Pondering Pikes Peak
by Gail Snyder

Pikes Peak has touched the hearts of countless people throughout history. The words of some of them are recorded for posterity, some with great acclaim, others with relative obscurity. Recently a friend shared with me some of the work of Frank Waters, a renowned and prolific western author. (He was profiled last year in the radio series Writing The Southwest.) Waters was born in Colorado Springs in 1902, grew up on Bijou Street, and attended Colorado College. Listen to him speak of Pikes Peak in an essay entitled The Sacred Mountains of the World:

"Pike’s Peak in Colorado, at whose foot I was born, was one of the most notable [sacred mountains in the US]. The Ute Creation myth centered upon it, and its mythical origin parallels stories of the Flood. Its psychic forces, like a great magnet, drew people to it for centuries. It was a mecca for Utes coming down from the Rockies, and for Arapahoes, Kiowas, and Cheyennes from the Great Plains to the east, who dropped votive offerings in the medicinal springs at it foot. When the White Men came, it was a beacon peak for the "Pike’s Peak or Bust" wagon caravans of the gold-seekers. Years later, when I was a boy, it still exerted its spell, drawing trainloads of visitors from all over the world to jog up its canyons by burro, drink from its iron and soda springs, and gather wildflowers at every turn of the trail. But neither its majestic snow-covered summit, nor the virginal beauty of its canyons, could alone account for the serenity and energy it exerted an a spiritual front. If there does exist for each of us a psychological archetype, or a Guru, manifested as a physical mountain, Pike’s Peak is mine. I grew up with it, nurtured by its constant living presence.

Today its life-giving energy has been destroyed. There are both a cog-road train and a race-course highway to its summit. The front wall of the range has been stripped bare for gravel. Cheyenne Mountain, just south of the Peak, has been hollowed out to house the combat operations of the North American Air Defense Command. The Air Force Academy has appropriated the slope of the Peak to the north, while an immense Army base covers the land to the South."

Waters goes on to describe the mining and recreational impacts on other western mountains. He continues: "These are but a few examples, here in the West, of the continuing military, industrial, and commercial onslaughts against the sacred mountains in America. Our destruction and desecration of the living land has made us the richest and most materialistic nation in history. But under our national ethic of economic progress at any price, we have been buying the physical energy derived from nature at the expense of the psychical energy so necessary for our survival as a spiritually healthy commonwealth. Today we are belatedly recognizing the role of physical ecology in our lives, but not that of psychical ecology. For all the living entities of the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms possess an inherent psychical life, as well as physical life, and all constitute one integrated life-system. Each helps to maintain the life of the whole; and when we do violence to any part, we injure ourselves."

Whether we share Water’s sense of the spiritual nature of Pikes Peak or not, his words resonate as he describes the alteration and degradation of landscape. We have inherited not a pristine environment but rather one which is showing many signs of use and abuse. The challenge before us is to honestly address the issues, and to translate our concern into action.
April 1997
This article appeared in the July/August issue of The Timberlines.

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Last updated February 12, 1999.