White River National Forest: The Most Visited Forest in America

The White River National Forest covers roughly two point three million acres of central and western Colorado, straddling the Continental Divide between Glenwood Springs and the Sawatch Range. By visitor count, it is among the most visited national forests in the United States, drawing well over ten million recreation visits per year. The ski resorts account for a significant share of that traffic: Aspen, Snowmass, Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, and Copper Mountain all operate on White River National Forest land under special use permits.

That arrangement, a commercial ski industry operating on federally owned public land, is one of the more complicated relationships in American land management. The resorts lease terrain from the Forest Service. They build lifts, lodges, and runs subject to federal environmental review. They pay fees and employ thousands of people. They also generate significant development pressure in the adjacent private land, which the Forest Service does not control, resulting in resort towns where a night's lodging approaches what a month of groceries costs.

The forest also contains the largest inventory of wilderness area in Colorado, with eight designated wilderness areas covering a large share of its backcountry. These include the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, one of the most photographed landscapes in North America, where the two Maroon Bells, fourteen-thousand-foot peaks of deep red mudstone, are reflected in Maroon Lake every clear morning in September when the aspens turn gold.

The road to Maroon Lake was closed to private vehicles in nineteen seventy-nine because the volume of cars was exceeding what the road could handle. A bus system replaced them. That decision, made almost fifty years ago, is still controversial.