For hikers trudging by, the unremarkable slab of granite beside the Baldy trail in the heart of the Buffalo Creek Recreation Area hardly merited a second look. But to the five men from the Colorado Mountain Bike Association, funded by a state grant program to spend the summer improving mountain bike trails on public land, it represented a creative opportunity.

Thanks to the sloping ground around it, one edge of the slab created a waist-high ledge, fairly begging mountain bikers to use it as a launching pad. All the work crew had to do was move several heavy boulders and pile them up at the base of the ledge to provide a bail-out option for riders who might decide at the last second that hucking off a ledge that high might not be such a good idea after all — especially because there was a steep hill below the slab.

“This has been on my bucket list for a while,” said the leader of the work crew, Ben Burgoon. “It’s a difficult feature, a fun feature. We’re going to put big rocks there, so if you come up to it too hot and you’re like, ‘I don’t want to ‘drop’ it,’ you can roll it.”

In March, Colorado Parks and Wildlife announced recipients of the state’s annual Non-Motorized Trail Grant Program, which totaled more than $2.4 million for 26 projects. Funding for the grant program comes from Great Outdoors Colorado, the Colorado Lottery, and the Federal Highway Administration’s recreational trails program. In all, Great Outdoors Colorado distributes around $70 million annually, derived from lottery proceeds, to preserve or improve the state’s parks, trails, wildlife, rivers and open spaces.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife reviews and approves grant applications for the Non-Motorized Trail Grant Program. The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative received $250,000 this year for work on 12 fourteeners. The city of Colorado Springs received the same amount to build 2.65 miles of trail at the Austin Bluffs Open Space. None of the other grantee organizations received more than the $150,000 going to the Colorado Mountain Bike Association (COMBA).

“Groups like the Colorado Mountain Bike Association across the state regularly do trail maintenance for every level of land manager — municipal, county, county open space, state and federal,” said COMBA executive director Gary Moore. “It’s work that we do every year. We’re funded by the state stewardship program for about five months of the year, and COMBA has been working hard to find other maintenance support.”

This summer, the COMBA crew spent a couple weeks working on the Virginia Canyon Mountain Park in Idaho Springs, which has a 12-mile network of trails with plans to more than double it. That park is located where the new Mighty Argo Cable Car is being built.

After that, the crew moved to Buffalo Creek in the Pike National Forest, eight miles southeast of Bailey. Working four 10-hour days per week, they camp near their worksites and perform backbreaking labor to do routine trail maintenance and create new features like the one at the rock slab.

On a recent day, they parked near a trailhead and carried their tools — rakes, shovels, iron pry bars, a wheelbarrow and more, but no power tools — 1.7 miles to the scene of the slab. They liked Burgoon’s idea for creating the new mountain biking feature but knew it wouldn’t be easy wrestling those boulders into position.

“We’re going to need some really, really big rocks,” said crew member Sylys Lackovic.

Lackovic lived in Paradise, Calif., until 2018 when his family’s home was lost in California’s most destructive wildfire, known as the Camp Fire. Lackovic was 13 at the time. In all, more than 18,000 structures were lost and there were 85 deaths. The family relocated to the nearby town of Chico, but they moved to Rifle in 2022.

Lackovic brought his love of the outdoors with him, and now he’s studying ski area operations at Colorado Mountain College in Leadville.

“I’ve always wanted to get paid to ride my bike and ski all season, being a ski patroller or a bike patroller,” Lackovic said, 20. “I love riding bikes and I love to ski so much. That’s why I picked the ski area operations program. And this program as well, we’re working on some really cool stuff.”

It’s not easy, though. It was hot, and they were harassed by swarms of horseflies. Occasionally mountain bikers appeared on the trail, huffing and puffing after a big climb, offering thanks as they rode by.

“It’s really nice to have people come by and they’re like, ‘Hey, you guys are doing great work, good job, I really like this feature you just put in,’” Lackovic said. “That gives you a nice dopamine boost. It’s a good feeling. And I love riding the trails as well. I can go out, ride them, see what needs to be fixed and fix it.”

To move the biggest rocks, they used a “come-along,” a portable hand-operated winch, to drag them into position. Some rocks they maneuvered into the wheelbarrow, which four or all five members of the crew would push and pull toward the slab. It tipped over a couple times en route, prompting groans from the crew.

Ellison Hagins recently moved to Colorado after spending five years working in construction management. His cousin, a mountain biker who lives in Littleton, recommended the COMBA gig to him.

“Working in the corporate field, I kind of lost touch with being in the outdoors and exercising,” said Hagins, 30. “Construction is a crazy field, very stressful, very hard to maintain work-life balance — especially as you get into upper leadership positions. The fact that this is arduous, and it’s manual labor, really attracted me. It’s been great.”

Burgoon works at a Golden ski shop in the winter. This is his third year on the COMBA trail crew, his second as its leader. Their plan was to spend two weeks on the Baldy Trail, which included the work at that slab, before moving on to other trail improvement efforts.

“You came at a good time,” Burgoon told a visitor as the crew worked on the jump and Fly Away by Lenny Kravitz played on a portable speaker. “This has been on my bucket list for a while.”

There would be other projects for the crew in Buffalo Creek, a magnet for mountain biking. Some of them involved general maintenance, such as cleaning out natural drain areas, reinforcing turns and moving more boulders.

“It’s work that we do every year,” Moore said. “We’re funded by the state stewardship program for about five months of the year, and COMBA has been working hard to find other maintenance support from land managers. We’re getting closer to where we can have this team year-round, not just a seasonal effort where we’re having to re-attract and rehire and retrain people for each summer’s work, but to where we can keep people employed year-round and develop deeper skill levels.”