Colorado Fourteeners Initiative - David Kennedy

Incentive Fund

Amount: $1,000

Provided By: David Kennedy

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

Summary

As CFI winds down the 2025 field season and starts to prepare for 2026'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 41 sustainably located, designed, and constructed summit routes on 36 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 2025, CFI accomplished the following:
•Completed the lower reroute and most of the upper reroute on Mount Shavano. All told, CFI opened 1.5 miles of newly constructed trail to the public.
•Began a two-year project on Mount Democrat, a fourteener that has been on CFI's to-do list for years but that wasn't accessible to us because of private land access issues. Those obstacles were removed in 2023, when the Conservation Fund, supported by CFI, purchased 300 acres on Mount Democrat and brought them into public ownership. In 2025, an all-women fixed-site squad began what is a much-needed upgrade to the trail.
•Sent a five-person fixed-site squad to Mount Bierstadt to restore that trail's iconic boardwalk and then to Mount Blue Sky, where the crew worked to re-delineate the trail, which had been destroyed by a mudslide in 2013.
•The Nomad Crew improved 62,143 linear feet of trail on 10 fourteeners across the state. CFI's Nomad Crew hosted 43 volunteer projects that engaged 545 individuals and recorded 1,023 days of volunteer stewardship.
 •CFI staff placed 23 infrared trail counters in the field to track 14er hiking use.