Before we left Colorado Springs, we spent some time visiting the Manitou Springs cliff dwellings. These structures were built about 700 years ago by the Anasazi Indians, also known as the “Ancient Ones” or the Puebloans. This is the most accessible and well preserved example of the cliff dwelling architecture. Next to the dwelling you can find a very nice museum and gift shop in a pueblo-style building built in the 1800’s. The alcove in the cliff in which the dwelling was built preserved it from the effects of the climate.

A 9 family structure

This structure housed 9 families.  What may look like windows was actually doing double-duty, both as doors and windows.  In New York City, they have the 5 story’s walk-ups, well I guess this would be a 3 story’s climb-up.  There’s evidence of ancient balcony between the floors.  Each family had a very small one room apartment with one opening in the front (there are no openings from one room to the other inside.  There were common areas to store grains and food supplies.

Structure with balcony intact on the left.

This entrance in marked with the sign of the clan

Chicken thinks that this is pretty darn cool!

The men would go gather rocks and they would shape them as they wanted, the space between the rocks was filled with clay and found objects.  Great care was taken during the construction, as shown in this picture, look how smooth the walls are and how straight the window/door opening is.

They lived on a diet composed mainly of corn.  They found many ways to cook it to make it less boring.  One way to make sweet corn bread was:   women chewed the cornmeal until the saliva  transformed the starches into sugar.  This paste was then  mixed with regular cornmeal and baked as a sweet corn bread.  Sounds delicious doesn’t it? 😉

After we left the dwellings, we went to Manitou Springs and had a delicious lunch at Adam’s Mountain Café.  We highly recommend it.

Pikes Peak viewed from Crystal reservoir.

It took us a few days to acclimate to the high altitude. The first day, we were so out of breath we didn’t have the strength to move. 7000 feet is hard on two Floridians accustomed to elevations of less than 100 feet! There are two main ways of going to the summit of Pikes Peak, one is by cog train, the other is by car. We chose the latter, just because we knew that we would be in control and if we were starting to feel dizzy with altitude sickness, we could turn around.

The "W's"

We made it as far as what they call locally, the “W’s” (12, 825 ft). A series of hairpin turns, with no guard rails (I was scared to death), and at that altitude, the absence of vegetation and trees (the soil is permanently frozen; permafrost), make the experience even scarier because of  the feeling of openness and the fact that you can really see the “drop” on one side of the road. The road was closed because of the snow after 13, 000 feet anyway. What a view though! Well worth the fear!

The two kids preparing to snowboard downhill

This is where we saw the two kids who had hitched a ride up with their snowboard (they left their car way down) and were preparing to snowboard down the mountain. Doug told them that they were certifiably crazy, but they laughed it off. We saw them later near their car, they had made it!

They made it!

For those interested by a bit of geology: Pikes Peak is a massive block of billion-year old pink Precambrian granite. The mountain rock contains interlocking crystals of quartz, a touch of black and white feldspar and a dash of hornblende and black flaky mica. (No I am not a geologist, I read that in a book…)

View from the about 12, 000 ft.

Interesting facts:

Before the Americans, the Utes (they called themselves “Yuttaa”) were the feared rulers of the Pikes Peak region for centuries. (They called the area the Shining Mountains). They believe that they always lived in Colorado, but they probably arrived 800 years ago. Their territory stretched from the Front Range westward for 450 miles into Utah (the state named for them). It encompassed the mountains northward into Wyoming and south into New Mexico. It included 150, 000 square miles of America’s most beautiful mountain wilderness. They were fierce warriors and succeeded in protecting their territories for hundreds of years. In the 1860’s though, their days were numbered, and finally in 1880, they were banished from their Shining Mountains. Today, Utes retain three separate reservation lands containing vast deposits of energy resources.

The first “known” Americans who tried to conquer the ascension of Pikes Peak was Lt. Zebulon Montgomery Pike and 22 enlisted men. They did not make it. The mountain retained the name because Lt. Pike was the first to describe it. The first one who actually made the climb was Dr. Edwin James in 1820. In the process, he and his crew set fire to hundreds on acres of land (they did not extinguish their camp fire). Someone must have done it before him, but there are no records of it. Archeological sites do suggest that the Indians were mountaineers and evidence of eagle traps and signal fires have been found atop some of Colorado’s highest peaks. In 1858, Julia Archibald Holmes became the first woman to conquer the summit.

The view from Pikes Peak inspired the song “America the beautiful”.

Pikes Peak or Bust

This was the slogan of the 1858 Colorado gold rush. The Peak itself was not really home to the precious metal, but it stood as a landmark for west-bound fortune hunters. Information on routes and trails was sparse and often misleading. Some of the guide books seemed to compete for the number of embellishments and outright lies they contained. One of them stated that gold could be easily gathered by merely climbing to the summit of Pikes Peak, since nuggets of gold lay on the ground like a golden necklace. The guidebook further instructed the miner to cut several stout trees from the summit (there a no trees at the summit), make a raft, and glide off the mountain on a surface of gold-bearing rock. The guidebook assured that the descending raft would plow up ground on the way down, imbedding even more gold in the raft itself, which could be extracted when the foot of the mountain was reached!

Fun fact:

In June 1929, Bill Williams of Rio Hondo, Texas, pushed a peanut to the top of the Peak with his nose. It took him 20 days to make the trip. In the process, he wore out 170 pairs of pants, a dozen pairs of cotton gloves and three pairs of shoes. There is no account of the durability of his nose…

huh?

Chubby Chicken in the Garden of the Gods

I am fascinated by big red rocks, I was in total awe when I saw the Garden of the Gods.  This land was a sacred place for the Indians and I totally understand why.

In the 1800’s it was purchased by Charles Elliott Perkins who gave it the name “Garden of the Gods” after he heard one of his friend saying that it was truly a garden fit for the Gods.  The land was given to the City of Colorado Springs in 1909 by the children of Charles Elliott Perkins at the condition that it remained a free city park accessible to all.  It offers the best hiking, picnicking and horseback riding in the area.  The rock formations are over 300 million years old.

Part of the Garden of the Gods

From what I was humbly able to understand when I watched the movie at the visitor center, the movement of the  tectonic plaques of the earth pushing against each other a long long time ago, formed the first Rockies (according to them, there are 3 Rockies formation eras).  Erosion by wind and water dissolved  part of the rock and transformed it into sand.  The sand was pushed downhill by the water and the wind where it accumulated until the pressure of the accumulated layers of sand formed sandstone.   Subsequent earthquakes broke the sandstones and part of them were tilted upward.  (That’s a very simplified explanation)

Whatever it was, I totally agree with Charles Perkins’  friend, it is really a garden fit for the Gods.  An awesome feast for the eyes.

Part of the Garden of the Gods

Garden of the Gods with Pikes Peak in the background

Does anyone know what kind of bird it is?

Funny thing happened at the Visitor Center, when in the movie room, the host asked where people were from, and sitting right in front of us, there was a mother and her daughter from, you guessed it….  Tallahassee!  It’s a small world!