Category: Outdoors

Inclined to Climb the Wrong Mountain

The Friday before last (before I went on vacation) I left work early intending to hike to the top of Mount Manitou. It had been raining and before I left work looked like there were dark clouds still moving in so I took my rain jacket on the hike. Naturally, the sun was out by the time I got 3/4ths of the way to the top, but at least it wasn’t crowded at all.

For the first time I actually packed a snack to eat at the top. That made me friends:
Ground Squirrel

The ground squirrels (not a chipmunk – chipmunks stripes extend across their head) were actually fighting over who got to come and beg for food. I didn’t share but even with me holding it close and swatting at any critter that came close enough to make a grab for my cliff bar I got a number of close-up pictures.

Once I’d rested and snacked I made another trip to the top of Eagle’s Nest:
Eagle's Nest
Garden of the Gods is left of center along the line of shadow from clouds, and the clearing at the top of the incline is to the far right of the picture.

After I’d found a way back down (cautiously, there were indications that a bear had been there recently) I headed up Barr trail and took the turnoff to the Old Fremont Experimental Forest. The experimental forest is a site where they experimented on what trees would grow best in the Rocky Mountains and how best to get trees started and nurture them with reforestation in mind. Here’s a picture of the site as it stands today:
Fremont Station Remains

Past the forest station it should have been a straight shot uphill to the top of Mount Manitou, mostly along what I’m guessing are forest service roads. Unfortunately I had no map or data signal for my phone and I picked the wrong slope to climb when the road turned away. I didn’t see any other trails (or people, it’s apparently not a well-traveled area) so I just hiked uphill until I got to the local maximum:

The point labeled “Local Max” in the “Misc” layer is where I ended up. It’s either an unnamed bump on the ridge or it’s part of Rocky Mountain. Unfortunately it’s covered in trees and one of the few things visible was Mount Manitou in the distance:
Mount Manitou

I’ll have to try again sometime soon – I was out of time that evening and didn’t have time to explore more.

Inclined to Take Panoramas

Today was a sad day: the chocolate bar I had in my car for when I finished the incline melted. At least I still had a (warm) fruit cup. I need to stock up on energy bars and sports drinks, either to take with me or for when I get back off the mountain. There’s actually a little shop at the base of the incline, but both times I’ve been recently it was closed by the time I got down (so it closes before 5:45 pm).

For context for the post title, my dad asked me what to do with the Google Cardboard he ordered for us to play with on vacation this year. I heard about it when he sent me an email telling me to figure out what to do with it. It’s a virtual-reality glasses thing, so the first thing that came to mind was panoramic pictures so you can turn your head while wearing the goggles to look around the picture. I live in near a wonderfully-picturesque mountain range, I just don’t typically think to take that kind of picture (nor do I go hiking all that often…).

I’d already been planning to hike the incline again for exercise, so I just had to make sure to take some good panoramas. The problem is that it takes time to fill out a photo-sphere (which angles up and down, not just around) and the incline is typically fairly busy so I didn’t want to be standing in the middle of the trail taking a bunch of pictures, especially when to the sides are just dense trees. Fortunately I was able to find an excellent view at the top.

Here’s a picture from the top of the incline:
Incline Top
The weather was nicer this weekend (at least when I took this picture, I got rained on later), but the view is framed by trees so I didn’t think it made a good candidate for a panorama.

I hadn’t looked around at the top of the incline before. Here’s a nice view of Pike’s Peak with a trail leading in that general direction, which made me think there might be a good overlook farther up the mountain.
Pike's Peak

A short way up the trail I found this, which certainly looked promising:
Eagles Nest

It was pointing towards this, even better (I have no idea if this actually is Eagle’s Nest or if that’s a higher outcropping – there were a number marching up the ridge and I just stopped at the first):
Eagles Nest

Unfortunately it’s late and I haven’t found an easy way to post a photosphere such that you can actually look around in it, so here’s the view from sitting on the side of the big rock in the previous picture (not standing because it was cold and windy and there were large drop-offs on either side):
View from the top

Testing something new, here’s a map with the incline and other point of interest for this trip marked:

The title image is the view of the Manitou Incline from Memorial Park in Manitou Springs.

Manitou Incline

My mom came up to visit for Memorial Day weekend, which meant that I drove all the way up to the Denver airport and back today in the middle of the day. It was a wonderful sunny day and I-25 is east of the front range, so in effect I spent 30+ minutes each way watching the (occasionally snow-capped) mountains go by. Naturally, that led to the thought that “I should go hiking”, so while I ate a late lunch I looked up the Manitou Incline and discovered that there’s now free parking in town with a shuttle to get you up to the trailhead.

The header picture for this post is what the incline looks like from the parking lot under the trailhead. It’s the vertical line straight up the mountain a little to the right of center. As explained in the wikipedia article linked above, the incline is an old cog railway track that’s stripped down to the railroad ties and lightly maintained to make it a very steep (2000 vertical feet in about a mile) hiking trail used primarily by locals as a way to stay in shape.

Start time: 4:04 at elevation 6669
Incline Trailhead
That’s a screenshot of the GPS app I have on my phone to show the timestamp (top right corner) and elevation (box on the lower right side). I was using the app to track my elevation gain as I went because there’s at least one false summit so just looking at how much there appears to be left isn’t a good indication of progress.

Part way up I spotted this critter:
Chipmunk
Someone had tossed a mostly emptied orange peel off the side of the trail and that chipmunk was nibbling the remaining fruit out of the peeling. It wasn’t too sure about me standing there watching it, so right before I got this picture it picked it up to haul farther away from the trail. The peeling was apparently light enough to carry but not light enough to carry easily, and when it jumped off a ledge to a lower bush it landed on/in the peeling and took several seconds to extract itself as the peeling started rolling downhill.

Top: 5:16 at elevation 8555
Incline Top

72 minutes is faster than the last time I hiked the incline (hiking with my dad, who wasn’t really aclimatized after coming up from sealevel to visit), but supposedly an average hiker should be able to do it in 40-50 minutes. In my defense it took me about half way up to settle into a pace that was sustainable (rather than walking at my normal pace and having to stop often to catch my breath), maybe I’ll do better just from that next time I do it. Alternately, maybe I’ll be in better shape next time and will do better just from that.

There’s a nice view of Colorado Springs from the top of the incline:
Colorado Springs
Unfortunately the lighting conditions (overcast where I was, sunny in parts of the city) made it hard to take decent landscape pictures with my phone. To the left of the tree in the center of the picture you can see the high rock ridges of Garden of the Gods.

Here’s the incline from the top. Note how the trail is almost perfectly straight down the mountain:
Incline from the top

Low Clouds
This was the inspiration for not sticking around on the mountain. Well, the low clouds, the fact that those clouds were starting to rain lightly, and also that it was cold enough my hands were going a little numb. I never did break out my rain jacket, but the slowly warming temperatures as I got farther down the mountain were greatly appreciated.

I took the Barr Trail down (it’s not as steep, and especially damp it’s dangerous to go down the incline), so I got back to the trailhead at 6:25. My pebble counted the full trip (from the bus stop to the top back down to the trailhead) at just over 11,000 steps. Of that 11.000 steps only about 3,000 were from the trip up.

Here’s another picture of the Garden of the Gods and Colorado Springs taken from lower on the mountain on the way down:
Garden of the Gods