Fourteener’s Initiative saves peaks from being “loved to death”

by Brendan Leonard

The first Saturday in August 2003, a friend and I climbed Colorado’s Mt. Elbert, two hours southwest of Denver. We left the apartment in Lakewood at 4 a.m. and drove to the Elbert trailhead outside of Leadville, the highest incorporated city in the United States at 10,430 feet.

We hit the trail at 6 a.m., briskly making our way through the trees. By 10:30 we were just below the summit, having put one hiking boot in front of the other for over four miles. We were both nursing mild altitude headaches brought on by the 4,650-foot elevation gain. In a few steps, we’d be at the crest of the 14,433-foot roof of Colorado, the second-highest peak in the lower 48 next to California’s Mt. Whitney. We’d be sitting higher than all of America, except for a few people who might have been atop Whitney at that exact moment. We could look over the view of the small communities of Stringtown and Leadville, 4,000 feet below us, and yell, “I am the King of the Rocky Mountains!”

But when we gained the summit, we found we weren’t the only royalty that day. We had to share Elbert’s view with nearly thirty co-kings and queens and a few equally royal canines. We sat on a rock, and a woman to our left lit a cigarette, at that time most probably the highest cigarette being smoked in the lower 48. As if on cue, a man just behind us lit a small bowl of marijuana, staking his own claim as the highest man in the United States.

On the upside, there were quite a few people available at the top to take our triumphant summit photo. But if we were looking for solitude, we had come to the wrong place.

There are 54 peaks in Colorado boasting heights of at least 14,000 feet. If you should decide to climb any of them this year, you’ll be one of roughly half a million people with the same idea. In the past decade, the number of hikers attempting to bag a “Fourteener” has increased three hundred percent. So if you choose Mt. Elbert, Mt. Massive, Capitol Peak, Pikes Peak, or any of their Colorado rocky relatives for a weekend getaway, prepare to share your solitude with the multitudes.

Jim Gehres, dubbed “Mr. Fourteener” by the Colorado Mountain Club in 2002, remembers when mountain climbing was less popular in Colorado, before “Fourteener-bagging” (the idea of climbing as many Fourteeners as possible) had been invented. Gehres, a retired IRS attorney who lives in Denver, has been climbing the Fourteeners since 1960. He’s done each one at least twelve times, some of them as many as fifteen times, and counts more than seven hundred summits of the Fourteeners in the past forty-four years. He can remember the days before the Fourteener trails were marked with signs and cairns to point hikers in the right direction. He even remembers the days before there were such things as trails—or even other hikers.

“I used to go out climbing mountains like Mt. Elbert on weekends in the summertime and go from early in the morning until late in the evening and never see another person,” Gehres says. “Occasionally, I’d run into a Basque sheepherder who didn’t speak English, or something like that.”

But as hiking became more fashionable and mainstream, many people left the health clubs to get their exercise in the mountains. The popularity of hiking increased, and widely available four-wheel drive vehicles and better hiking equipment made the peaks more accessible.

“Back in the sixties, very few people had four-wheel drives,” Gehres says. “So we used to backpack for miles up a jeep road (to get to the trail).”

Gehres has made the Fourteeners his back yard for the past fofrty-four years. But now the Fourteeners are everyone else’s back yard, too. The 500,000 people hiking them every year often use the traditional climbing routes, or “social trails.” Social trails, or user-created trails, are not constructed with much foresight—they’re just routes people have walked and worn into the mountain over many years. Social trails become highly susceptible to erosion, a danger in the fragile alpine ecosystems of the Fourteeners, as the soil can gradually wash down the mountainside and smother lower-altitude plants, or seep into creeks and interfere with aquatic life.

Like city streets that develop potholes, mountain trails also are susceptible to wear and tear. Alpine vegetation gets trampled when hikers step off the trail to let others pass. Trails are widened when hikers step around a puddle instead of walking through it. Many routes cause water to run off and erode soil or destroy native plant life. Switchbacked trails, designed in zigzag patterns to make mountain climbs less steep, also present problems when hikers shortcut them. Avoiding the switchbacks and going straight up or straight down the mountain can accelerate severe erosion.

When potholes appear on city streets, the street department eventually shows up to fix them. Similarly, when the trails on the Fourteeners start to deteriorate, the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative shows up to fix them.

