The Ranges
Colorado's 58 fourteeners fall across six mountain ranges, each with its own rock, character and approach. Browse a range, then step into any peak.
The easternmost range of the Colorado Rockies, rising nearly 10,000 feet above the plains along the 40th parallel and visible from the Interstate 25 corridor. Its rock spans almost a billion years, from Precambrian granite at the core to Fountain Formation sandstone laid down when the range's ancestral predecessor eroded into desert dunes, before uplift beginning about 10 million years ago pushed the modern peaks skyward. Six 14ers stand here, from Longs Peak — the only one north of I-70 — south to Pikes Peak above Colorado Springs.
Two ranges sharing one ridge: the Tenmile, north of the Continental Divide near Breckenridge, and the Mosquito, a roughly 40-mile spine that split from the neighboring Sawatch Range when a rift valley opened about 35 million years ago. Silver strikes on Mount Lincoln and Mount Bross built the mining town of Alma in the 1870s, and those two peaks, plus Mount Democrat and Mount Cameron, now form the popular one-day DeCaLiBron loop. Quandary Peak and Mount Sherman round out the range's six 14ers, several of them among Colorado's shortest, gentlest fourteener hikes.
Colorado's tallest range and its most crowded with 14ers — 15 of them along an 80-mile spine that carries the Continental Divide — takes its name from a Ute word for "sand dunes," spelled the Spanish way as Saguache and pronounced "Sawatch." Eight of its summits rank among the 20 highest in the Rocky Mountains, led by Mount Elbert, the range's and the Rockies' high point. Five of its central peaks — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, and Columbia — were named for universities by 19th-century survey parties, earning the cluster its nickname: the Collegiate Peaks.
A rugged range in west-central Colorado, southwest of Aspen, where the Maroon Bells' red rock — the roughly 310-million-year-old Maroon Formation mudstone, shed off the ancestral Uncompahgre Uplift — fractures into rock so loose the U.S. Forest Service's trailhead sign calls the peaks "the Deadly Bells," a reputation sealed by eight deaths in five separate accidents in 1965 and echoed by Capitol Peak's Knife Edge, a 150-foot ridge crest with 2,000-foot drops on either side and one of the worst fatality rates of any Colorado climb. Seven named 14,000-foot summits sit in the range, led by Castle Peak; mining from Colorado's Silver Boom shaped the valleys below, and the range's Yule Marble quarry supplied stone for the Lincoln Memorial.
A roughly 75-mile fault-block wall between the San Luis Valley and the Arkansas River watershed, named for the red hue Spanish colonial governor Antonio Valverde y Cosío reportedly saw at sunrise — Sangre de Cristo, "blood of Christ." Lacking foothills, the range rises as much as 7,000 feet in only a few miles; most of the rock is Permian-Pennsylvanian sediment except the Precambrian core of the Blanca massif, and the range is still actively uplifting after rising over roughly the last 5 million years. Ten 14ers stand here, from Blanca Peak, the range's highest, to the Crestones' twin summits.
The most volcanic of Colorado's 14er ranges, built from eruptions of the San Juan volcanic field — including the La Garita Caldera, at roughly 35 miles across one of the largest calderas on Earth, whose eruption erased the older volcanoes beneath it. Silver and gold strikes built the mining towns of Silverton, Telluride, Ouray, Lake City, and Creede, which still anchor access to the range today. It holds 14 fourteeners, the most of any range after the Sawatch, led by Uncompahgre Peak; several, including the Chicago Basin group, are reached only by a multi-day approach.