The view from Crow Gultch

Pondering Pikes Peak

By Mary Burger

Another year is drawing to a close. And, what a great year it has been! We finally started work on the Ring the Peak Trail. We began a new relationship with Cheyenne Mountain State Park. We completed maintenance of the Crags to Devil’s Playground trail all the way to “Banana Rock.” We held our first ever campout work weekend. And, best of all, we partnered with VOC to build the top mile of the western approach to the summit of Pikes Peak.

Despite some setbacks, (the drought, the Hayman fire, the economy) we turned out more than 350 volunteer days for the peak. (That includes about 250 volunteers on the VOC project and over a 100 on our own.) With your help, we are making a difference on Pikes Peak.

Neither growth nor profits are the goals of our organization. We are focused on sustainability. As we chip away at the miles of trail to be built on the ‘ring’; or slowly crawl our maintenance efforts from the Crags toward Devil’s Playground; I sometimes become impatient. But slow and steady is the course we have chosen. The work we do will stand for a hundred years. Not forever, but long enough to be called a legacy. Let our legacy be one of peace and cooperation.

I recently read an article about an extreme sporting event. The author spoke of the difficulty of staging this event in the USA because of our environmental activists and their interference on the grounds his event would cause destruction of the eco-systems. I think I can lend no better conclusion to this missive than to quote his final paragraph. Did he have his tongue in his cheek? My apologies to National Geographic Adventure Magazine for plagiarizing copyright material. Here is what Dan Barger reported Mike Kloser as saying: “It’s certainly easier from an organizational standpoint to run adventure races overseas. Unless you go to places where people aren’t allowed to stand up to government, you’re going to have these controversies.”

Let our freedom ring