Fourteeners

Colorado is home to fifty-eight of the nation's ninety-six mountain peaks standing at or above 14,000 feet in elevation. Known colloquially as “Fourteeners,” these peaks dominate Colorado’s skyline and shape the way people live and identify with nature in the Rocky Mountain West. Throughout Colorado’s history, these majestic mountains have captured the human imagination and have been used for everything from hunting grounds to climate research outposts.

Colorado’s Fourteeners are dispersed throughout the state’s Rocky Mountain backbone, rising in the San Juan, Sawatch, Elk, Mosquito, Tenmile, San Miguel, Sangre de Cristo, and Front mountain ranges. According to the Colorado Geological Survey, the tallest is Mount Elbert at 14,440 feet; several of the smallest Fourteeners stand just barely above 14,000.

There is some disagreement among mountaineers over how much taller a peak needs to stand above its neighbors to qualify as a Fourteener, but most agree that, in addition to being over 14,000 feet in elevation, a Fourteener must stand between 250 and 500 feet higher than the mountain’s next-highest feature (a measurement called "prominence").

Responsibility for managing most of Colorado’s Fourteeners falls to the US Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management. Two exceptions are Longs Peak, which lies within the boundaries of Rocky Mountain National Park, and Culebra Peak, which is privately owned. Mountains like Longs Peak and those in the Elk and Gore Ranges are the most popular because they are closer to Denver, but Coloradans have been known to drive many hours to experience the thrill of climbing new peaks. Some of Colorado’s Fourteeners require specialized mountaineering gear, but most can be summitted without the assistance of rock-climbing equipment. For example, Pikes Peak outside Colorado Springs can be summitted in a car or by cog railway. Nearly all of the Fourteeners have some history of mining activity and a few, like Pikes Peak, have hosted ski areas. Today, Fourteeners figure as prominently in the hearts and minds of Coloradans as they do in the state’s rugged skyline.

Native Traditions and First Ascents

As the region’s most prominent landforms, Fourteeners held religious and geographic significance for many of Colorado’s Native Americans. Serving as destinations for spiritual revelation and as markers of territorial boundaries, Fourteeners played (and continue to play) important roles in native life long before any whites laid eyes on these impressive peaks.

Archival and archaeological evidence suggests that Ute and Arapaho peoples were some of the state’s first mountaineers. Though most of these native hikers left little behind that might serve as proof of their ascents, stories like that of an Arapaho elder named Old Man Gun Griswold and his eagle trap can give us an idea of why Native Americans would have wanted to climb Fourteeners. In 1914, Old Man Griswold’s son, also named Gun Griswold, made the trip from the Wind River Reservation to Rocky Mountain National Park to visit his old hunting grounds. On this trip, the younger Griswold ran into explorer Oliver Toll and told the story of a trap his father built on Longs Peak’s 14,259-foot summit. According to Toll, Old Man Gun would climb to the top of Longs Peak and wait patiently in a stone shelter for a passing eagle to come investigate a coyote carcass he would leave out as bait. When an eagle lit near the carcass, Old Man Gun would leap from his shelter and grab the eagle by the feet. Though subsequent explorers did not see any physical evidence of Griswold’s blind, anyone who has been to the four-acre summit will tell you that a small stone shelter there would be easy to mistake as simply another pile of boulders.

Euro-American Explorers

Spanish, French, and American explorers made up the next group of Colorado’s early mountaineers. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, Spaniards in search of mineral wealth and new trade routes ventured deep into the heart of Colorado’s Fourteener country. Hostile landscapes and Native American resistance kept the Spanish from leaving much of a physical record of their journey, but their presence is remembered in the names of Blanca, El Diente, San Luis, and La Plata Peaks and in the striking designation given to Southern Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo (“Blood of Christ”) Range.

French and American explorers, trappers, and traders also frequented Colorado’s high country throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, searching for new opportunities for trade and knowledge of the region’s economic potential. French fur traders found Colorado’s prominent mountains the perfect navigational landmarks as they traversed the state seeking animal pelts.

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, the US government commissioned surveys and expeditions that would catalog the locations and elevations of Colorado’s highest peaks. Several Fourteeners bear the names of the men who led these expeditions. Later in the nineteenth century, the mountains named for Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long featured prominently in the imaginations of overland migrants coming across the plains. Signs painted on the sides of wagons in the nineteenth century proudly declaring “Pikes Peak or Bust” remind us that the Front Range Fourteeners were potent symbols of Colorado’s mineral wealth and served as distant landmarks for overland migrants, just as they had done for the French trappers and native peoples who preceded them. Today, Pike and Long remain in our memory as some of the first whites to lay eyes on the formidable mountains that now bear their names, though many other trappers and traders knew of the mountains before either explorer crossed the Mississippi River.

