Guffey Gorge / Paradise Cove

The trailhead at Guffey Gorge is a gravel parking lot on Park County Road 102. The Federal Register calls that road “a narrow, two-lane road with limited visibility near the Guffey Gorge trailhead.” The lot has vault toilets, trash cans, and a kiosk where visitors pay the day-use fee before starting down. Between May 15 and September 30 the fee is $6 per vehicle, paid in cash, by check, or through the Recreation.gov app. The app has to be downloaded before arrival because there is little cell service at the site. The gorge covers 80 acres of public land, about twelve miles from the center of Guffey, and private pasture surrounds it on all sides. The Bureau of Land Management’s Royal Gorge Field Office in Cañon City runs it. Most visitors call it Paradise Cove.

The parking rules are strict. When the lot is full, the site is full. Cars left on the county road are ticketed and towed by the Park County Sheriff’s Office. The site is open in daylight only, with no camping and no fires. Alcohol, glass, and amplified music are banned, and Recreation.gov adds marijuana to that list. Dogs must be leashed. On grills the agencies disagree: Recreation.gov permits gas grills, while the BLM’s own site page and its 2025 notice list grills among the prohibited items. The restroom at the lot is accessible. The trail is not.

The trail down West Fourmile Creek

The BLM measures the hike at a mile. Recreation.gov, Leave No Trace, and the newspapers call it half a mile. The trail follows West Fourmile Creek past rock outcrops and wildflower meadows, enters ponderosa pine where the gorge begins, and then drops steeply to the water. Leave No Trace counts three creek crossings and warns that the trail “is not flip-flop friendly.” Recreation.gov lists steep slopes, loose rock, and slippery footing.

At the bottom, a small cascade falls from the granite into a pool walled with rock. Leave No Trace describes the pool as “not much bigger or deeper than your average backyard pool.” Recreation.gov notes shallow water that changes depth often, and it says jumping or diving is not recommended: “Injury or death may occur.” Signs posted around the cove warn swimmers about cliff jumping. People jump anyway. In 2017 The Gazette described 80- to 100-foot cliffs “from which the adventurous dive into a small, waterfall-fed pool and put on a show for onlookers.” The BLM lists climbing, fishing, and wildlife viewing among the site’s other uses.

Oil Creek, Truro, and a salted pit on Mount McIntyre

The country around the gorge sits at the base of three eroded volcanoes that erupted some 34 million years ago. The Thirtynine Mile Volcanic area is the last remnant of the Central Colorado Volcanic Field, and the Guffey volcanic center is the largest in it. West Four Mile Creek, as the county histories spell it, rises on the southeast slopes of Thirtynine Mile Mountain and drains to the Arkansas River east of Cañon City. Its first name was West Oil Creek, for oil found near its mouth.

The Flume reports evidence of people in the area before 5,000 B.C., including spear and arrow points and flaked stone chips. One of the main Ute trails came north from Salida, followed West Four Mile Creek to Four Mile Creek, and went down Ute Pass to Manitou Springs. The Rocky Mountain Field Institute, which has worked on the trail here, recognizes the gorge as the traditional territory of the Ute and Cheyenne.

The first homesteaders reached West Four Mile in the late 1860s and 1870s. Richard Tremayne, from Cornwall, kept a post office named Truro on his homestead just west of the gorge on Park County Road 102. He is listed as its postmaster in 1887 and stayed until he moved to Cañon City in 1903. John Reeves Witcher arrived on the creek in 1871 and brought his family the next year. In 1885 he bought the Marcott Ranches, where West Four Mile and Four Mile creeks meet. He ran his holdings as the 76 Ranch until his death in 1911. His second wife, Laura Belle, known locally as the Grand Dame of ranching, ran the lower ranch until she died in 1956.

Henry Boswarthick Gross, known as HB, settled with his family in the 1870s at County Road 71 and County Road 102, on the slopes of Mount McIntyre. In 1884 two men dug a test pit on public land just outside his homestead and filed a placer claim. According to Marshall Sprague’s Money Mountain, the miners bought provisions in Cañon City with some fanfare and stopped at the Gross place, where HB happened to run an assay office. Sprague writes that a later sample assayed at $2,000 gold per ton in Cañon City. HB told the Park County Bulletin in April 1884 that his own test showed little gold or silver. By then the rush had started. Three square miles of pasture were staked, and the mountainside was stripped of trees for tent poles, corrals, and firewood. The claim proved to be a hoax. Some thought Cañon City businessmen had started it to drum up trade. Because Mount Pisgah, near Cripple Creek, was the better-known peak, the affair became the Mount Pisgah Hoax.

