Radon Mitigation in Palmer Lake, CO

Palmer Lake sits at the very top of the Palmer Divide, tucked against the base of the Rampart Range at roughly 7,200 feet. It is the highest of the Tri-Lakes communities and the smallest, and its housing stock is unlike anything else in El Paso County.

The town started as a railroad resort in the 1880s, and that history is still visible in the building inventory. Original cottages and turn-of-the-century summer homes sit a block from 1970s infill and a block from recent custom builds. For radon work, this means an installer cannot assume anything. The same street can hold a house on a shallow rubble foundation, a house on a mid-century slab, and a house on a modern engineered basement, each needing a different diagnostic approach and a different system design.

The terrain adds its own complication. Much of the town is built into the hillside below Ben Lomond and Sundance Mountain, which produces walkout basements, split-level construction, and homes where the lowest floor is partly below grade on one side and fully above it on the other. A single suction point in the wrong corner of a house like that will leave half the foundation unaddressed.

Geologically it is the same story as Monument, only more so: granite and coarse arkosic material with plenty of pathways for soil gas, at an elevation where the winter stack effect is strong and the ground freezes early and stays frozen.

Snow retention is significant here, meaningfully more than a few miles downhill, which caps the ground and pushes soil gas toward the warm building on top of it for a long stretch of the year. Winter readings should be treated as closer to typical than exceptional.

Permitting runs through the Town of Palmer Lake for work inside town limits, with the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department handling building permits. Lot sizes are tight and neighbors are close, so exterior venting routes need checking early.