Word: colorados
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...COLORADO Legislators kill a bill making it easier to win concealed-guns permits; officials mulling new restrictions on the permits...
...scene that will be re-enacted on mountaintops across the U.S. this summer, from the Sierras in California to the Adirondacks in New York. But it's a particular problem in Colorado's highest peaks--and especially the 54 mountains that top 14,000 ft. The Fourteeners, as they are affectionately known by locals (and a growing stack of outdoor magazines and travel guides), have become a magnet to upwardly mobile climbers sporting high-tech gear and checklists of the peaks they've bagged. More than 200,000 are expected to scale the Fourteeners this year, three times as many...
...problem is that most of Colorado's biggest mountains don't have well-defined trails to the top. So hikers scramble up the slopes any way they can, disrupting the natural drainage systems and trampling the fragile ecosystem--which includes tundra rarely seen in such abundance outside the Arctic. Where once there were rock jasmine and alpine forget-me-nots, there are now deep gullies, muddy lagoons and widespread erosion. "We are loving the Fourteeners to death," laments former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm, who has scaled 49 of them...
...mountains are fighting back--with a little help from their friends. The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, a coalition of private mountain-loving groups, along with the Forest Service and other public agencies, has targeted 35 of the 54 peaks for restoration. Every weekend a small army of volunteers heads for the hills, blazing trails, shoring up paths and redirecting misguided streamlets. On Humboldt Peak, more than 400 tons of rock were hauled in by rope and bucket to plug a 4-ft.-deep gully that ran for a quarter-mile. On Grays Peak, a well-groomed trail to the summit will...
RICHARD WOODBURY, our Denver-based correspondent, trudged through mud fields and scrambled up rocks to report on the crowding of Colorado's highest peaks. "It's easy to follow in the footsteps of others who have created paths and broaden their trails," says Woodbury, with allusion to the growth of the West in general, which he writes about often. "Unfortunately, widening contributes to erosion and drainage problems." Though an avid jogger based in the Mile High City since 1994, Woodbury admits he was winded by the time he reached the top of Mount Bierstadt, where he spent a very windblown...