The Incline Club Starts at the Top of Pikes Peak

By Matt Carpenter
www.skyrunner.com

(I wrote this for the 2002 Friends of the Peak fall newsletter while I was serving on their board.)

For three years now the Incline Club has joined forces with the Pikes Peak Trail Dogs in helping maintain the Barr Trail. This year the club was asked to build a 500' section of trail from the Army building on the summit heading NW to the “Hot Breaks Fail” sign at the final switchback of the Pikes Peak Highway. It was a unique experience for us in that we would be putting in a trail where there was none. Although some of us have quite a bit of time working on trails we found the many decisions that came with building a new trail both challenging and exciting.

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.