Estimates from the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative present that the state’s highest peaks noticed fewer hiker days in 2025 than in some other years since monitoring started.
CFI mentioned that highway closures to Mount Blue Sky pushed down hiker numbers on that standard peak. (Picture: Brad McGinley Images / Second by way of Getty)
Up to date August 5, 2026 06:22PM
Colorado’s Fourteeners noticed fewer hikers in 2025 than in any yr since record-keeping started in 2015, in keeping with new estimates from the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative (CFI).
In a press launch on August 5, CFI wrote that Colorado’s highest peaks noticed a complete of 256,000 hiker-use days, 3 p.c lower than in 2024 and roughly 63 p.c decrease than their Covid-era peak in 2020. In response to the group, the closure of the Mount Blue Sky Scenic Byway, the very best paved highway in the USA, contributed considerably to the drop. The highway was closed for almost two years, beginning in September 2024 for main upgrades, and reopened in Might. The highway gives entry to the shortest path to the summit, a 0.6-mile round-trip hike from a car parking zone on the finish of the highway; whereas CFI doesn’t depend individuals who take that stroll in its 14er use report, it does tally hikers who take the roughly 5.5-mile path from the Summit Lake parking space. In response to the group, that closure minimize use on Colorado’s Fourteeners by roughly 18,000 hiker days.
At the same time as fewer hikers went to Blue Sky, different Colorado Fourteeners acquired noticeably greater visitors in 2025, with Bierstadt—the preferred peak—Sherman, the Decalibron Loop, and Quandary, Grays, and Torreys all seeing between 1,500 and 5,000 extra hiker days than they’d the earlier yr, in keeping with Lloyd Athearn, CFI’s govt director.
“Continued volatility stemming from peak closures and re-openings masks the underlying development that the Fourteeners proceed to be exceptionally standard climbing locations,” Athearn mentioned.
In response to CFI, the estimates recommend that hikers tackling Fourteeners contributed $69.4 million to the state’s economic system. (A 2009 examine by Colorado State College economists John Loomis and Catherine Keske discovered that climbers tackling Quandary Peak spent a median of $271.17 per day; CFI famous that these numbers don’t account for subsequent will increase in prices, so they might understate the mountains’ true financial impression.)
Greater than half of the estimated visits—59 p.c—have been concentrated within the 12 Fourteeners closest to Denver. Different closures and reopenings on the state’s Fourteeners doubtless affected hikers’ selections as nicely: In 2025, hikers regained entry to Mount Lindsey, situated within the southern portion of the state, after landowners instituted an digital waiver system, whereas La Plata Peak closed starting in the course of August after a wildfire swept via the world.
As well as, CFI famous that adjustments in methodology may have affected the group’s estimates.
Colorado’s 58 named Fourteeners proceed to be a magnet for hikers, each native and out-of-state, in addition to the location of a few of Colorado’s most complex entry disputes. In 2025, after the favored Decalibron Loop had been closed a number of occasions as a result of a personal landowner’s fears of legal responsibility, the non-profit Conservation Fund bought a 480-acre parcel of land alongside the 8-mile path to maintain it open to the general public.
