The Shelter at Mile 28: How Palisade Takes Care of Its Own on the Plunge
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
On August 3, a mountain biker dropped into the lower canyon section of the Palisade Plunge on a day the National Weather Service would later flag for a record high in Grand Junction. Somewhere past mile marker 22, the bike broke down. Ten miles from the trail's end, in a stretch with no cell service and no way to refill water, that mechanical failure could have turned into something much worse.
Instead, the rider walked to a small shade structure built into the canyon wall, sat down, and waited. Mesa County Search and Rescue drove an ATV up the trail, found the cyclist there, gave them water, and hauled them and the broken bike back down into town. The whole thing ended the way these stories rarely do: safely, with nothing more dramatic than a long, hot afternoon.
What makes this worth writing about isn't the rescue. It's the shelter.
That shade structure went up in November 2025, less than a year before it did its job. It wasn't built by Mesa County or the Forest Service. It was built by the family and friends of Jeff Higgins, a 52-year-old Colorado Springs cyclist who died of heat exposure near that same stretch of trail in June 2022. The family commissioned Grand Junction artist Jeff Bates to design and build it, and Scott Winans, who owns Palisade Cycle & Shuttle and works with the Colorado Plateau Mountain Bike Trail Association, helped assemble it on site. The project came together as a partnership between the Higgins family, the Town of Palisade, the Bureau of Land Management, and COPMOBA.
Mesa County Search and Rescue put it plainly in a statement after the August 3 rescue: "a space created in Jeff Higgins' memory provided shade and comfort when it was needed."
To understand why that shelter exists where it does, you have to go back to the day Jeff Higgins died. On June 11, 2022, Grand Junction hit a record 102 degrees. Higgins was riding alone when he ran into trouble near mile marker 28. Three other cyclists found him unconscious and called 911, but they'd also run out of water by then, despite each starting the ride with a full gallon. All three needed treatment for dehydration themselves.
That's the part of the Plunge that doesn't show up in the trail brochures. The ride starts at over 10,700 feet on the flat, cool top of Grand Mesa, winding through pine forest and wildflower meadows. It ends more than 6,000 feet lower, in the high desert canyon above the town of Palisade, where afternoon heat builds fast and doesn't let up. A rider from Grand Junction who spoke with Colorado Public Radio back in 2022, out on the mesa on a cool morning, put it simply: "I think people just aren't ready for how hot it is." By the time riders reach the last few miles, they've left the cool part of the day and the cool part of the elevation profile behind at the same time.
As of late August, Palisade Cycle & Shuttle's trail condition report breaks the route into four sections, and it's worth knowing where things stand if you're planning a ride before the season winds down:
This isn't an isolated summer for heat-related trouble on Western Slope trails. Two days before the Plunge rescue, on August 1, Lower Valley Fire District and Mesa County Search and Rescue responded to a heat emergency on Wranglers Trail near Fruita, airlifting a mountain biker out by CareFlight of the Rockies. Two rescues in three days, on two different trails, both tied to heat. It's a pattern the whole region is watching this year, not a Palisade-specific problem.
The trail is set to close for the season on November 30, ahead of the annual winter wildlife closure that runs through May 1. If you've been meaning to ride it before the weather turns, the window is still open, just not indefinitely.
What stands out about the shelter isn't just that it worked. It's who built it and why. Amy Higgins, Jeff's widow, has talked about the project in terms that have nothing to do with liability or optics. "We want to encourage people to do what they love to do and just help them do it safely," she told WesternSlopeNow after the August rescue.
Dan Higgins, Jeff's brother, was there when the family broke ground on the shelter last November. He's also noted that the section of trail near the bailout point now has clearer signage pointing riders toward both the emergency exit and the shelter itself, a detail that matters more than it sounds like it should when you're ten miles into a canyon with no water left.
The Palisade Plunge gets talked about as a mountain biking destination, and it is one. But the way this particular piece of trail infrastructure came to exist says something about how this town actually functions. The shelter at mile 28 wasn't a line item in a county budget. It came from a grieving family, a local artist, a bike shop owner who also happens to sit on the regional trail association's board, and a handful of agencies willing to coordinate on short notice. That's not a small thing. It's the same informal network that shows up for a lot of what makes Palisade work day to day, whether it's trail maintenance, wildfire response, or just knowing who to call when something goes wrong out past cell service.
If you're already out there on the Plunge this fall, or you know someone who rides it, the practical takeaways are simple: carry more water than you think you need, know that Whitewater Creek near mile 16 is your last chance to refill, and remember that the shelter near mile 28 exists because a family decided the trail needed one before anyone else got around to it.
If you're the kind of person who reads a story like this and thinks about what it says about a place, that's worth sitting with too. A town's character shows up in the small, unglamorous ways it looks after the people who love it, on the trail and off it. If you're already part of that story in Palisade, or thinking about becoming part of it, Michelle Ritter would be glad to talk through what that could look like.
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