After a record-setting year for Colorado’s highest peaks at the height of the pandemic, traffic on the state’s 14ers dropped in 2021, falling by more than 110,000 user days. The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, using remote-sensor counters on 23 trails around the state, counted about 303,000 hikers scaling the state’s 54 14,000-foot peaks in 2021, down […]
Mount Bierstadt
Posted inNews, Outdoors
Arapaho, Roosevelt National Forests to start requiring reservations after 200% spike in recreation
Every weekend last year, hundreds of cars spilled from trailheads, lining forest roads for miles. Wait times stretched for hours just to get inside Forest Service welcome centers at Brainard Lake and Mount Evans. Wildfires scorched more than a quarter of the 1.5 million acre Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests. And still, the easy-to-access forest’s […]
Posted inEnvironment, News, Outdoors
What’s killing Mount Evans’ mountain goats? A research team is collecting their poop to solve the mystery.
MOUNT EVANS — Lance Carpenter is standing on a lichen-covered boulder somewhere around 13,000 feet, his binoculars zeroed in on the target: the backside of a mountain goat kid. The goat is about 20 yards away, grazing alpine forbs alongside its nanny. Carpenter is keeping up a conversation, but his eyes are on the kid’s […]