Summiting Pikes Peak: September 8, 2007
More photos from the day are up in the gallery.
On my parents last day of their road trip, they ended up in Colorado Springs. Mark and I weren’t able to meet them for camping on Friday night because of Liv’s injury, but I drove down to the Springs on Saturday morning to meet up with them for the day. We had reservations on the 10:40 cog train to the summit of Pikes Peak!
Mom was a little nervous, as was I. Mark and I took this train two years ago, and I remembered it being VERY steep. But on Saturday, it wasn’t bad. The trip went quickly, the views were beautiful, and the whole family had a great time.
The summit wasn’t as cold as the last time Mark and I were up there, but the views were still great. TJ and I got Pikes Peak Summit doughnuts and macaroni and cheese! We hung out, shopped and took pictures for our allotted 45 minutes, and then it was back on the train down. The family had a great day, and lots of fun on this little adventure. We then hopped in the cars and headed home to the Fort!!
Kate,
My response to your comment on my blog:
I like your idea about comparing trad and sport. I think that the results would come out very different for each. For example, I was a bit surprised that Salt Lake City came out in 8th place. It would take a bit of work, but if somebody was interested they could assign seperate trad and sport ratings to each crag (or bouldering and alpine climbing for that matter).
I used the data straight out of Rock N Road to make these maps. The weights came from the quality rating that Tim Toula assigned to each crag with 5 being the highest and 0 being the lowest. Large crags, such as New River Gorge or the Gunks are shown as several smaller crags. Number of routes was not used itself as a criteria, although I’m sure it was a factor that Tim considered.
My next project will be to develop a second series of maps using only closed areas, however, this will have to wait until I finish my master’s thesis. While compiling the data I noticed that some regions of the country have large numbers of crag closures. My thought is that a map showing the impact of crag closures on the climbing resource would be valuable to the Access Fund for communicating with land managers and policy makers.