A nonprofit stewarding Colorado’s biggest mountains recently marked its “largest and most expensive” project ever complete. 

That’s how Colorado Fourteeners Initiative referred to the job that is wrapping up a fifth summer on Mount Shavano. After about $2 million, 2 ½ miles of new trail and another 2 miles closed for restoration, CFI recently hosted a ribbon-cutting atop the Chaffee County mountain near 14,230 feet. 

During the celebratory day, CFI Executive Director Lloyd Athearn asked crew members how many times they had summited Shavano since 2022, when construction started. 

“There was one guy who said he touched the summit 200 times,” Athearn said. “That’s an awful lot of vertical gain and time at altitude.” 

And that goes to show why Athearn has described the project as the most ambitious in CFI’s 32-year history. 

It was a highly logistical project that had one crew based on a lower part of the mountain while another crew hiked 3,000 feet to their worksite, where they moved heavy rock with bars or a pulley system to define the new route to the top. Other material was hauled by pack animals or delivered by helicopter. The work was “incredibly complex,” Athearn said — taking place in a talus field above “a 1,000-foot eroded scar” that formed the previous path. 

The scarred slope has been closed off and, in places, covered with cedar planking, matting or transplanted “plugs of vegetation,” Athearn explained. That all represents different strategies aimed at revegetation to be monitored long term by a biologist. 

“It’ll hopefully help in determining the best restoration techniques in the alpine,” Athearn said. 

Meanwhile, lower on Shavano, an initial ascent previously followed “this straight-up fall line,” Athearn said. “Just this gut-busting, ankle-twisting ascent.” Crews built gentler, switchbacking trail away from there. 

Along with that, they rerouted the trail away from riparian areas prone to flooding and erosion. The trail there and elsewhere has been complete with erosion-mitigating steps and walls made of timber and rock.

The end result, compared with the old trail? 

“It’s the difference between looking at a Picasso vs. chimpanzee art,” Athearn said. 

And while construction spanned five years, he pointed to the project being many more years in the making. 

Athearn pointed to 2012, “when I first heard about Shavano being a super high priority” for CFI. Indeed, the route was graded the worst in a “report card” assessing trail conditions across the state’s fourteeners. 

Upon further review, it was no wonder why the U.S. Forest Service had not addressed the situation: The agency did not own the whole mountain. On surveying maps to be dug up, the upper reaches appeared to be a patchwork of private mining claims. 

This set CFI on its mission to track down owners and raise money for the land, as well as for the lawyers who did the obscure legal work and the environmental assessments needed ahead of new trail design. This all played out about 10 years ago when the first formerly private parcels were acquired — all contributing to why CFI has called Shavano its “biggest” project to date. 

Going forward, Athearn anticipates more projects like it. 

“When people talk about various engineering challenges, they tend to refer to the last mile which is always the hardest,” he said. “And as we get near completing all of the routes on fourteeners, the ones that remain are all these complex ones that oftentimes have private land issues involved, which usually means old mining properties, and those have all sorts of different challenges.” 

He said his organization has been eyeing property on Mount Sherman. CFI has been among organizations involved with recent years of acquisitions along the Decalibron loop, which travels multiple fourteeners still spotted with private parcels. 

Parts of that loop had previously been closed by landowners worried about liability. Similarly, ownership had closed Mount Lindsey before launching an electronic waiver system last year. 

“That seems to be working so far,” Athearn said. “We’re cautiously optimistic about that.”