Nothing too interesting happened while I was in between Wilderness Experiences. Thus I will be brief to keep your courage and interest in this narrative from falling into atrophy.
I have a few friends (Monica and Ben) in Manitou and I was lucky enough to stay with them for a few days before heading off to Denver. There was plenty of showering and food and good times doing mostly nothing. My stay in Manitou was comprised of trying to figure out how to actually get to Denver from Colorado Springs which, it would turn out, was a little tougher than I thought it’d be. Eventually I settled on Greyhound because that was really the only option, dreaded as it was. Other than that I did a lot of reading of a book (Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones) I found at the library and walked around as much as I could before it became too dull.
It was great seeing my friends but there’s really nothing for someone like me to do in a place like Manitou as it is like most cities and, as far as I’m concerned, pretty boring. A lot of yuppies and stuff like that, but with the occasional transient hippie and occassionally a something a little out in left field, such as the belly dancing get-together that happens on Fridays. That was pretty neat. In the end, however, it’s just not really my kind of thing. I didn’t even take any pictures while I was there. One thing that was on the agenda was to climb Pike’s Peak.
We hit the sack early on Friday night and got up early the next morning, around 3.30 or something like that. Packs were put together and Monica made us all breakfast which was oatmeal but instead of oats it was made out of rye. She also made us all peanut butter sandwiches, but those were for later, not breakfast. We walked to the trailhead from the house and got there just as dawn was arriving. For some reason I was under the impression that the trail to the summit was around 8 miles, but the sign said it was a little over 12. That’s a long way to keep going up. The goal was to be at the top by around 2 or so, as Ben’s mom was going to meet us all and bring us back, and that now seemed like a very optimistic goal. We started walking.
There’s a whole group of people along the Front Range who like to do crazy stuff like run up mountains for exercise. I saw many of them this morning as they sped past me on the way up and then again on their way down. At around 9 o’clock I figured out what they were running for as we made it to Barr Camp which is a great little campground at about 9,000 feett up. They have coffee, tea, and snacks for passersby and a bunk house for overnighters. I wish I’d known about this place as it seems easier and more sensible to hike up to the campsite the day before, get rested, and then go the rest of the way the next day. There were quite a few people teeming around either taking a break to keep pressing on or those joggers taking a rest before they ran back down. The folks who run the place are very good people. I talked with one of them for a bit and she said that there’s only maybe one or two days a year when they don’t have anyone come through. The Gray Jays are abundant here. These are weird birds who like people and are looking for a food handout from anyone. The proprieter of the site told us about a potential wrong turn that a lot of people were making up at tree line and said that if you missed it it was just a lot harder because you ended up missing a switchback. I had a smoke or two and then got going.
I got to tree line after a while and made the wrong turn that I was so warned about and adamant that I wouldn’t take. She was very correct that it’s a lot harder than the regular way. You more or less end up going straight up over a bunch of shale in a Two Steps Forward One Step Back approach to progress. I managed to find the trail again after a while and proceeded like a regular person would do it.
The view was pretty lame as it was really a view of Colorado Springs through a nice layer of smog. I’m not sure I ever got above smog level. A few hundred feet from the top a horde of morons on mountain bikes started coming down the trail. They careened towards the hikers and it was very very irritating. These pitiful bikes, rode by the pitiful themselves, are designed to be rode only downhill. I’d give some credit to those who rode up the mountain, but this was very very annoying. To my disappointment, not one of them fell head over wheels down to tree-line. And yes, I really wanted to see this happen to one of them.
The top of Pike’s is a very good example of how it is possible to ruin a mountain. A donut shop for all of the lazy people to have a snack in celebration of their automobile’s capability to drive to such an altitude. My friends had, I assumed, taken off as it took me a lot longer to do this due to my wrong turn down at tree line. I managed to hitch a ride (I know I know… I took advantage of the car thing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t stupid) from some folks down to the bottom and got ahold of Ben and he came and got me.
While Ben and Monica slept soundly, I went and got a burger and a beer to celebrate my bagging of this first peak of the summer. It was a very difficult climb, I assure you. It wasn’t really that fun, but there certainly was, for me, a sense of personal pride and accomplishment for sticking to it and going all the way. I had a whole bunch of 14ers marked for later in the summer while hiking, and I was wondering if I’d even do any of them. It was hard to tell. I wonder if I would have liked it more if I’d actually come back down of my own accord as this would have completed the actual completion of things, but I didn’t even consider this as a possible source of my discontent until well after the entire trip was finished. I do wonder.
The next morning Ben and Monica drove me to the Greyhound station in Colorado Springs and we made our farewells. I was lucky enough to get the last available seat on the bus and went to the diner to have some breakfast. Loitering outside of the station after some biscuits and gravy backed with some coffee, I ended up talking with a guy who was on the road going to different MMA events. He wasn’t really a martial arts person at all, he said, but just sort of scrapped. Even so he said he’d never lost a fight. He was meeting some guy who was a trainer as he was going to Denver for a fight.
Of course, the bus was late, as expected, by about an hour. Many many people were waiting for this bus that finally arrived and somehow most of them were not aware that they weren’t going to get on as it was overbooked per Greyhound’s business strategy. I ended up sitting behind a couple of guys from Texas who were in a great mood for being on a bus for what was probably days with a day to go. I could tell that they’d gone through lots of dip from the volume of spit in their Coke Bottle Spittoons. After getting through a car accident delay on the highway we finally made it into Denver.
The delays had added up to an amount of time that made it sort of unreasonable to begin the trail that day. However, this was nothing to lament as I got to hang out with Sara and Nick, a couple of gooduns I’d met on the AT last year. I ate their roast beef, went to the Lake with them, and then discovered the wondrous world of Cici’s, an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet which costs $4.99. If you want to ask me if it was good pizza, I’d have to ask you to just think about that for a second. For what it’s worth, I loved it and look forward to going back to one. I slept on their couch and watched their TV before waking up nice and early to get to Chatfield State Park, enter Waterton Canyon and hit the trail.
Nick had to leave very early that morning to be at a job site somewhere in Kansas, so Sara was my ride. I stopped at the gas station for a coffee and another pouch of tobacco (I really didn’t want to run out before getting to Breckenridge which was seven days away) and together we managed to find the park. I don’t know how you’d get to this place without someone giving you a ride. I imagine a taxi would cost a fortune and I don’t recall seeing any buses out there either.
It was about 8 in the morning or so. I made a couple of phone calls to a few different people to let them know that I was actually about to finally start this thing, and then, after a little bit of searching, found the actual trail and got to it.
Thanks, friends, for all your help and kindness.
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