The gorge takes its name from the town. The post office opened on April 12, 1895, in the Freshwater Mining District. The name Freshwater was already taken by a post office in California, so the office was named Idaville, after Ida E. McKelvy Wagner, who held mining claims on Gold Hill. On May 23, 1896, under postmaster Gustave Cohen, the name changed to Guffey. The name most likely honors James McClurg Guffey, a Pennsylvania oilman with mining and real estate holdings in the district, who gave money for street improvements. Another story holds that his uncle, Joseph F. Guffey, later a U.S. senator, paid the townsite $500 to say it was named for him. The Flume’s correspondent leaves it there: “Whatever the true story about the town name, it still remains Guffey.”

From a few hundred to forty thousand

According to the BLM’s 2017 Federal Register notice, recreation at the gorge had been light until about ten years earlier. Local residents came to picnic, hike, and swim. The Rocky Mountain Field Institute writes that the internet and word of mouth turned a place known to a few hundred users a year into a summer destination for more than 40,000. The counts vary by source:

• The Gazette reported about 12,000 visitors in 2011 and nearly 40,000 in 2016.
• A Park County presentation put 2016 at about 38,000, with up to 400 a day in hot months.
• The Denver Post, in May 2016, quoted a BLM average of about 18,000 a year.
• Leave No Trace named the gorge a 2017 Hot Spot and counted up to 1,000 visitors a day on sunny July weekends.

Leave No Trace also recorded the damage. Litter lined the rocks and blew from overflowing dumpsters into neighbors’ yards. “Thousands of glass shards” lay at the water’s edge. Off-trail travel had eroded the path until it was hard to follow. Loud music drowned out the creek. Local emergency crews regularly carried out people hurt jumping from the cliffs or falling on the trail.

The Gazette visited in late June 2017. A resident who gave his name only as Kaleb called the place “a complete disaster.” He said, “Nobody ever used to know about it, and now everyone knows about it,” and added, “We live up here to get away from the city; we don’t want the city up here.” A motorcyclist passing the dirt lot yelled “Go home.” Prajwal Kulkarni of Denver had found the cove by searching online for swimming holes. “This got real good reviews,” he said. Louie Scott of Colorado Springs, who called himself “terrified of heights,” walked toward the cliffs with friends and said, “I like the rush.”

Rules on the Federal Register

The BLM began a management plan in 2013. The process included site tours with the Resource Advisory Council, a scoping period that opened August 11, 2014, and a decision record signed June 29, 2015. The site had no trash service until 2015. Two dumpsters arrived in 2016, and a vault toilet was installed that October. A grant from the Park County Land and Water Trust Fund covered half the cost of the first improvements.

In April 2016 the field office released a draft business plan proposing the fee. Keith Berger, the Royal Gorge field manager, said that “the dramatic increase in visitor use at this site in recent years has caused a number of issues and concerns that need to be addressed.” The fee was meant to start on May 15, 2017, but it was delayed. Only three letters came in on the proposed rules. One was from a woman who described a bad experience at the gorge and asked for a strict ban on alcohol.

The final rules took effect January 19, 2018. Linda Skinner, an outdoor recreation planner at the field office, was their principal author. They banned alcohol, parking outside designated areas, and unleashed animals. The rule against amplified sound was written, in the BLM’s words, to “restore opportunities for quiet recreational activities recognized as one of Guffey Gorge’s attributes.” In 2022 the office added payment by phone. Berger said the app “must be downloaded prior to visitors’ arrival at Guffey Gorge, due to the limited cell phone service.”

Work on the trail continued. Crews from the Rocky Mountain Field Institute closed social trails, armored muddy spots, and built rock ramps to help search-and-rescue teams carry out the injured. In 2025 the BLM opened an overflow parking lot with 31 spaces, one of them ADA-compliant, and a crosswalk to the recreation area. One of the photographs the bureau published that June shows staff moving concrete berms into line to mark the new spaces.