What is the Tour de 14ers?
The goal of this challenge is to bike to all of the Colorado 14ers and then summit them under your own power. The tour usually involves creating some kind of loop, like leaving from your house and arriving back there again.
This challenge was made popular by Justin Simoni in 2014 when he set the Fastest Known Time and became the first documented person to undertake this in the new millenia. On his website he has some rules and suggestions for people who want to race this.
What is the Fastest Known Time for the Tour de 14ers?
The current men’s record is held by Joe Grant. He did the tour in 31 days 8 hours and 33 minutes back in 2016.
There is no women’s or non-binary record, yet.
What’re the stats for the tour?
Estimated Length (based on Simoni’s 2014 trip):
- Total cycling: ~1,600 miles, 150,000′ elevation
- Total trails: ~350 miles, 150,000′ elevation
- Once the clock starts, it does not stop.
How many 14ers are there?
There are 58 peaks, and you can see a list of them on 14ers.com.
This challenge only requires you to summit 57 of the 14ers. The 58th - Culebra, is privately owned and the ranch owner charges $150 to climb it, if you can even get a permit. Spencer has written more about Culebra and its turbulent history here. Due to this history, the maintainers of this site don’t recognize Culebra as a peak and thus exclude it from the challenge. If you set out to ride the tour and want to do it, feel free to summit it.
There are several other peaks on private land, but those landowners make a good faith attempt to allow the public access to the peaks.
About the website
This site was originally used for this project.
The site creator gave us the code, but we couldn’t get the 3D visualization working before we went out on tour, so we cut that out. And we expanded it in some areas to be more self-serve. If you ever want to do this and want us to expand the site to include you please send an email to gobikecamping@gmail.com.
The goal of this site is to track Spencer, Carlee, and Torin as they do the Tour de 14ers. After they’re done, Spencer aims to expand the site to have more info for folks that want to do the tour and to track finishers in the future.