Colorado Fourteeners Initiative has another plaque for its wall of fame courtesy of the Coalition for Recreational Trails, a national trails advocacy group, which presented CFI and the Forest Service with the 2012 Achievement Award in the Youth Conservation/Service Corps category on June 5 in Washington, D.C. The award was given for the four-year Mount Yale Trail Realignment Project that built a new, sustainably designed and constructed summit trail and restored the heavily eroded, user-created social trail.
CFI Executive Director Lloyd Athearn and Forest Service Fourteener Peak Manager Loretta McEllhiney were on hand in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill to receive the award from American Recreation Coalition President/CEO Derrick Crandall and Rails-to-Trails Conservancy Senior Vice President for Federal Relations Marianne Fowler. The Coalition for Recreational Trails annual awards are presented in eight categories and recognize outstanding use of federal Recreational Trails Program funds. Read more about the 2012 CRT awards. CFI was similarly honored by CRT in 2002 for its trail reconstruction work on Mounts Bierstadt and Harvard in the Environment/Wildlife Compatibility category.
While in Washington, Athearn also met briefly with Rep. Earl Blumenauer (OR-3), co-chair of the Congressional Trails Caucus. Blumenauer is among the most vocal trails advocates in Congress, recently having been acknowledged by the American Hiking Society with its inaugural Congressional Trailblazer award. It was a reunion for the two, since Blumenauer gave Athearn his first jobs out of college almost 26 years ago. Athearn worked on his campaign for the Portland (Oregon) City Council in 1986, then served as a constituency aide on his staff once in office in 1987.
The visit to D.C. also allowed Athearn to meet with Jim Bedwell, the Forest Service’s national director of recreation, heritage, and volunteer resources, Will Shafroth, counselor to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and Grant Colvin, legislative aide to Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet. Despite collecting a few blisters from all the walking in dress shoes, it was a productive trip for Athearn on behalf of CFI’s work on the Fourteeners.
