Along a new, rough road stretching past a gate and through the plains of Colorado Springs’ east side, Mike Bowman drives his truck to a pull-off and greets two curious visitors.

Bowman is a city park ranger, and the two guests are here for his tour. The tour, part of a regular series this summer, is about as new as the road into the place that is anything but new. Indeed, Corral Bluffs has long been known as a place of ancient intrigue.

“This is called the hike through time,” Bowman tells his guests as they start toward the surprising, rugged folds of the city-owned 700-plus acres.

They will hike a washed-out corridor between grasslands and lower rock walls that soar higher the farther they venture. Canyons and hoodoos emerge — along with evidence of life from long, long ago.

‘Nothing short of magical’: Dinosaur fossil discovered deep below Colorado museum

Corral Bluffs is a well-documented home of the K-T Boundary, the rare geologic layer defining the end of dinosaurs and rise of a new dominant species some 66 million years ago. “Rise of the Mammals” was the name of a documentary released in 2019, on the heels of fossil discoveries here that opened the eyes of scientists worldwide.

Now more eyes are being opened during ranger-led tours.

“That’s palm wood right there,” Bowman says, pointing to a chunk of a tree that once stood in a once-tropical environment.

Loxolophus would’ve roamed around here, he says — one of those mammals added to the fossil record at Corral Bluffs. Loxolophus was a racoon-sized creature.

“They’re gonna start to get bigger and bigger at this point,” Bowman says as the hike through time continues.

Friday and Saturday hikes are available for registration at a city webpage, coloradosprings.gov/corralbluffs. The tours supplement those long offered by Corral Bluffs Alliance and volunteer Paula Watkins.

She’s unable to do much guiding anymore. But she’s glad the city has continued the opportunity.

“It’s great,” Watkins says, “because I never had a hike where somebody didn’t say, ‘Oh, my gosh, I never knew we had this gem right outside city limits.”

It’s a gem far east — despite appearances not so different from a gem on the city’s opposite side, Matt Mayberry says. He’s the city’s cultural services manager.

Happy Trails: West of Colorado Springs, a humble summit with humbling views

“We think of Corral Bluffs as kind of a bookend to Garden of the Gods,” he says. “Garden of the Gods is our truly unique treasure in the park system on the west side of the city, and this is similar on the east side.”

Of course, the number of people are different.

Corral Bluffs has been gated since the city’s land acquisition in 2008 through the sales tax-funded Trails, Open Space and Parks program. Following talk of a dirt bike park, the acquisition was a relief among advocates near and far who for years had eyed the land of constantly eroding rock that revealed hints of the deep, unknown past.

“There was a strong belief that discoveries were going to happen,” Mayberry says. “Sometimes science takes time.”

Flash-forward to Sept. 10, 2016. “A day I’ll always remember,” Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, said in a previous interview.

With a hammer, he cracked an egg-shaped rock to find a skull inside. It was the skull of the pig-like carsioptychus. Several more of Earth’s earliest mammals would be documented at Corral Bluffs and showcased at a Denver Museum of Nature and Science exhibit called “After the Asteroid: Earth’s Comeback Story.”

Lyson’s thrilling discovery that day was not the first nor the last at Corral Bluffs — far from it. A larger mammal would be logged: the eoconodon, about the size of a wolf. Another species was announced last year: Militocodon lydae, somewhat resembling a chinchilla.

Many years earlier alongside a researcher, Mayberry recalls sitting atop a boulder that had broken from an outcrop above. “When we stood up, he turned around and said, ‘By the way, where we’re sitting, there’s a crocodile right there.”

Crocodilian teeth have been common finds for Watkins over her decade of volunteering for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and guiding hikes.

“I found a huge turtle shell the other day,” she says. “I found my first mammal tooth a couple of weeks ago, and I totally geeked out.”

She’s seen people geek out during guided hikes. And she’s heard the question over and over again: “Everybody’s first question is always, ‘When is it gonna open? When can I just come out here?’”

The short answer remains the same: Not anytime soon.

“As much as I have wanted to be able to move the process forward, economic circumstances have not allowed that,” says city Parks Director Britt Haley. “And I’m OK with that, simply because I know we’re doing a good job by wanting to do it very responsibly and do it right.”

The costly process of a master plan would determine broader access. And before any master plan, Haley and her predecessors over the years have sought to acquire as much surrounding land as possible to connect with another city-owned preserve of major archaeological significance: Jimmy Camp Creek Park.

Named for a man who established a trading post there among trees and running water in the 1830s, Jimmy Camp Creek Park has yielded evidence of mankind dating back 3,500 years. Mayberry suspects a presence as far back as 8,000 years.

Combined with Corral Bluffs, “when you look at them like a single landscape, it is unique to any place in the state of Colorado,” he has said. “It’s similar to what you might find in the Four Corners area.”

That is how the city aims to manage Corral Bluffs and Jimmy Camp Creek Park — “as one scientific and cultural landscape,” Mayberry says.

All the while, there has been a vision for homes and businesses to march across the windswept vicinity.

New trails mark milestone for open space north of Colorado Springs

Norwood Development Group holds plans for an expanded Banning Lewis Ranch, as detailed in previous Gazette reporting. “We recognize that Jimmy Camp Creek Park is an asset to the entire community and we are committed to thoughtful development adjacent to the area,” an executive said in 2022.

That echoed a company statement in light of Corral Bluffs revelations a few years prior: “We are dedicated to being responsible stewards of our property and believe that continuing to partner with (the Denver Museum of Nature and Science) and the city will provide for amazing park, trail, open space and more scientifically significant discoveries.”

But advocates have felt uneasy about the prospect of thousands of more people living and working across the landscape. “I’ve had a pit in my stomach,” Watkins says.

Other advocates have wondered if the city’s Parks Department is equipped to be the proper steward. Some have wondered about the National Park Service — perhaps a status like Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in the Pikes Peak region beyond — while others stand by local control.

From Garden of the Gods to the west and Corral Bluffs to the east, the Parks Department was in a unique situation, Haley observes.

“Very much like when you go to Garden of the Gods and say to yourself, ‘I can’t believe the city of Colorado Springs has a city park of this level, it’s almost like a national park,’ I want people to do that with Corral Bluffs,” she says. “To have that pride of place, that’s what I want people to take from it.”

To take from the guided tours at Corral Bluffs.

On the tour this day, the ranger stops at a pile of rockfall. “That’s in the last two weeks,” Bowman says.

With more inspection, it’s easy to imagine more fossils meeting daylight, he says. “It happens all the time.”