GEORGETOWN, Colo. — Whether you're here for the weekend or you've lived here all your life, hiking a 14er is a tradition for many in Colorado. But new data from the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative shows the number of people hiking 14ers has hit its lowest level in years.
At Mount Bierstadt Sunday morning, the trailhead was packed and the parking lots full -- making it hard to believe that traffic on 14ers is down.
"We've been kind of racking our brains as to what might be behind this," said Lloyd Athearn, Executive Director of the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative.
CFI tracks how many folks try to reach the top of Colorado's highest peaks.
"We just finished analyzing our hiker data for 2023 and it was as if we hopped into a time machine and popped back to 2015, the first year that we conducted full scale estimates of people climbing the 14ers," Athearn said.
Last year, 260,000 people took on a 14er. That's the lowest count in eight years, and far below the 2020 peak of 415,000 hikers taking on 14ers.
"We expected it was going to go back maybe to a certain degree. Maybe to what we'd had in 2018, 2019 into the mid-300,000 level. And it's just continued to drop," Athearn said.
As for why? It's not clear, Athearn said. Tourism in the state is at a record high. Private property restrictions have impacted some hikers, Athearn said, but not many.
Part of it, Athearn said, may be avid hikers aging out.
"The baby boomers are now probably into knee and hip replacements, and if they’ve climbed them, they’re like, 'That was fond memories. I don’t need to do that again,'" Athearn said. "A lot of the millennials are buying houses and having kids and more professional job responsibilities. And then, I have a son who is Gen Z who, he and his friends are really into outdoor stuff, but I know from like in high school, a lot of people he was classmates with were into gaming and other more sedentary activities.”
"So it could just be that we have these ebbs and flows of generations. And some of the bigger ones that had been out on the 14ers a lot are now exiting and we have Gen X and Gen Z that might just be smaller generations and not as many people out on the mountains. Other than that, it's just hard to know," Athearn said.
But this drop in traffic, Athearn said, isn't necessarily a bad thing.
"There's still a lot more people out there enjoying this. People come from all over the world to climb these mountains," Athearn said. "I mean, it's not like they're vacant out there."
