Published in Westword
Colorado’s alternative weekly newspaper

Like hiking 14ers? Show your support with a sticker

By Ted Alvarez in Backcountry, Rock Climbing

Dig climbing Colorado’s storied 14,000-foot peaks? You aren’t alone: 500,000 people attempt to bag one of our 58 high-country monarchs every year. But those mountains just don’t take care of themselves — each year, groups like the Colorado 14er Initiative and Colorado Mountain Club put in days of trail work to keep the peaks clean, safe, and beautiful.

If you’d like to help contribute to preserving our 14ers without, y’know, actually picking up a shovel or a Pulaski, you can always do what the politically outspoken have done for years: buy a sticker. The Colorado-based 14erstickers.com has created a unique screenprinted 2 x 2 sticker of each and every 14er, from Blanca to Windom.
The stickers will set you back three bucks, but 30 cents goes to 14er restoration (they should probably pony up more, but that’s a start). If even one-fifth of aspiring 14er climbers bought one, that’d amount to a cool $30K for our hometown mountains (about $517 a mountain).

The idea is that you buy a sticker for each 14er you’ve completed, but climbers who’ve successfully completed all 58 can save some dough and just get the 12 x 3- inch Fourteener Finisher bumper sticker. It’s only $6, and it be a great way to fool everyone you know into believing you’d already summitted them all. Way easier than actually climbing them, anyway.

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Published in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel
Grand Junction’s daily newspaper

Stickers support trail restoration

The estimated half-million hikers and climbers spending some time each year on one or more of Colorado’s 14ers have a considerable impact.

To help offset the cost of needed restoration work and to help you remember your accomplishment, the Web site 14erstickers.com has developed 58 different 14er peak stickers, with 30 cents of each sale going to trail restoration.

The money will be go to various non-profit groups involved with improving trail conditions on the state’s highest peaks.

The two-inch square stickers are black-and-white screenprints showing the different peaks and their elevations.

Stickers cost $2.95 each and are available at http://www.14erstickers.com.