Hiker count on Colorado 14ers falls to 10-year low. And that’s fine.

When Lloyd Athearn took the reins at the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative 17 years ago, the trail-building group liked to trumpet that half a million people were climbing the state’s highest peaks every year. 

The number, born out of the “loving our 14ers to death” trope, Athearn said, “was a totally inaccurate, wild-ass guess that didn’t pass the sniff test.”

So he started actually counting. First with handheld clickers. Then in 2014 his crew installed thermal people counters along trails leading to the top of five peaks. There are 20 of those infrared gizmos on trails now. Athearn has helped craft a modeling system that gives more precise — but far from exact — numbers of hikers on the state’s 58 highest peaks. 

FLOURISH CHART: https://app.flourish.studio/visualisation/29893786/edit

And the numbers never hit half a million. The latest estimate from the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative shows around 256,000 people climbed fourteeners in 2025. That’s the lowest tally since the group first began crunching numbers from trailside counters in 2015. 

“With each passing year, we get more confidence in our locations and our counts and we are seeing a solid number of people out on the fourteeners and it’s all happening over essentially four months,” Athearn said. “And it’s an awful lot of people; a critical mass of people from all over the world who are out there hiking and loving these peaks.”

For a couple years around the pandemic, it looked like the fourteeners were too busy. Athearn’s numbers show more than 415,000 hikers clambering up the highest Colorado peaks in 2020, a surge that triggered things like landowners closing peaks over liability fears, communities offering shuttles to trailheads, parking restrictions and lots of work around managing trail traffic.

The last few years have been more of a return to normal traffic patterns, with added obstacles, like the closure of the road up Mount Blue Sky and wildfires closing trails, pinching the flow of traffic up to the state’s highest points. 

Erratic may be the overarching trend for 14er traffic, with a constant rotation of impediments and green lights for hikers of the lofty mounts. 

“We need to be prepared for the erratic nature of these one off-things like fires and construction projects,” Athearn says. “It seems that one year is never really fully analogous to the next year.” 

Does the decline worry Athearn? 

“Hardly,” he says, laughing.

A quarter-of-a-million hikers a year is a good number, he says. It’s not so many hikers that trailheads are overwhelmed and still enough to feed rural communities that host hikers. Maybe it’s the sweet spot for sustainable trails. 

Athearn sees more traffic — up 40% in the Mosquito Range, up 15% in the Tenmile Range, and up 65% in the Sangre de Cristos — as a sign that hikers are exploring beyond the most popular peaks. There’s a bit more balance, with 59% of the state’s fourteener climbers scaling 12 fourteeners closest to metro Denver, a smaller percentage than recent years, a sign of easing traffic on those wildly popular hikes heading up Grays and Torreys and Mounts Bierstadt and Sherman. 

Total numbers are only a chapter in the story of Colorado fourteeners. Hikers spend more than $25 a day when they climb a fourteener, but that number is from a 15-year-old study so it’s likely higher. And don’t forget the individual impacts of laboring up a peak for a breathless view, says Ahearn, who spends many days a year tromping up trails and chatting with his fellow hikers. 

 “Sometimes we get caught up in the numbers and forget the stories behind every visit,” he says. “For most of us, it’s a magical moment and a great sense of accomplishment shared with family or friends. And we have more than 250,000 of those moments every year in Colorado.”