Although protecting the Fourteeners isn’t a hot-news environmental issue like global warming or an ecological emergency such as an oil spill, the use the Fourteeners receive is growing by ten percent every year, and the wear and tear on the mountains is altering nature at altitude. Consequently, the CFI stepped in to make hiking more sustainable so that land managers won’t have to limit access by instituting a permit system or fees. 

The CFI was founded in 1994 by five organizations: The Colorado Mountain Club, Outward Bound, Leave No Trace Inc., the Rocky Mountain Field Institute, and Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado, to “protect and preserve the natural integrity of Colorado’s 54 14,000-foot peaks and the quality of recreational experiences they provide.” CFI has partnered with the U.S. Forest Service to tackle the damage on thirty-seven of the 54 peaks—those that appeared to be in the most critical condition during the Forest Service’s initial Fourteener impact study in 1994. Its work includes maintenance and repair of routes, constructing more sustainable trails, replanting and transplanting alpine tundra vegetation, and educating Fourteener hikers in how to enjoy the peaks more responsibly.

“A lot of people don’t really understand how fragile tundra is,” says T.J. Rapoport, CFI’s executive director. “They don’t understand that five footfalls in one day in one spot is enough to kill (plant life)—and that’s nothing. You do that just walking around in your back yard.”

CFI’s “Peak Stewards” program is its primary tool to educate Fourteener fans. Each summer, twenty-five to thirty volunteers are certified in Leave No Trace practices and trained in alpine ecology and mountain safety. The trained Stewards are then asked to spend a minimum of four days on the mountain (or mountains) of their choice throughout the summer, talking to other hikers about the principles of Fourteener-friendly mountain climbing. But they act more as friends of the mountain rather than mountaintop cops.

“Instead of talking to them about the rules that exist, the laws, or the authority of laws that says, ‘You can’t do this, you have to do that, your dog has to be on a leash, et cetera, et cetera,’ we try to talk to them about the authority of the resource,” Rapoport says. “There are certain laws of nature that determine whether or not the ecosystem up there is going to remain healthy. People are usually really responsive.”

But not all CFI volunteers get to spend four days of their summer tooling around their favorite Fourteeners and fraternizing with fellow peak baggers. In 2003, 379 volunteers spent 5,944 hours sweating out the grunt work of creating more durable trails and repairing the damage caused by hikers. They labor in the high, thin air improving existing trails, creating new, more sustainable trails, and hiding harmful social trails. They plant new seeds for alpine bluegrass, Rocky Mountain sedge, willows, and cinquefoil, and they transplant healthy plants into areas where existing vegetation is dying from erosion or hiker traffic. They build retaining walls, rock dams, and switchbacks.

Nevertheless, not one shovelful of dirt is moved without considering the long-term effects on the mountain. Crews go “rock shopping” to find building materials on-site—but they avoid pulling out a rock anywhere it might leave a hole in the mountainside, which could fill with water and then erode. If they need to provide cover for newly planted seeds, they use shredded aspen, which breaks down back into the soil under sunlight. If they cut out turf to build a new trail, they re-plant the turf to cover a social trail they’re trying to erase. Rather than building rock staircases, CFI crews favor “shark’s teeth,” the erosion-slowing practice of burying large rocks so that only the tips of the rocks stick out through the trail to provide footholds. And when they plant rocks, they plant them lichen-side up, to disguise their work and help it blend into the surroundings.

Blending in is important to CFI, especially in wilderness, where thirty-two of the Fourteeners are located, and according to the Federal Wilderness Act of 1964, areas should be “affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.”

 “We go to great lengths to disguise our work, so that unless you know what to look for, you wouldn’t really spot that there was a lot of work done; just that there was a clear route,” Rapoport says.

Even the crews’ bathroom habits are eco-friendly. Work crews pack out all solid human waste, and the liquid waste, well, as Rapoport says, “When you pee, you don’t pee on plants, because the soil and everything up there is so deprived of salt. An animal will go, ‘Oh, cool, salt,’ because urine’s full of salt, and they’ll go and eat whatever you peed on. If it’s a rock, they’ll just lick the rock, and they’re not hurting anything.”

The greening of CFI’s trail crews stepped even further forward last summer, when all the CFI base camps were converted to solar energy. Each base camp is now powered by a seventy-watt solar panel, providing enough energy to run an electric fence to keep bears out, a light for the camp’s kitchen, and two battery and cell phone chargers.

