in Woodland Park, a municipal venue that serves as the community's main gathering space. The event center manager, who took the position in January 2023, handles a packed schedule that runs from neighborhood meetings and holiday parties to a heavy load of weddings booked from May through October. "People think it's kind of glamorous and we're just having parties all the time, folding napkins in cool ways," she said. "Yesterday we had to test all of the fire alarms … There's a lot of physicality with events that people don't expect." Weddings carry the highest pressure of all. "Weddings are probably some of our most challenging events because, it's somebody's perfect day and you want to get it just right," she said.
The seasonal workload at Mueller State Park in Divide plays out entirely in the open air. The park's education, volunteer and outreach coordinator runs a summer lineup that spans fly-fishing clinics, archery classes, campfire sing-alongs and trivia nights open to all ages. Pulling it off requires managing a pool of more than 100 active volunteers. "We have an absolutely amazing and dedicated not only education staff, but volunteer team who lead a ton of different programs and activities here in the summertime," she said. "The volunteers tell us they get a lot of fulfillment and enjoyment from getting to educate and inspire the people that they interact with at the park."
Anyone expecting the pace to ease after Labor Day may be surprised. The Mueller coordinator said September is actually when staff begin gearing up for the park's peak period, with mid-September through early October — aspen leaf season — drawing the heaviest visitation of the year. The chamber president agreed, saying that leaf-peeping keeps Teller County busy well into September, with business not truly tapering off until around the end of October.
Whether the region's volunteer ranks and small professional staff can sustain that extended tourism arc through the fall color season is a question local organizers are already working to answer.