July 8, 2025

July 8, 2025

After climbing out of Royal Gorge, Zebulon Pike saw a tall peak that might give him a good view of the Arkansas headwaters. Unfortunately he tried to scale it too late in the season and was stopped by deep snow drifts. Aimee and I are going to attempt to finish his mission. It will be a little easier as a rail line was built to the summit of Pike’s Peak in 1891.

We got tickets for the first train at 8 am. We are glad we did as parking is nearly impossible in the narrow valley of Manitou Springs. And of course it is expensive. Partly because the train line is now owned by the nearby luxury Broadmoor Hotel. Pikes Peak has been on my list for many years, since I saw a meme listing iconic American sites. Pikes Peak was the only one we hadn't visited.

The train is expensive but very well run. We left precisely at 8 am. Our guide and conductor had a great non-stop comedy routine on the hour-long ride up. Besides being entertaining, I learned this train is the highest and longest of the three cog rail lines in the US...and that we have already ridden the other two. Cog rails are needed when the incline is greater than 10%. This one reaches over 25% at several points along the nine-mile length.

The line runs up the deep pine forest before emerging above the treeline. Pike’s Peak is a giant piece of granite that can be seen for miles. The exposed granite has been broken down through millennia of freeze-thaw into fragments. The summit is a giant boulder field. At the top is a Visitor Center where we join people who have hiked up or driven the nineteen-mile toll road. The summit is at 14,115 feet, the highest we have ever been. Aimee and I both feel a little strange at this altitude. The oxygen content is just 60% of sea level. We both chug some water to ward off altitude sickness. We spend the limited amount of summit time, traversing the parking lot, reading the interpretative signs and enjoying the vistas.

The descent left precisely at 10 am and took almost as long. At the bottom we retrieved our car and drove an hour north to the Denver suburb of Parker, where we met Aimee’s only brother. After getting the house tour, we had lunch at a nearby French bakery. After catching up on family news, we made the long drive back to Colorado Springs. Conveniently our hotel has a lobby bar and pizza parlor.