Grateful for this community

[bsteinmetz21]

Hi all - I'm mostly a "lurker" on this site but I wanted to take a minute to say thank you to everyone on this sight for providing trip reports, route recommendations, peak conditions and more. I moved to Colorado 6 years ago having never hiked but like so many, needed something to give me something positive during the COVID times and started hiking after a year here. I'm moving to Maryland in 2 weeks and I finished my 35th unique 14er today (Columbia - underrated Sawatch peak btw!) and my last before moving. I may or may not finish some day, but I'm so thankful for my time in the mountains and for this site/community. I can always count on meeting positive and encouraging people on the trail and that's priceless in the world today. Hiking these mountains is such an incredible way to see the state and appreciate how small we really are. I'm hanging up my boots for a while but the mountains will still be here. In the meantime, safe climbing to everyone and hopefully I'll see you on the trail again sometime!

[Veory]

This site has done a lot to get me into it. I don't use the route descriptions anymore, but I still love browsing the forum and looking at TRs.

Special thanks to everyone who posts conditions updates during winter and early spring when beta is the most valuable!

[climbingcue]

Bill runs an amazing website to keep us informed and updated on all things in the 14ers and 13ers in Colorado. I met just about all of my hiking partners on this website through gatherings.

Thank you Bill.

[rmcpherson]

I appreciate that this site increasingly feels like a vestige of the old, better internet. A place that's default-public, advertising-free, and not subject to the whims of billionaires or their corporations. It's a stark contrast to the 14ers Facebook group which, while not the fault of the people that post there, is a terrible interface with worse discoverability destined to be memory-holed eventually and all that knowledge lost to the open internet.

I was thinking in the context of the latest Capitol thread on the near-tragedy of the two hikers that went down the death gully that the more surprising thing is that this doesn't happen more often since 2017 and this site is in large part responsible for that. Attribution studies are notoriously difficult, but Bill and this site have saved at the very least dozens of lives, probably more.

[The_Ramp]

Worth re-sharing if you missed it the first go-round in May.

https://www.5280.com/the-founder-of-14e ... his-story/

The world's greatest website. Thank you Bill.