The Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park is a 125,000-acre swath of sacred reservation land. The tribe offers guided tours of the area, which include showing potsherds, cliff dwellings, and art on canyon walls from ancient Ute, Hopi, and Puebloan peoples.
The Tribal Park is in the same valley as Mesa Verde National Park. The Tribal Park features art on canyon walls, cliff dwellings, and shards of pottery from Indigenous people from hundreds of years ago.
One trail in the park, the Pool Canyon Trail, has been closed since 2021. Great Outdoors Colorado awarded the Ute Mountain Ute tribe a $44,190 grant to help restore the Tribal Park’s Pool Canyon trail.
Veronica Cuthair has worked for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park since the 1990s. She says the trail restoration will reopen the area for guided tours.
“The grant will assist us with the trails in Pool Canyon. Pool Canyon will have mile markers this time so that the trails will be well established,” said Cuthair.
Scott Segerstrom is the Executive Director of the Colorado Youth Corps Association. He explains how the Pool Canyon trail has degraded over time.
“Over those five years, the Pool Canyon Trail has degraded to the point where it's not passable. We've seen small rock slides. We've seen trees have fallen across the trail, making it unpassable. Vegetation has naturally become an encroachment on the trail,” said Segerstrom.
Segerstrom says tribal youth will work alongside members of the Southwest Conservation Corps to fix the trail in 2025.
“They're going to do technical rock work and build rock walls to mitigate the threat of erosion. They're going to go in with hand saws and potentially chainsaws, and they're going to clear all those trees that fell across the trail. They're going to use hand tools to widen the trail, smooth it out, and return it to a passable state,” said Segerstrom.
Veronica Cuthair and Scott Segerstrom emphasize the importance of the guided tour of the Pool Canyon trail as an important economic resource for the tribe. The park's tours are closed for the winter and will reopen in April.