In many states, you can easily adopt a highway or a park, but only in Colorado can you adopt a 14,000-foot mountain. Through CFI’s “Adopt-A-Peak” program, groups that choose to adopt a Fourteener agree to do summer preservation work such as repairing trails, transplanting vegetation and making the land more defensible to erosion. The groups bring eight to ten volunteers to their chosen peak and get dirty for the cause, led by crew leaders from CFI and the U.S. Forest Service. In 2003, six different groups, including the High Mountain Institute and the Gay and Lesbian Section of the Sierra Club’s Rocky Mountain Chapter, adopted nine Fourteeners, and spent 1,888 hours working on their respective mountains.

Outward Bound West, an adventure education school based in Golden and the most experienced Adopt-A-Peak group, has been working on Huron Peak since 1998, and adopted La Plata Peak in 2003. As part of an Outward Bound education course, students typically complete one day of service, and sometimes that day is on one of Outward Bound West’s adopted peaks, Huron Peak and La Plata Peak. Unlike many Adopt-A-Peak groups, Outward Bound West students are already used to the high altitude and close proximity to dirt that the Adopt project provides.

“Usually, by the time our students are on the trail projects, they’ve been out there quite a while,” says Jake Jones, environmental resource manager for Outward Bound West. “Generally, it’ll be day fifteen or sixteen of their course. They’ve been up above 11,000 feet, they’ve been climbing Fourteeners—potentially; they’ve been well acclimated. They’re filthy dirty when they start those projects, and they’re even dirtier when they end, and they’re not going to shower for another week.”

Outward Bound West at times has as many as forty students on a peak during its project days, but since the crew is already camping on the mountain and self-contained, CFI just has to show up with the tools and directions. And most of the already dirty students don’t usually mind a day’s work to save a Fourteener, Jones says.

“They’re not asking, ‘How come I paid all this money to come work on a trail?” he adds. “They can see the value added to their course.”

In the ten years since the founding of the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, the nonprofit has grown from one staff member to an operation with a $500,000 annual budget, six full-time employees, eleven seasonal staff members and four interns. CFI has completed work on sixteen peaks out of the thirty-seven in its agreement with the U.S. Forest Service. In 2003, CFI restored 16,890 square feet of trails, reconstructed and performed maintenance on 24,690 feet of trails, and constructed 15,735 feet of sustainable trails.

“CFI acts as a taskmaster,” says Loretta McEllhiney, peak manager for the Forest Service in Leadville, “and keeps the Forest Service on a timeline to address the damage caused by heavy use of the peaks.” The Forest Service writes the plan and CFI implements the plan. An important part of each plan is fund-raising. CFI uses funds from the Forest Service to leverage other grants, and it obtains a large part of its operating cash from donors, both individual and corporate.

“Through their fund-raising efforts, we get a lot more money onto the mountains,” McEllhiney says. “The Forest Service, on their own, probably couldn’t afford to do the extent of activities that are occurring on the mountains, for sure.”

The Forest Service is beginning work on a strategic management plan for the Fourteeners to deal with the ever-increasing hiking-boot traffic. “CFI’s efforts are wonderful,” McEllhiney says, “but no trail can be constructed well enough to withstand an annual climbing population that rivals the size of the city of Denver.”

“I think that they are very skilled at what they do,” McEllhiney says. “But sustainability is also a factor of mountain use. When you’re working on steep slopes or erosive soils and very easily impacted vegetation types, there’s a limit to how many people they can withstand. And we already see it. We have problems with the fact that we just have too many darn people up there. There’s no way to build a trail, with the funding levels that we have, that could actually accommodate uncontrolled use.”

Most Fourteener fans don’t want to see fees or permits, like those used on Mt. Whitney and Washington’s Mt. St. Helens, come to Colorado to remedy the high use of the state’s mountains. However, as long as the yearly traffic on the Colorado’s highest peaks keeps up, the Fourteeners Initiative will have to work hard to prevent the Fourteeners from being “loved to death,” as a CFI brochure says.

As long as hiking the Fourteeners is free, it will be popular, and hikers can expect to see as many as two hundred other climbers on weekends at Mt. Elbert, Pikes Peak, and the other more popular Fourteeners.

 “If you live in Denver, it’s still kind of getting away,” McEllhiney says from her office at the Leadville Ranger District. “For us, it’s not, really. If I want to get away, I’ll go anyplace but a Fourteener.”

Brendan Leonard is a candidate for the Master's Degree in the School of Journalism at the University of Montana. This article was written as part of his master's thesis.