Let’s talk the future. But not 2025. How about 2125? We do have to deal with the short-term problems and solve them, but I want to try to see what Estes Park will look like 20, 50, 100 years. We’ve been here for 150 years or so and we’ve made it look like what it is. Can we keep the beauty while tending to our population and workers and wildlife for another 100 years and beyond?
It’s a worthy exercise but perhaps TOO conservative with the vision. There will be great advancements that I’m missing here. I need my inner Isaac Asimov to kick in; as I go to press with this, I think it looks more like 50 years in the future, not 100. So, what do YOU see in Estes’s future?
Green Energy and Transportation
We will have achieved 100% green dependable electrical power no later than 2037 for Estes. The Virtual Power Plant will track the many sources of private electricity into the grid. We’ll have enormous, redundant battery storage to get us through. There will be new sources of energy not yet discovered or developed today. Will the rest of the world be as good as us locally/regionally?
We’ll have continuous autonomous (no driver) transportation up and down the hill. We’ll have only a small number of private vehicles, because it will be so convenient to use the automated green methods. You can still have family privacy on a long road trip by using personal vehicles.
There will be aerial options, vehicles of the air. Really! You can get one now for $300K, but the FAA doesn’t have rules yet.
Our fleet of Town vehicles
Vehicles will be completely electric by 2032. We’ll have pedestrian overpasses: the top of Big Thompson or across Highway 7 / S. St. Vrain. Crosswalks will not be danger zones – cars will be stopped automatically if a person or elk is crossing.
Personal wheeled or hovering devices
Pedestrians on gyroscopic wheeled shoes will follow paths around the Dry Gulch/Devils Gulch loop, the full Fish Creek/Highway 7 loop, and more.
Downtown Estes Park
Our will be a beautiful, interwoven multi-street mall with pedestrian walkways and some areas of downtown will have weather management with seasonal enclosure. Flowers all year! It will be more than shops and restaurants: there will be various entertainment and play options that I can’t imagine. Many streets will be heated (technology to do that will be much cheaper); ice and snow will be much less of an issue. Paid parking? Not needed by then. (But it’ll be around for a while yet.)
Forests: hiking, climbing, fire protection, and suppression
The beetle kill stands will be long gone, some through conflagrations. Fire protection and suppression will be advanced technology that would look like sorcery if we could see it today. Automated transportation will be the thing in the park but there will still be options for backpacking into the more remote parts of the parks and forests. Long before 2125, we will help our guests and residents depart the Park with a greater understanding of how to live in harmony with our forests and mountains and streams, how to do no harm and instead nurture.
Art and Music
This millennium has seen great steps not only in musical venues, but musicians of all sorts. We will be a designated arts community; we’ll have public art which will look magical because of AI and 3-D technologies. And 4-D! We will solve noise challenges with new sound absorption technologies that keep the music at the venue perimeter, even in outside venues. Amazing? It’s 2125!
Fireworks
Fireworks will be virtual and safe drone light shows. We’ll have holographic images of Enos Mills and F. O. Stanley and Isabella Bird at the museum giving presentations and tours. (F. O. might look a bit like Kurtis Kelly.) We’ll have a nice fine arts theatre (I won’t predict where). AI will let us have a virtual Beethoven concert; high-school budding thespians can get lessons from William Shakespeare himself.
Building Development and the Workforce
We’ll continue to walk the line and maintain beauty, with conscientious leaders and with proper citizen pressure. We will have wonderfully quaint neighborhoods that look like the Irish countryside, with little low cottages made of remarkably strong but incredibly inexpensive materials, and hedged roads winding through. Geothermal heat will be very common. We’ll have treehouse vacation rentals that charge you a reduced rate if you conserve energy and water during your stay. Much of our workforce will still commute via clean, green, fast public options above. You will still be able to look across town and still see a preponderance of green nature. We’ll have long annexed all the unincorporated parts and everyone in our valley can vote in Town elections.
Information Revolution
The Information Revolution will be 175 years in. AI will help us develop solutions faster and will help educate our kids with plenty of interaction from human teachers. Electronic health records will be remarkably efficient and save doctors huge amounts of time to spend with you, the patient.
Food Supplies
We’ll have daily deliveries of new food supplies; fruits and vegetables will be as fresh as Fresno.
Movies
AI and immersion and three-dimensionality will have vastly changed the movie experience. And hopefully Sundance will be in Boulder.
Sanitation District
They’ll build new facilities yet in the 2020s, and that will be replaced again in by 2080. We’re clean!
Schools
Ultra-modern learning tools, but it’s still Go Bobcats!
Water
Still pure and sweet.
The Mountain Shop sale
Still happening! 25% is not bad in 2125.
Longs Peak Scottish Irish Highland Festival
Albannach’s great-great grandchildren will be entertaining us with their fresh primeval performances.
Taffy
And yes, you can still buy taffy.
Is this crazy? What would the Estes inhabitants in 1920 say about our technology now? The future is a big place, let’s move into it. Let me know your ideas!
Mayor Gary Hall can be reached by email at ghall@estes.org.
Listen to the Mayor’s Message on the EVV Podcast
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