FOURTEENER

that has consistently topped the hiker use charts since recording began.

“It’s sort of curious to me. Just as we’re getting close to having almost every fourteener with some kind of intentional route on it — something we’ve been working on for decades, and that the state has spent millions of dollars on — now the communities are saying, ‘we don’t want people here,’” Athearn said. “It’s like we built an interstate highway and all of a sudden the towns start saying they’d rather people run out the county roads.” ough almost all of the fourteeners experienced a decline in tra c, the numbers and impact are not evenly dispersed. Overall, the state experienced an 8% decrease in trafc. is, in itself, is not particularly alarming. e pandemic year, when people got bored of fearing for their lives inside, created a high watermark of tra c. Even the double-digit decrease from 2020 to 2021 was something to be expected. e Mosquito Range and the Elk Mountains are the only groups that did not see decreases. e Elks near Aspen — which consist of Castle Peak, Maroon Peak, North Maroon, Capitol Peak, Snowmass Mountain, e most drastic decrease was on Quandary Peak, just south of Breckenridge, which saw roughly 13,000 fewer hiker days in 2022 than in 2021. Athearn speculated that a season-long reservation system and the introduction of a shuttle fee in 2022 drove down that number. e next steepest losses came from the Sawatch Range, west of Buena Vista, which hosted 11,500 fewer hiker days, followed by the San Juans at 10,000 fewer hiker days. e Front Range peaks, including some of the most accessible fourteeners like Grays and Torreys, Mount Evans, and Mount Bierstadt, lost about 3,000 hiker days, while the Sangre de Cristos rounded out the losses with 1,500 fewer hiker days.

Conundrum Peak, and Pyramid Peak — showed roughly the same number of hikers as last year, at 7,000. e Mosquito Range, just east of Leadville, actually increased its hiker count to almost double — to 32,000 in 2022 from 17,000 in 2021 — because of a two-month closure of Mount Lincoln, Mount Democrat and Mount Bross in 2021.

Athearn isn’t unsympathetic to the concerns of local communities.

In rural mountain towns, residents face the consequences of high visitor numbers— acutely felt in labor and housing prices — and a loss of the serenity that many moved there for in the rst place. Last month, a report by Montana’s Headwaters

Economics outlined the paradoxical challenges of living in a mountain town so plentiful with natural features that its allure brings in crushing numbers of visitors and secondhome owners, thereby degrading the quality of life for locals. e report called this type of town an “amenity trap.” ose fears carry over to natural spaces. e dialogue about “overloved” natural resources is wellfounded in Colorado, and many heavily tra cked areas have implemented strict permit systems to try to do some damage control.

What Athearn is wary of is the knee-jerk reaction by local communities who see more people and immediately want to regulate rather than invest in better infrastructure.

“Some people think we need to permit everything, but you have to think, who are the people that really bene t? People who have exible schedules, who can book a trip six months in advance,” Athearn said. “What about someone who works a retail shift and might not know they 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 some- thing 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 concerns 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

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