Why hikers are going thirsty on The Colorado Trail

Sneak Peek of the Week

Water woes worry hikers on Colorado Trail

On a summer day in late July, environmental scientist Heidi Steltzer ran out of water in a remote stretch of the Colorado Trail when a hoped-for water source turned up dry. The experience left her wondering if it was a symptom of something bigger: megadrought.

The Colorado Trail is one of the nation’s prime long-distance trails. It winds through five river systems, spans nearly 90,000 vertical feet and runs over 500 miles between Denver and Durango. Whether its visitors are hikers, bikers or horsepackers, the trail is not for the faint of heart. And after more than two decades of drought in Colorado, finding water along some sections of the trail comes with even more uncertainty.

For Steltzer and her hiking buddy, Karin Ahern, it meant facing a difficult decision: take a chance on the next possible water source, which could also be dry, or backtrack 7 miles to Spring Creek Pass.

“If, when we got 2 miles ahead, there was no water, we would have turned around,” Steltzer said. “At that point, it was straight up a mountain to the highest part of the whole Colorado Trail. There was not going to be any water where we were going.”

The two Colorado women were on a five-day journey starting near Creede and heading toward Molas Pass north of Durango. They filled their bottles at Spring Creek and planned to stop and refill at a drainage marked with a half cup in the trail’s guidebook signaling intermittent reliability.

When they arrived, there was no water to find.

“We were above 12,000 feet. That’s high. If the snow is going to stick around anywhere, it’s going to be two places: one, the subalpine forests and it’s going to be at higher elevations,” said Steltzer, who specializes in alpine environments.

The mountain snowpack in Colorado is a vital water source for communities across Colorado and in the seven-state Colorado River Basin. But that snowpack is under increasing strain.

The last two decades have been the driest on record in the Southwest. Thirsty soils can suck up water before it can reach streams. Rising temperatures, dry snow years and dust that blows into Colorado from the desert are changing how quickly snowpack melts.

For hikers like Steltzer, that means the Colorado Trail experience is changing too — in some ways they didn’t expect. Read more from water reporter Shannon Mullane in The Colorado Sun next week.

The Guide

Citizen city planners are working to make streets safe again in Denver, Durango and Grand Junction

Chances are Katie Marie Siegrist wasn’t thinking about her outfit as she stepped onto the 1200 block of Durango’s Animas View Drive at 7:45 p.m. in dark clothing.

And maybe she thought there would be enough natural light for her to see the road and for motorists to see her, which is why she didn’t carry a flashlight.

But these things made her invisible to 66-year-old Olivia Burkhart, who told police she didn’t see Siegrist until the second before her black Jeep Wrangler hit the 27-year-old on Sept. 14, 2023, during a rain squall.

Siegrist died in the hospital. Her dog survived, as did Burkhart. Burkhart wasn’t charged. But the accident has become a vehicle of its own for residents of Durango, some of whom blame the city for Siegrist’s death, saying Animas View Drive has become increasingly dangerous amid sprawl and population growth.

Now, that may change, thanks to some concerned citizens and a program claiming to bust common misconceptions about the cause of tragic, routine crashes and give cities the tools they need to prevent future harm.

A few months ago, the site of Siegrist’s death became the subject of a Crash Analysis Studio developed by a national nonprofit called Strong Towns, which advocates for replacing America’s post-World War II development pattern with one that is financially strong, safe and resilient.

Strong Towns’ founder Charles Marohn believes a “bottom-up revolution” of concerned citizens can make cities of all sizes safe, livable and inviting by correcting America’s “grand experiment” of suburbanization, which he says has bankrupted cities and endangered neighborhoods.

Dangerously designed streets and roads are part of this problem along with the traffic engineering profession itself. Sure, engineers literally make cities work but safe streets depend on policy change, Marohn says. That requires local leaders willing to create “street design teams” of engineers, but also elected officials, health professionals and, most importantly, neighbors who travel and live on these streets.

A resident has to nominate a street for the Crash Analysis Studio and in Durango that person was Andrew Allport, policy director at Bike Durango.

“I’m also a parent. I try to work on pedestrian safety, particularly for kids in our town here. And ironically, I am walking up to the intersection where my son was hit by a car a few years ago,” he said in a phone interview. “So it’s quite personal for me, but (making streets safer) is also something we all need to be doing collectively.”

