The Colorado Rockies were once a barrier to Western travel and later became a major destination, with Colorado containing 54 of the continental United States' 68 fourteeners and 15 of them standing in the Sawatch Range between here and Leadville. From 1860 on, miners swarmed over these high mountains in search of paydirt, and with the rise of recreational mountaineering the fourteeners themselves became the prize, with the Sawatch Range, including the three highest peaks in the Rockies, representing a premier hiking and climbing experience. As backpacking and hiking traffic steadily increased, erosion, soil compaction, and vegetation damage also grew, prompting warnings of environmental degradation, and with hundreds of thousands of hikers each year the fourteeners came to face the danger of overuse. During the great mining booms of the late nineteenth century, the Arkansas River was heavily damaged as miners ate most of the fish, deforested the banks, and polluted the water with tailings and raw sewage. The river took decades to recover, with fishermen still complaining of poor catches as late as 1930, and Depression-era conservation projects aided its revival. In 1990, the federal government created the 148-mile-long Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area to protect natural resources and manage recreation, but the river's popularity for brown trout and whitewater rafting again brought strain from overuse. Today the Arkansas River contains 102 of Colorado's 322 miles of Gold Medal trout waters, stretching from Leadville to Pueblo.