The exploitation of Pikes Peak by the city of Colorado Springs has a long history, one which extends beyond the incorporation of the mountain into the city’s water collection and distribution system to include the development and growth of the region’s tourism economy. The physical manifestations of this story are well-known: the Cog Railway, the Pikes Peak Highway, the now defunct Manitou Incline, and the north and south slope reservoirs and water delivery apparatus. Although most of the Pikes Peak massif lies within the boundaries of the federally-controlled and managed Pike National Forest, in reality what takes place and what has taken place on the peak over the past century or more can be traced directly to the relationship between the city and the mountain to its west.
Pikes Peak burst into the nation’s consciousness in the nineteenth century as a universally-recognized symbol of the Anglo-European advance into the Rocky Mountain West. In the subsequent peculiar history of our nation’s system of public lands, however, it developed as a virtual fiefdom of the city at its eastern base and most recently has emerged as yet another battleground pitting the forces of the Old West (what author Charles Wilkinson likes to characterize as "the lords of yesterday") against those representing its present and future. Within the context of our public lands history, the causes of the widespread damage of natural systems on Pikes Peak—particularly those centered around the highway corridor—essentially are no different than those which resulted in havoc wreaked upon the public’s forests, rivers, and grasslands throughout the West. The myth of inexhaustibility coupled with the absence of competing interests to slow the onward march of the exploiters has brought us to the situation in which we now find ourselves. In the early 1900s Gifford Pinchot, the father of the nation forest system, preached the gospel of multiple use, but for most of this century, the history of our national forests and other so-called multiple use lands has been a tale of exclusive use. The relationship of the city of Colorado Springs to Pikes Peak has been no different than the one between the West’s mining communities and the surrounding mineral-rich mountains or between the West’s agricultural sector (and later its fast-growing cities) and our regions rivers.
These exclusive arrangements, in many cases encouraged and subsidized by federal programs and dollars, have come under assault in recent years as additional interests, most often representing recreational or environmental constituencies, have sought to assert their claims to the public lands (and waters). In the case of Colorado Springs, the conflict over the city’s attempt to develop the Homestake II water project in the Holy Cross Wilderness was perhaps the first and certainly the most visible manifestation of this trend. Now the issue is much closer to home. In fact this time it’s right outside our doors.
The history of the city’s presence on Pikes Peak as water developer is both fascinating and little-known. Its promotion of the peak as both the symbol and linchpin of the region’s tourism economy is at once more ballyhooed and more apparent in its physical transformation of the mountain environment. Only now, however, are the associated costs in terms of environmental damage becoming evident.
The Pikes Peak Highway, the current focus of attention, has
been managed over the years with the same single-mindedness which has characterized the
city’s approach to all its interests on the peak. Its inability to correct the damage
which continues to occur can only be attributed to its refusal to acknowledge and
accommodate the whole range of priorities and interests which must govern the management
of America’s, not Colorado Springs’, mountain.
by Rick Eckert 7/96
This was taken from the regularly featured column in the Timberlines Newsletter, published bimonthly by the Pikes Peak Chapter.
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131 Williams Street, Colorado Springs, CO 80905-1413 - Phone: (719) 592-0963
Last updated February 12, 1999.