Read how Durango’s recent crash analysis studio went and the changes it has, and hasn’t, elicited, in Tracy’s story at The Colorado Sun on Wednesday. The city is the third in the state to participate, after Denver and Grand Junction. It’s high time, even amid work to reduce pedestrian deaths on Colorado streets that reached an all-time high in 2023, a year after the largest number of road deaths in more than four decades was recorded.

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

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Breaking Trail

Third year in a row for declining traffic on Colorado 14ers

The number of hikers on Colorado’s highest peaks fell to a nine-year low last year as a popular trail in the Mosquito Range closed and the state’s population growth slowed.

“We might have more people on Colorado’s 14ers if we continued to see this wave of new Coloradans in the state,” said Lloyd Athearn, the head of the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, which uses discreetly hidden thermal counters on heavily trafficked peaks to estimate annual visitation to the state’s 58 14,000-foot mountains.

The initiative’s counters estimate 260,000 people climbed a Colorado fourteener in 2023, down from the all-time high of 415,000 during the height of the pandemic in 2020. The 260,000 hiker days in 2023 marks the same level as 2015 and the third year in a row of declining visitation.

The Colorado Fourteener Initiative hiker tally is really a best guess. The infrared counters are not 100% accurate. But they offer the closest estimate to numbers on the state’s highest mountains.

Mount Bierstadt and Quandary Peak remain the state’s most popular 14ers, with somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 annual ascents. Mount Elbert above Leadville — the state’s highest peak — and Grays and Torreys peaks were the second busiest, with somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 hiker visits.

The Decalibron Loop Trail, which accesses mounts Democrat, Cameron and Lincoln and the base of the privately owned Mount Bross, saw a steep decline of nearly 10,000 hiker days in 2023. The drop came after a longtime landowner closed portions of the trail as he struggled to secure liability insurance to protect him from potential lawsuits filed by injured hikers. The landowner sold about 300 acres atop Mountain Democrat to The Conservation Fund last fall and the conservation group then sold the acreage to the Forest Service. Access has been restored and visitation is rebounding for the peaks above the town of Alma.

Outdoor recreation boomed in 2020 as the pandemic sent record numbers of people outside. That surge ebbed as urban options opened and travel rebounds. That’s part of the reason hiking on the state’s 14ers is declining. Another is shifting demographics.

The baby boomers who drove outdoor recreation for the previous three decades are aging out of mountain climbing. The millennials who covered the baby boomer declines for the past decade are starting to buy houses and have kids and are maybe not getting onto 14ers as often. And all the new arrivals to Colorado who made the state one of the fastest growing in the country for several years in a row are not flooding the state like they did a decade ago.

“It could be that we are starting to see some of the ebbs and flows of demographics among Colorado residents and visitors to the state,” Athearn said.

Using an economic study from 2009 that showed 14er climbers spending about $271.17 a day on gas, food, lodging and retail purchases, the Colorado Fourteener Initiative estimates 14ers stirred an economic impact around $70.5 million in 2023.

Jason Blevins

Outdoors/Business Reporter

In Their Words

How Reed Small climbed Pikes Peak with spina bifida

Whenever Sara Thinger would hike a 14er with her husband, Charles, one thought would stay with her, even after the Colorado Springs couple finished all 58 together: How could we get Reed up here?

Reed Small is her son from a previous marriage and by far the most adventurous out of her three kids. One prefers to hide in her tent, complain about the mosquitoes and read a book. Reed was an Eagle Scout. He loves camping and traveling and skiing and snowmobiling and kayaking. He went whale watching in Alaska. He’s done zip lining. He’s willing, Sara said, to try anything.

But hiking with Reed, who has spina bifida, is nearly impossible. He and his parents stubbornly make things happen, but Reed rarely gets to venture beyond a trailhead. Wheelchairs don’t come with 4WD, and pushing his rig over the inevitable rocks, roots and the ups and downs would be like taking a Toyota Camry four-wheeling in Ouray.

And yet, that’s essentially what The Lockwood Foundation took on the weekend of Aug. 24, when the nonprofit hauled Reed to the summit of Pikes Peak. No, the organization didn’t drive him up, or even cheat a little by pushing him up the paved road. Dozens of volunteers took him via the Barr Trail from the parking lot to the top.

Reed rode in a chair pulled ahead by other people. The trip took more than 50 volunteers and oodles of planning. But this is the mission of The Lockwood Foundation, which is also the subject of freelance writer Dan England’s story at The Colorado Sun.

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