The Empire PAW Site is being developed into an outdoor classroom to teach outdoor recreation providers and college students how to include persons of all ages and abilities in an outdoor recreation experience.

Below is a photo of the trail design laid out on Google Earth. The photo is dated September 24, 2011 which was the PAW workday at the site.  The trail design has been done by the students from the Colorado School of Mines EPICS program under Dr. Robert Knecht.

The Empire PAW Site will have three different user groups.  The first will be the general public, school children and visitors to Clear Creek and Grand Counties who are interested in the history  of Colorado and Berthoud Pass.  The historical theme exhibits on site will be experiments on tactile (touchable) exhibits with special emphasis on ways to include persons with visual impairments as well as the general public. The trail will be designed to the scale of the wagon road  on the Clear Creek County side of Berthoud Pass.  The scale will be 100 feet of wagon road to 1 foot of trail.  The work that has been done on the Berthoud Pass Auto Tour will be the resource for the exhibits.

The second group of users will be  those wanting to develop a level of confidence in an outdoor recreation setting.  The trail will have "bump-outs" or "challenge areas"  beside the main trail, where visitors can test the impact of different combinations of  running grades, cross-slopes and surface materials in determining the level of difficulty for a trail. These will be designed after the new ADA for Trails.  http://www.access-board.gov/outdoor/status.htm  The trail has been laid out by several teams of students from the Colorado School of Mines.

The third user group will be made up of university students, government agencies and manufacturers who want to test and research new accessible trail methods and materials.