The environmental and archaeological reviews are done, and the money is in — $250,000 from Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Trails Program, the largest grant that Rocky Mountain Field Institute has received in its 22-year history in Colorado Springs.

“Now the work begins,” said Joe Lavorini, the nonprofit’s project coordinator.

As soon as snow melts on the wild back of Pikes Peak, Lavorini expects to lead a crew on the summiting path known as Devil’s Playground, through the forest of Douglas fir and pine to the craggy, colorful tundra above 12,000 feet.

After much talk and anticipation, builders will commence the multiyear effort to reroute the trail.

“What I’ve been saying is: America’s Mountain deserves better,” Lavorini said. “It’s a sorry excuse for a trail, and we need to do better than that.”

It’s something stewards with Friends of the Peak have known for years. With RMFI, they’ve been going up every summer, applying what Lavorini called “Band-Aids” over degraded sections below treeline and especially above. There, the trail’s fall line has been measured as wide as 20 feet and deeper than 5 feet — an ever-incising scar deemed a threat to the tundra’s ecosystem, a hazard for hikers trampling through it.

“God, the way it was rotting, we could spend forever trying to fix it,” Paul Mead recalled thinking as a Friends of the Peak board member.

Better to close the trail and make a new, sustainable one, he figured. The U.S. Forest Service agreed and had him call Loretta McEllhiney, the agency’s expert on Colorado fourteeners. That was in 2012.

“So I came out here and hiked it and said, ‘Yeah, you’re right. We really need to do something,’ ” McEllhiney told The Gazette two years ago.

At the time, she was scouting a route on Devil’s Playground alongside a biologist and botanist making their own assessments. McEllhiney couldn’t remember how many times she had been to the site in that season alone, not to mention all of the seasons prior — including winter, when she needed to see how snow settled on the landscape to plot a wise alignment for the trail.

“The majority of people think trails just happen,” McEllhiney said. And indeed, the fall line just happened, made over time by people who decided this was the fastest way up the mountain.

But “sustainable trails don’t just happen,” McEllhiney said.

RMFI has demonstrated that on several other fourteeners, most recently on Kit Carson Peak, where a similar fall line is set to be replaced. And as the group will demonstrate again now in its backyard.

The $250,000 grant is projected to cover a third of the job, with other money coming from the National Forest Foundation. The Forest Service’s nonprofit partner is spearheading a campaign to fund work on the state’s biggest mountains, with Devil’s Playground among its top three priorities.

Lavorini said it could take five or six years to build the new trail and “decommission” the current one, restoring the damaged corridor with rocks, soil and seeds.

“We’re gonna do everything we can to get this trail constructed in a timely manner,” he said, “but our priority is to build it well.”

Following McEllhiney’s blueprint, the new 4 miles will start in the woods, around where the Devil’s Playground trail currently splits with the Crags trail.

The route will trend south, meeting near the fall line and branching to the hiker’s right. The plan adds about a mile to the trip.

For those with the fitness to charge up the steep trail, the distance might matter, Lavorini recognized.

But for others having to stop frequently to catch their breath, the extra length will be seamless, he said. “You’ll be able to move at a more steady clip.”

The design follows the booming trend of fourteener trail rerouting: Think less vertical, more horizontal with long, winding switchbacks, so as to avoid erosion on harsh grades.

Along with RMFI, nonprofit Colorado Fourteeners Initiative has led the way, having also attempted to track the increasing bustle across the mountains.

Data from a counter placed at Devil’s Playground last July through November surprised CFI Executive Director Lloyd Athearn: 3,893 hikers were tallied during that period, and he guessed June numbers might bring that total to 7,000 for the full climbing season.

“It does seem a little bit low,” Athearn said. “But it’s always important to understand the difference between volume of use and the amount of impact. That mountain has just a massive amount of decomposed granite, and so the impacts from that are huge.”

With a locally respected pedigree in trail design, Mead called the new Devil’s Playground route “perfectly usable.” A previous plan was “more fun and interesting” with more overlooks, he said, but land managers scrapped that to keep people away from bighorn sheep.

Still, “anything will be better than what we have now,” Mead said.

Lavorini said volunteer days will be scheduled, “and we expect there to be pretty big interest.”

After all, he said, “It’s not every day you build a new trail on Pikes Peak.”