Tourism and Adventure

Accessing the state’s most impressive mountains in the early days of Colorado mountaineering involved hiring guides, loading mules, and trekking on foot or on horseback through extremely rugged terrain. Before 1900, wealthy tourists and Colorado-based “thrill seekers” (as early climbers were known) established trails and climbing routes to the summits of most Fourteeners and solidified their knowledge of the tallest peaks in the Colorado Rockies.

One such thrill seeker was Isabella Bird, the first Anglo-American woman to climb a Colorado Fourteener. Born in Yorkshire, England, Isabella Bird came to Colorado in 1871 searching for a climate that would be good for her health. Bird was awed by the sight of the mountains and published an inspirational account of her ascent of Longs Peak. As mountaineering became more popular, climbers repurposed the roads miners and loggers carved into mountainsides to carry carloads of climbers into the heart of the high country. The founding of the Colorado Mountain Club in 1912 helped turn mountain climbing into one of the state’s signature pastimes by sponsoring annual summit outings.

Modern Mountain Climbing and the Outdoor Experience

Though demand for soldiers and material kept mountaineers off the peaks during World War II, the US Army’s Tenth Mountain Division training facility at Camp Hale in the Eagle River Valley helped set the stage for the resurgence of mountain climbing after the war. Trained for mountain warfare in the high peaks of Europe, 10^th Mountain Division soldiers were expert skiers and mountaineers. As they returned home, a few members of the 10^th Mountain Division started opening ski areas like Vail Resort because they loved being in the mountains and wanted to share their love with others. By the early 1960s, Colorado’s ski resorts were introducing tourists and Coloradans alike to the joys of high-altitude recreation. In the 1960s and 1970s, other factors, including increased leisure time, a rise in automobile ownership, and improvements in outdoor equipment, also helped put 14,000-foot summits within reach for more people. Today, observations by US Forest Service personnel indicate that more than 500,000 ascents are made every year.

The popularity and geographic prominence of Fourteeners in Colorado has led to the growth of distinct communities that identify strongly with a particular peak. Towns like Minturn, Buena Vista, Leadville, and Ouray have organized economically and socially around nearby mountains. This has transformed several of Colorado’s Fourteeners into potent symbols of community and also transformed these small mountain towns into popular jumping-off points for visitors wishing to experience the surrounding nature.

Development of a community identity surrounding Fourteeners is not limited by physical space. In the last several decades, the desire to climb all fifty-eight of Colorado’s Fourteeners has become a uniting force for “peak baggers.” These intrepid hikers might drive from all four corners of the state – or even from outside Colorado – to summit distant and rugged mountains. The most committed peak baggers may summit several or even all of the mountains in a year, often during winter months when the opportunity to ski down the mountain makes the task of descending significantly less tiresome.

Mountains as Environmental Markers

Colorado’s high peaks have also become increasingly important sites for scientists studying the effects of climate change. Because high-elevation ecosystems like those found on the slopes of Fourteeners are very sensitive, small variations in climatic conditions can produce big changes in the lives of plants and animals. In Colorado’s high country, relatively warm winters in recent years have contributed to a dramatic increase in the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) population. In colder years, sustained freezing weather kills mountain pine beetle larvae in the winter and reduces the number of adult pine beetles that emerge from their burrows in the spring. But a two-decade-long warm spell has allowed the mountain pine beetle to produce more offspring and attack trees at higher elevations than ever before. Visitors to Fourteeners in the Front, Gore, Elk, and Sawatch Ranges may notice that entire hillsides have been turned brown because mountain pine beetles have killed so many of their host trees. While fire suppression policies and other human-related environmental disturbances have promoted the pine beetles’ spread, the brown forests now surrounding many famous Fourteeners are evidence of these mountains’ role as sentinels of environmental change.

Colorado’s Fourteeners have represented many different things to various groups of people. Whether seen as a spiritual retreat, an iconic landmark, a living laboratory, or simply an opportunity for exploration and adventure, Fourteeners will continue to shape the way people learn and play in Colorado.

Colorado Fourteeners

Drawn from “Official List of Colorado Fourteeners,” Colorado Geological Survey.