Colorado Fourteeners Initiative - Clint Emmerich

Incentive Fund

Amount: $1,000

Provided By: Clint Emmerich

Details: I will match (dollar for dollar) the first $1,000 dollars raised.

Summary

As CFI winds down the 2022 field season and starts to prepare for 2023's effort of preserving and protecting Colorado's highest peaks, I would like to request that you make a financial donation to help CFI achieve its ambitious goals. As a member of the Board of Directors of CFI, I am asking for your help to allow CFI to accomplish its lofty plans. Donations from individuals play a critical role in CFI's field successes. Gifts match restricted grants, while funding expenses that many foundations and corporations will not cover, such as feeding field crews and transporting crews and supplies to remote trailheads.

Since 1994, CFI has been working to protect and preserve the natural integrity of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks through active stewardship and public education. Today, CFI is the nation's leading high-altitude trail-building, terrain-restoration and visitor-education organization. CFI has built 39 sustainably located, designed, and constructed summit routes on 35 peaks, with its work garnering honors and awards from Congress, the US Forest Service, the Colorado Lottery, the National Forest Foundation and other organizations.

In 2022, CFI accomplished the following:
•Completed the second season of new trail construction on Mount Wilson's Navajo Basin trail. The eight-person CFI crew partner with an Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps crew to construct 1,364 linear feet of new trail, build 4,015 square feet of retaining walls, install 169 cribbed rock steps, maintain 1,443 linear feet of the upper ascent trail, and completed an additional 4,057 linear feet of new trail leading to the Rock of Ages saddle.
•Began the second season of a three-year trail reconstruction project on the North Ridge of Mount Elbert. A four-person CFI crew worked alongside an eight-person Rocky Mountain Youth Corps crew. The team focused their efforts on building new trail segments as high as 13,790', as well as installing complex timber structures below tree line.
•A two-person crew returned to Grays and Torreys Peaks for the fourth-and-final season of trail reconstruction. With help from a private helicopter service, CFI was able to move more than 62 large logs to the worksite above 12,800'. These materials were crucial for saving work completed in prior seasons and stopping the erosion of ancient alpine soils.
•CFI kicked off a new, multi-year trail construction project on Mount Shavano, the worst rated 14er trail in the state. The anticipated three phase, six-year project is expected to be CFI’s largest scale, most expensive, and most technically challenging project to date. The goal is to reconstruct two bypass sections of trail totaling 3 miles (one on the upper mountain, one on the lower mountain), perform 1.5 miles of heavy reconstruction in three sections of the existing route (near the Colorado Trail, between the two reroutes, and on the ridge traverse from the summit to Tabeguache Peak), and close/stabilize/restore 2.5 miles of the current route that will be bypassed.
•The Adopt-a-Peak crew performed 17 miles of routine trail maintenance and alpine restoration on 12 different fourteeners across the state. CFI's Adopt-a-Peak crew hosted 39 volunteer projects that engaged 620 individuals and recorded 1,210 days of volunteer stewardship.
 •CFI staff placed 23 infrared trail counters in the field to track 14er hiking use.