April 2021

Books read:

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Trails walked:

Devisadero Loop Trail near Taos, NM (April 1st)
Picture Rock Trail near Lyons, CO (April 7th)
Lake Estes Loop in Estes Park, CO (April 17th)
Manitou Incline / Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs, CO (April 26th)

Song of the month – Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday

Scientist Spotlight - Katalin Karikó - mRNA for vaccines

April Summary: April started off with a fun road trip to Taos, NM which is about a 5-hour drive from our home. It was a nice 5-day vacation with both of our kids and their significant others plus my wife’s mom and our grandson. We hiked, the kids skied, and we ate some great New Mexican food. It was a great way to start out the month.

The George Floyd murder trial ended with a "guilty on all counts" verdict on April 20th. All the press leading up to the verdict is what inspired my song of the month for April. Black Americans have been putting up with inequality in this country for a long time. It is why there is such a large percentage of blacks in jail and below the poverty line. Many of the movies nominated in this year's Academy Awards had powerful portrayals of this struggle. Judas and the Black Messiah, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, One Night in Miami, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, United States vs Billie Holiday, the documentary Time, and the short film Two Different Strangers. Here's hoping for faster progress.

I received my 2nd vaccine this month which inspired my scientist of the month selection. It's a good feeling to know that my chance of getting very sick from this virus is significantly reduced. And most of our family has been vaccinated which is an even better feeling. Maybe that fall concert we have tickets for will actually happen.

This month I read one of the best books I've come across in a long time, a literary classic, and an interesting book on the psychology of decision making. I also managed a nice hike in Taos with my daughter and her boyfriend and their two dogs (collectively known as R2J2). Plus hikes near Lyons, Estes Park, and Colorado Springs. It's starting to feel like spring in Colorado!

Scientist Spotlight – Katalin Karikó:

Hungarian-born scientist Katalin Karikó has been working on messenger RNA her entire adult life. She received her PhD in Hungary and when funding ran out, emigrated to the US in 1985. Several grant rejections later, along with deportation threats, she continued to work on her passion of finding a way for mRNA to be delivered to human DNA. Then Pfizer started working on a COVID-19 vaccine and partnered with BioNTech where Karikó is a senior VP. The technology she had been working on all her life found its first major use as a vaccine for the pandemic of our times. It's a great story of perseverance, believing in your passion, and the importance of immigrants. She has hopes for even greater things ahead in the area of mRNA.

Song of the month – Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday: This song was named song of the century in 1999 by Time magazine. It was written in 1930 by a Jewish communist teacher and civil rights activist from the Bronx, Abel Meeropol who gave it to a nightclub owner who then passed it on to Holiday. She first performed the song in 1939 and it was not without controversy. The mainly white jazz club patrons were divided on it; some walked out, others stood and applauded. I hadn't heard about the controversy until I recently watched the movie United States vs Billie Holiday which is streaming on Hulu. Andra Day, in her first ever acting role was riveting as Holiday. There was a racist agent from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics that didn't want her performing the song and went through unethical and illegal means to stop her. Here are the lyrics, along with a YouTube link:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin' flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather
For the wind to suck
For the sun to rot
For the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHGAMjwr_j8

Devisadero Loop Trail near Taos, NM: While in Taos I was able to get a hike in with my daughter, her boyfriend, and their two dogs (R2J2). We hiked this loop trail which goes for around 5 miles and 1,200 feet of elevation gain. According to the US Forest Service website, Devisadero means a “lookout” point or place. However, Google Translate says it doesn’t exist. I started to go down the rabbit hole of different translation apps and decided it wasn’t worth it. This peak had once been used by the Taos Puebloans to stand guard against the Apaches who would come down Taos Canyon to raid the pueblo. It was a beautiful April day with temps in the 60s and sunny. The northern slopes were still pretty muddy with patches of snow and ice, but most of the trail was in great shape as it climbed from junipers to pines and aspens. There were great views west towards the Rio Grande Gorge and North towards the Wheeler Peak wilderness (Wheeler Peak is the tallest point in NM at 13,159 feet). The town of Taos could be seen spread out from south to north along the mesa that stands to the east of the Rio Grande river. There are some really nice homes here, nearly all of them built in the adobe pueblo style so common in New Mexico. Julia Roberts got married in Taos and has a home here. A few other famous people have lived here including Donald Rumsfeld, Georgia O’Keefe, country singer Lynn Anderson, actor Dean Stockwell, and authors Aldus Huxley and DH Lawrence. We didn’t see any of them (or their ghosts) up on this peak today but there was a nice family on spring break and lots of people with dogs, hardly any of them on leashes which I think is great. Any well-behaved dog should be off leash because it’s safer for the dog and the owner while hiking. Most people seem to disagree with this thought evidently since nearly everywhere you go dogs are required to be on a leash. The rules must have been made by owners of poorly behaved dogs. All the dogs (and their owners) were having fun on this beautiful day in the mountains near Taos.

