Maintain
Fourteener summit trails are built of available rocks, logs, and soils found in high alpine environments. Heavy winter snows, violent summer thunderstorms, and the impacts of an estimated 260,000 hikers annually (see CFI’s 14er Hiking Use Report) take a heavy toll on even the most sturdily constructed summit trails. To keep these summit trails in great shape, Colorado Fourteeners Initiative enlists volunteer stewardship organizations, local businesses, youth summer camps, college programs, and other groups of organized volunteers to perform routine trail maintenance through the Adopt-a-Peak program. This active stewardship work protects trail structures, controls erosion, and restores denuded areas. Since 2001, more than 22,942 volunteer days have been performed.
CFI has been working since 2011 to develop a GIS-based trail conditions modeling program that will assess the severity of natural resource problems and track the conditions over time on constructed and user-created summit trails. The Sustainable Trails Program is helping CFI prioritize future maintenance projects and will ensure that limited funding and volunteer efforts are focused on the highest priority projects to build out and maintain the network of summit trails on the 14ers. Between 2017 – 2019, CFI completed baseline trail condition inventories for 15 routes that were not included in the first phase. In addition, CFI performed secondary inventories on 14 routes that were originally evaluated in 2011 – 2013. These secondary assessments note how on-the-ground trail conditions have changed and track cash and volunteer investments in the intervening years.
The result was an updated “Statewide 14er Report Card” which outlines $12.8 million in needed new summit trail construction projects and a further $5.6 million in major improvements to existing trails. CFI’s Sustainable Trails analysis now covers 56 14ers routes, including all standard and some secondary routes on the Forest Service and BLM-managed peaks.
In 2014, CFI began tracking visitor use to correlate on-the-ground impacts with the amount of hiker use. In 2024, CFI released the eight edition of the “14er Hiking Use and Economic Impact” report which estimated that the number of people climbing a 14,000-foot peak in Colorado in 2023 fell to an all-time low of 260,000 hiker use days, equaling the initial estimate from 2015. This represents a 6.8 percent decline from 2022’s estimate, reflecting a broader trend of decreased hiking activity since the peak in 2020 during the pandemic summer when use reached 415,000 hiker days. One of the primary factors contributing to this decline was the closure of the popular Decalibron Loop near Alma for much of the season due to private landowner liability concerns, resulting in a 17,500-day drop (-55%) in the Mosquito Range.
CFI’s estimate of hiking use suggests a statewide economic impact of $70.5 million directly attributable to hiking 14ers in 2023, based on past economic expenditure studies performed by Colorado State University economists John Loomis and Catherine Keske. Their 2009 study found that climbers of Quandary Peak near Breckenridge spent an average of $271.17 per day on gasoline, food, lodging, equipment, and other retail purchases. Given the decade-old data, these figures are likely understated in today’s economic context. Read more about the report here.
