Peak Season

By Richard Woodbury

As he threaded his way up through fields of jagged boulders and knee-deep snow toward the summit of Colorado's Mount Bierstadt last week, Denver banker Don Pritchett looked forward to the splendor and isolation of the 14,060-ft. peak. But when he reached the top, he found he had to share the wind-torn precipice with nine other climbers and a Labrador retriever. According to a logbook wedged in the rocks, a dozen more climbers had already beaten him to the summit that morning.

It's a scene that will be re-enacted on mountaintops across the U.S. this summer, from the Sierras in California to the Adirondacks in New York. But it's a particular problem in Colorado's highest peaks--and especially the 54 mountains that top 14,000 ft. The Fourteeners, as they are affectionately known by locals (and a growing stack of outdoor magazines and travel guides), have become a magnet to upwardly mobile climbers sporting high-tech gear and checklists of the peaks they've bagged. More than 200,000 are expected to scale the Fourteeners this year, three times as many as a decade ago.

The problem is that most of Colorado's biggest mountains don't have well-defined trails to the top. So hikers scramble up the slopes any way they can, disrupting the natural drainage systems and trampling the fragile ecosystem--which includes tundra rarely seen in such abundance outside the Arctic. Where once there were rock jasmine and alpine forget-me-nots, there are now deep gullies, muddy lagoons and widespread erosion. "We are loving the Fourteeners to death," laments former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm, who has scaled 49 of them.

Now the mountains are fighting back--with a little help from their friends. The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, a coalition of private mountain-loving groups, along with the Forest Service and other public agencies, has targeted 35 of the 54 peaks for restoration. Every weekend a small army of volunteers heads for the hills, blazing trails, shoring up paths and redirecting misguided streamlets. On Humboldt Peak, more than 400 tons of rock were hauled in by rope and bucket to plug a 4-ft.-deep gully that ran for a quarter-mile. On Grays Peak, a well-groomed trail to the summit will be fashioned to replace a spiderweb of paths that climbers have etched haphazardly in the tundra. On Bierstadt, which has been singled out for attention this summer, workers are building boardwalks and diverting stream runoff to dry up muddy quagmires that have engulfed the main route.

Not everybody is in favor of the rescue mission. Some diehards argue that the best way to protect the mountains is to leave them alone; new trails, they fear, will only attract more climbers. But Keith Desrosiers, the initiative's executive director, argues that they will come anyway. "More people are moving here; more hikers are coming," he says. "That's a given." Unless the climbers are channeled up the mountains in an orderly fashion, he fears, the mountains will be overrun.

Among the volunteers, straining in the thin air at timberline to repair gashed trails, there's no time--or breath--to waste wondering whether the Fourteeners are worth their sweat to preserve. "I've enjoyed these mountains for 35 years, and I brought up two daughters climbing," says Susie Frazee, a retired elementary school teacher, as she attacked Bierstadt's slime with a hoe. "Now I just want to give something back."