|| Back || Forward || Whitney Zone || Table of Contents || Trip Home Page ||

      Day 11: Fri Aug 1, 1997

      Went to the Waffle House for breakfast. It doesn't have a non-smoking section and when a few people around a table light up it ruins your meal. A lot of people smoke around here.

      Then we drove to the Barr Trail trailhead parking lot, found it full except for one space. We walked down the road a few hundred yards or so to the Cog Railway station and checked on getting a one way trip to the top of Pikes Peak. The normal price is $22 per person. A one way trip is $14 and is on a standby basis. They were pretty crowded so the chances of getting in were not great, especially in time to leave the top by about noon. So we decided to hike part way up the Barr Trail. We went back up to the parking lot and I changed from long pants into shorts since it would be hotter going up. Then we walked by a lady working on a laptop computer under a canopy on the side of a camper trailer. She said she was waiting for a group of 25 which had gone up about 6:30 am.

      The trail starts out with a warning sign at the bottom and a distance sign up the trail just a bit.
      Warning
      Distances

      The trail climbs at a fairly steady rate, at first through tall pines. One switchback turns at an old abandoned inclined railway, we climbed out onto it and got some good views.
      Barr Trail near bottom
      Old inclined railway

      We hiked up the trail for about 3 miles. It has a steady climb, we were doing about 2 miles an hour carrying our fanny packs. We had 2 bottles of water, Cliff Bars (high energy bars to give you energy when run down), and a few emergency supplies in case we got caught overnight for some reason. We passed some runners coming down the trail. They were practicing for a marathon coming up in a couple weeks. We watched the Cog Railway train go up the tracks through the valley the trail overlooks when it starts out. The weather was increasingly stormy, as usual, and finally a light rain started to fall. There were some impressive strokes of lightning, nothing very scary. We decided to head back down before getting soaked too badly.

      Old Cog Railway Engine
      As we drove away from the trail we passed an old Cog Railway engine at the Cog Railway station. It was designed to keep the boiler level on an incline.

      We shot the last of the roll of 36 pictures and took it to Walmart for overnight processing. They didn't have what we needed so we took it to a King Sooper grocery store and wandered around quite awhile trying to find a good place to eat. We ended up at The Jalapeno, a California/Mexican place, not bad.

      || Back || Forward || Whitney Zone || Table of Contents || Trip Home Page ||