01 / Safety and emergency egress
The Draft EIS describes the project area as the terminus of an 11.7-mile dead-end road and recognizes wildfire, flash-flood, landslide, debris-flow, and mass-wasting hazards. Before authorizing more visitors, vehicles and overnight use, the agencies should publish a route-specific evacuation analysis that shows the selected scale can be cleared safely.
What happened August 30, 2026
Sweetwater Road is the proposed park's only access route. For approximately six hours, Eagle County's alert system reported that Colorado River Road and Sweetwater Road both had multiple locations blocked by rock slides. Vail Daily reported rock slides and mud blocking the roads near Dotsero. CBS News Colorado reported a large mudslide with boulders and debris near the two roads. FOX31 reported that the slide completely blocked both directions of a road, and Krystal 93 reported that flooding and rockslides closed portions of both Sweetwater Road and Colorado River Road.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW)'s own 2024 scoping comment
“CPW finds it critical that a robust response plan for emergencies be analyzed for each alternative within this process.”
CPW specifically identified communications, emergency egress, on-site response to critical incidents and wildfire. That is an agency statement from before the Draft EIS—not a Working Group characterization.
A recurring road hazard
Vail Daily reported that a sudden storm closed Sweetwater Road for much of the night. Eagle County crews worked through the night to clear both Sweetwater Road and Colorado River Road; people at the resort spent the night while others downstream could not return home.
Read “Mudslides close Sweetwater Road”The Derby Fire prompted evacuation orders for Sweetwater Road, Sweetwater Lake and parts of Colorado River Road. During reentry, authorities kept Sweetwater Road closed to non-essential traffic and warned of flooding and flash-flood risk.
Geologist Karen Houck documented landslides and debris flows, including active features, and warned that downstream material could damage or bury the county road and make it impassable.
Read the Houck reportNational Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) · ESCAPE
NIST Technical Note 2262r1 presents an assessment, planning and execution framework for wildland-urban-interface fire events that can leave little or no time to evacuate. It connects pre-fire conditions and local knowledge with real-time information used during an incident.
The ESCAPE framework identifies planning elements such as:
The decision standard
Model residents, visitors, employees, large vehicles and incoming responders under realistic fire and debris-flow scenarios.
Establish a workable alternate route—or select a scale that does not depend on an unproved one-road evacuation.
Publish assumptions, vehicle counts, bottlenecks, blockage scenarios and the time required to clear the corridor.
Put occupancy, vehicle, closure and emergency conditions in the decision and permit, not only in plans drafted later.
The public record is open
Request a route-specific evacuation analysis and enforceable, project-specific wildlife protections in the decision and permit.