Fishers Peak State Park

Fishers Peak is the flat-topped mountain over Trinidad, and for anyone driving north out of New Mexico it is the first thing in Colorado that holds the eye. It stands at the western end of Raton Mesa, 9,633 feet high, and for travelers on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail it marked the climb over Raton Pass, just to the west.

The name is less certain than the mountain. Early maps called it Ratón Peak. The usual story credits Waldemar Fischer, an artillery officer with Stephen Watts Kearny's Army of the West in 1846, with climbing it, but History Colorado points out that the account rests largely on Uncle Dick Wootton, who had a mountain man's taste for a tall tale, and that Fischer and Fisher traded places on the maps for decades before one spelling stuck.

Coal under the Raton Basin brought mines to the mesas from the 1860s, and by the 1920s the slopes around the peak had been stripped of their timber. The land passed among ranchers and investors, and in its last private decades it was the Crazy French Ranch, a trophy-hunting property with no roads to speak of. The Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land bought it in February 2019 with the City of Trinidad and Great Outdoors Colorado, and on October 30, 2020 it opened as Colorado's forty-second state park, 19,200 acres, second in size only to State Forest State Park.

The summit trail opened in November 2023, about eight miles each way from the trailhead off I-25 on the south edge of town, and the park advises treating it like a fourteener. Its upper section closes from mid-March through July while peregrine falcons nest on the cliffs. Shorter loops wander the grassland and piñon-juniper near the trailhead, where the peak fills the view to the east.