VISITORS

can get out until the day before? Who are the people that will get access to public lands, versus those who will feel locked out or that the system is too Byzantine to navigate?”

With so much focus on diversifying public lands, and on reducing barriers to entry like cost, Athearn nds it strange that communities also want to start charging people for something that was traditionally free.

“We’re at this crosscurrent,” he said about the future of the fourteeners. “What do people actually want?” is year, the heavy and latestaying snowpack is going to have an impact on the hiking season. at much CFI is expecting. Overlaid on those natural conditions are an increase in parking and reservation fees, and an increase of private land closures — more than 10% of the fourteener’s summits are on private land — due to liability issues. e way that those three forces will impact hiker numbers this year con- cerns Athearn.

“I worry that we’re going in this negative direction where people are just saying ‘there’s too much. Too many people, too many dogs, too much whatever, and so let’s just stop,’” Athearn said during a recent fourteener safety panel. “Is this a canary in the coalmine for our recreation-based economy?”

Another driver of what Athearn called the knee-jerk, “shut o the tap” reaction, is the fallacy that more people means more damage.

In 2015, CFI’s trail condition report card, an assessment that they conduct every four years, gave the Quandary Peak trail a C+. at year the trail hosted 18,000 people, according to the hiker use report. CFI used that information to prioritize the Quandary trail’s improvements. In 2018, the next iteration of the report card, the trail received an A-. It hosted 38,000 people that year.

“ ere were more than twice the amount of people on it, but the trail was better,” Athearn said. He emphasized that high numbers don’t necessarily mean high impact. “If you have a good trail, people are