Clear Creek Canyon climbing trail in Colorado upgraded for medical responders

Clear Creek Canyon has a newly updated trail to the CatSlab Climbing area intended to make things safer. Although not directly for climbers' benefit, this is about emergency medical responders who need to get to injured climbers, and more importantly, get them out. 

Jeremy Jones who runs Operations for the Clear Creek Fire Authority said it's a spot with frequent enough serious injury issues they've wanted this done for a long time.

"We've had probably 20 accidents in this location in the last 10 years," Jones explained. "Fifteen or 16 of those have been removed by highline due to critical patients."

"Highline" is a series of cable lines that EMS or rescue crews would string across Clear Creek in order to send patients across, that method took a little more than 30 minutes, which is half the time it would take crews to struggle on the loose craggy rock rail with a patient. Now that the trail has been updated and a railed bridge platform has gone in, they can do it in about 10 minutes. 

"We get to the patient faster and able to move out of here faster, everything we do, we are talking minutes, but all these minutes add up with patient care," Jones said. 

The new improvements took a little over three weeks to accomplish thanks to the Clear Creek County Trails Team. The build was especially difficult considering the whole reason they were putting in a bridge was because the trail was not easily accessible. 

Jones told CBS News Colorado it's important that they keep access to this popular climbing location open and safe, they in no way want to discourage people from using it, they just want to be able to get to and help people in need as quickly as possible. 

"We want people to use our open space, we want people to recreate, that is why we live in Colorado and that is why they do what they do, we just want to be effective when they have a bad day."