Chris Brandt first started mountain biking the rugged single-track trails on Carbondale’s Red Hill in 2009 and immediately noticed something both aesthetically beautiful and ecologically fragile about it.
“I was blown away by how awesome it was, and how it encompassed everything I loved about mountain biking, with its natural challenges and the scenery,” Brandt said.
At the same time, he also began to take note of how quickly the trails were degrading, due to the increasing number of feet and bike tires navigating the loose, rocky soil that’s highly prone to erosion when disturbed.
“So I sleuthed out who was in charge of trail maintenance and started figuring out how to get involved,” he said.
In 2011, he officially joined the nonprofit Red Hill Council which works with the local U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office to oversee and maintain the free, public trail system.
He is now president of that organization, and over the past 12 years has been one of the key instigators in bringing environmentally sustainable trail improvements to the area, along with stepping up public education to empower users to be more responsible and help take care of the trails and the unique ecosystem they traverse.
For his efforts, Brandt was recently named BLM Colorado’s Volunteer of the Year for 2023.
“Chris’s volunteer efforts at Red Hill in 2023 were nothing short of impressive and impactful,” the BLM Colorado River Valley Field Office said in nominating Brandt for the award. “Being an avid mountain biker, Chris has a thorough knowledge of the Red Hill trails and the maintenance needs.”
Starting after the trails dried from the spring snowmelt last May, Brandt led trail maintenance efforts, including three weekday evenings where the Red Hill Council, BLM, Town of Carbondale and Roaring Fork Outdoor Volunteers (RFOV) partnered to help restore the designated route known as Mushroom Rock Trail.
With the award came a $4,000 allocation by the federal BLM office that will be used to support ongoing trail projects.
Red Hill has become immensely popular for bikers, hikers and trail runners — many of them accompanied by their dogs — and now sees over 75,000 visits annually.
Those same stunning views and challenging trails that greeted Brandt in 2009 had been drawing the hardiest of outdoor enthusiasts for many decades before, enthusiasts who blazed the very first foot paths up to Mushroom Rock.
“A lot of those historic trails were conceived at a time before people understood sustainable trail design,” Brandt said of trails that often took a straight-line path uphill instead of a more engineered, switchback approach that responded better to the natural terrain.
“So what you’ve seen is that, over the years, we have reworked and rerouted things in a more sustainable manner,” he said.
That work continued last year with a targeted effort to rebuild and better delineate one of the higher-use trails, the Mushroom Rock route up the south side of Red Hill, and closing off some of the criss-crossing “social trails” that had developed.
As a landscape architect with the Carbondale office of DHM Design, Brandt brought some needed expertise in understanding how water moves across sloped terrain, and how to design the trails in a way that requires minimal long-term maintenance.
Brandt was also recognized by his employer in a recent DHM newsletter, saying, “We are honored to have Chris as a member of our team at DHM, recognizing his significant contributions to maintaining and enhancing the quality of trail experiences on BLM lands and using his experience to share knowledge with other designers at DHM.
In 2023 alone, Brandt dedicated over 150 volunteer hours to work on Red Hill, which the BLM valued at nearly $4,800.
In addition to the trail work, Brandt spearheaded the effort last spring to encourage users to clean up after their dogs along the trails, orchestrating a campaign to place hundreds of little pink flags at every leftover dog poop location. The image left an impact on trail users, and habits began to change.
He also led an effort to secure a $5,000 Aspen SkiCo Environmental Foundation grant to design and build a “mud meter” sign to be placed at the Red Hill trailhead, encouraging users to stay off the trails when they’re muddy with the message, “If you’re leaving a track, please turn back.”
Brandt said he couldn’t do it alone and acknowledged the various businesses and organizations in the community that help organize trail crews for the projects.
Red Hill steward earns accolades from public lands agency
