The Incline Club Starts at the Top of Pikes Peak
By Matt Carpenter (I wrote this for the 2002 Friends of the Peak fall newsletter while I was serving on their board.)
Making it all the more challenging was that we were given a deadline of September 7, so that the 180 plus volunteers from VOC could use our section as the staging area for the much longer section they were going to work on. After a few visits to the area to familiarize ourselves with the task at hand about 20 ICers met the Sunday before the Pikes Peak Ascent and Marathon and put in about 4 hours of high altitude trail work. It was even higher than normal since in July the USGS had put Pikes Peak at 14,115' instead of 14,110'. We called this our Pikes Peak race taper (before a race we reduce our mileage and this is called a taper) and while 4 hours may not seem like a long time by the end of it even the fittest among us were ready to get out of the thin air! With the exception of a small 15' section that we will need to touch up we think we accomplished our objective of building an easy to follow and use trail. We walked away (ok ran away) with a sense of pride and a whole new appreciation for what Fred Barr had done, mostly by himself, on the Eastern Face of the mountain.
|