Pike’s Peak (11)

All of us had been looking forward to exploring Pike's Peak from the moment we saw it sitting majestically behind Colorado Springs on our intital journey north. We left Denver at around 8.30 because the drive to Colorado Springs takes around 1 ½ hours and we wanted to try to catch the 10.45 train to the peak.

A cog railway train travels from Manitou Springs, the train base depot at an elevation of 6571 feet to the top of Pike’s Peak at 14,110 feet (4302 metres). Cog trains have been taking tourists up to the peak since 1891.

“Homer” took us directly to the train depot and we arrived at about 10.15 only to find a queue for the 10.45 train. Apparently we had little chance of getting on board as few seats were left (online bookings were the best solution we were told) and those in front of us naturally had first choice – turned out to be the case so we booked for the 12.0 midday service. As the round trip was just over 3 hours, we thought we had blown our chance to see the Garden of the Gods.

The time passed quickly with a little bit of shopping in the gift shop - Grace found a Filipina working there and they chatted amiably in Tagalog for quite some time – followed by morning tea. The girls had never tried some of the delights on offer, so peanut butter and jelly sandwiches it was. They had serious reservations as they imagined “jelly” to be what we know as jelly, and “that surely can’t be mixed with peanut butter!” After dissecting the sandwich they discovered the jelly is really jam….”why don’t they call it jam?”

The train arrived a little early and it was comprised of two carriages, two seats on one side and three on the other. Each set of seats face each other and you can’t move the back of the seat to all face forward, thus some must go up the peak backwards. Leg room wasn’t all that great and they fortunately gave us the 2 x 3 sets of seats facing each other. If you didn’t know the people sitting opposite when you first boarded, you soon would!

The train is manned by two people, the driver and a conductor (ours was Mike), and he chatted through a PA system for the entire trip. He was great and had many of us laughing at times with quick anecdotes as well as very interesting information about the train and environment through which we were passing.

At one stage he asked us all to look out the “two seat side” to have a look at the rock that had fallen onto the track “last week” and that he and the driver had managed to drag the rock off and prop it up in “some” safety beside and above the railway track. They hoped it would stay there but expected that with the train’s vibration, at some stage it would probably fall again. We saw the “rock” that they secured; it was huge, perhaps 4~5 metres in diameter and would have weighed many tonnes. It also appeared to be propped there by a couple of smaller rocks and certainly looked precarious!

He mentioned that we should try to keep warm as, despite the warm weather in Manitou, the temperature would drop about 3~5 degrees F every 2000 ft we climbed - so the temp at the top would be about 30~35 degrees F cooler than at the start.

The train is powered by 4 x diesel engines that are connected to (I don’t know how many) cog(s) in between the train rails. These are of paramount importance as the incline in at least two places was 25%. I tried to take photos of some trees standing vertically to give you an idea of what it felt like in the train.

As we climbed through various types of vegetation, the most noticeable were the Aspin trees – most were turning a beautiful autumn yellow and some had progressed to a burnt orange. The leaves and stems are used for medicinal purposes, sun screen protection and balms.

The panorama unfolding before us as we reached the tree line in the mountains was amazing. The weather was ideal and we could see mountains way into the distance. I’m no good at estimation but Mike our conductor said a particular mountain was about 185 miles away.

At the summit we disembarked and we all had about 30 minutes to walk around before re-boarding for the trip back down. The thinness of the air was very noticeable and most people we spoke to felt the same as we did, dizzy with a slight headache. As we walked about I was noticeably puffing lots more than I could have expected with such little exercise, and I could feel my heart rate had increased substantially.

The trip down for Meryla was terrible because her left ear played up very badly. She has had a punctured eardrum a couple of times during her swimming days and we’ve been to see a specialist who said her eardrum was thicker than normal and that it could cause problems when descending in a plane. We really felt for her on the way down as she was crying with pain - actually the pressure difference would have been worse than experienced in a plane because I understand they are pressurised to 10,000 ft and we were at 14,110.

It was around 3.30 when we got back to the Chev, and despite the 1 ½ hour drive back to Denver, we decided we still had enough time to quickly visit the Garden of the Gods – next blog.