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Most programs required vans and trucks hauling kids and gear into the surrounding Sawatch Range.

While the slide danger caused by all the new snow likely peaked on Sunday, it said the danger was still high — just below the top rating of extreme — in the Front Range, Vail and Summit County, Aspen, Grand Mesa, Gunnison and Sawatch regions.

State and federal officials say water from melting snow is rushing into the Arkansas River in central Colorado, thanks to a surprisingly wet winter in the towering peaks of the Sawatch Range where the river begins.

Chaffee County, the three-town home of 12 of the fourteeners in the Sawatch Range, harvested $82.4 million in spending from overnight visitors in 2015, according to research commissioned by the Colorado Tourism Office.

For 22 years, Downing has seen a steadily increasing flow of hikers on Mount Elbert on the north end of the Sawatch Range, the 15-fourteener strip of the Continental Divide that hosted about 95,000 hiking days last year, the most of any region in the state.