Deep Cut Guide

Climbing on Colorado Parks & Wildlife land

68 crags on this site sit on ground Colorado Parks & Wildlife manages, with 2,396 routes between them. Everything below is what Colorado Parks & Wildlife itself states.

CPW runs the state parks, which for climbers means Eldorado Canyon, Castlewood Canyon, Staunton and Rifle Falls among others. The rule that catches people out is the entrance pass: it is charged per vehicle, at the gate, and Eldorado adds timed entry in summer.

What they require

Fees
Every Colorado state park requires an entrance pass for motor vehicles. A daily vehicle pass is $4 to $17 depending on the park; an individual pass covers entry on foot or bike.
Reservations
Eldorado Canyon runs timed-entry vehicle reservations on summer weekends and holidays; see the park's own page. Other parks do not require one to enter.
Permits
A daily pass is valid until noon on the day after purchase. The annual Keep Colorado Wild pass is $29 and is bought with a vehicle registration.

Read against source 1, source 2, source 3 and checked 2026-09-29 by John Crawford. Colorado Parks & Wildlife's own climbing page is the one to believe over this one.

A heading missing from that list is a question Colorado Parks & Wildlife's pages don't answer, not a rule that doesn't exist. This page never says climbing is allowed somewhere — none of these pages says that either, and reading permission into a page's silence is how people end up somewhere they shouldn't be.

Where the line matters

23 of these crags have another manager's land within 250 m of their map point. A crag's map point is not the rock — it can be hundreds of metres out — so at those crags the wall itself may be on someone else's ground, under someone else's rules. Each crag's own page names the neighbour.

Boulder

Golden

South Platte

Fort Collins

Buena Vista

Durango

Eagle/Vail/Minturn/Red Cliff

Grand Junction Area

Ouray vicinity (rock)

Spanish Peaks

Colorado Springs

Denver Metropolitan Area Bouldering and Buildering

Wet Mountains, The

Which crag sits on whose land comes from USGS PAD-US (public domain), read at each crag's map point. Every manager whose rules we've written down, and which ones we haven't. Closures are tracked separately and dated.