Some nice homes in the foothills here

Daughter's wonder dog on the edge

Expansive views south and west

Dogs cooling off in the snow

Nice view from up on top

Daughter and boyfriend heading back down

Rounding the bend

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer –This may be one of the best I’ve read in some time. There were 3 or 4 chapters in which I found tears rolling down my cheeks for the stories they told. The writing fit me like a glove. All that I feel about being in the natural world and my concern for its future are perfectly written about in this beautiful book; far better than I could ever describe it myself. The full title is Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The author is an indigenous woman of the Potawatomi Nation who also has a PhD in plant ecology. Her childhood was spent mostly outdoors in upstate New York where she developed a close relationship with the natural world around her. She was born to write this book. In very poetic prose, she combines the ancient stories of indigenous tribes with her rich education in botany. Like the braided sweetgrass in the title, she weaves the story of the relationship between humans and the natural world and how that relationship has changed and deteriorated as our unquenchable thirst for consumption has wreaked havoc on the plants and animals around us. The author calls it an intertwining of science, spirit, and story. When her college adviser asked her why she wanted to study botany, she responded that she wanted to know why flowers were so beautiful when they didn’t have to be. He told her she should go into the Art Department instead of science if she cared about beauty. Thankfully she didn’t listen to that dummy. When she finished her degree another adviser gave her this letter of recommendation for graduate placement: “She’s done remarkably well for an Indian girl.” Oy vay, this world we live in!

There is a chapter on black ash basket weaving that will forever change the way I feel when I look at a hand weaved basket. The amount of work and love that goes into this craft is incredible. Her father taught them to leave a pile of wood at camp for the next campers whenever they would go paddling in the summer (“I liked to imagine their pleasure, those other paddlers, arriving after dark to find a ready pile of fuel to warm their evening meal.”). And then there is the comparison between the indigenous human creation story where Skywoman creates a garden for people to eat from versus the Christian story of creation where Eve was poisoned by an apple and banished from the garden. Could that creation story explain how people feel differently about nature? “And then they met – the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve – and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories.” Also, her description of the “Indian Schools” of the late 1800s and early 1900s where indigenous children were removed from their homes in order to learn the ways of the white man and forget the pagan ways of their ancestors was heartbreaking (her grandfather was one of them). I really enjoyed her description of the Three Sisters—corn, beans and squash and how they help each other grow, if planted correctly, and how they nourish people with all the nutrients humans need.

There is a peace that comes over me when I’m in nature, whether it’s a city park or a backcountry wilderness. It’s always been a cure for any stress I may feel. That is the gift that nature gives to me. Much of this book is about gratitude between humans and nature and a reciprocity between us. If nature is giving me the gift of peace, then I need to give it something back. What can I possibly give back to nature? I suppose gratitude is the least I could do. But I suppose my advocacy on action to address climate change is another. Small acts like planting a garden or picking up litter on trails are other ways. You may have heard about indigenous ceremonies before a hunt or before planting season; these ceremonies are their way of expressing thanks and gratitude for the gifts that nature will provide them in order to survive.

Here are some of my favorite lines from this wonderful book:

…to turn off the voice in my head until I can hear the voices outside it: the shhh of wind in needles, water trickling over rock, nuthatch tapping, chipmunks digging, beechnut falling, mosquito in my ear, and something more—something that is not me, for which we have no language, the wordless being of others in which we are never alone. After the drumbeat of my mother’s heart, this was my first language.

(Sweetgrass, aka)… Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.

So I offer…a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world.

The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes.

A Navajo woman without a day of university botany training in her life spoke for hours and I hung on every word. One by one, name by name, she told of the plants in her valley. Where each one lived, when it bloomed, who it liked to live near and all its relationships, who ate it, who lined their nests with its fibers, what kind of medicine it offered. She also shared the stories held by those plants, their origin myths, how they got their names, and what they have to tell us. She spoke of beauty. Her words were like smelling salts waking me to what I had known back when I was picking strawberries. I realized how shallow my understand was. Her knowledge was so much deeper and wider and engaged all the human ways of understanding.

It is the fundamental unfairness of parenthood that if we do our jobs well, the deepest bond we are given will walk out the door with a wave over the shoulder.

We learn to say “Have a great time, sweetie” while we are longing to pull them back to safety. And against all the evolutionary imperatives of protecting our gene pool, we give them car keys. And freedom….I would be glad to retire from the worried nights when the roads are snowy, waiting for the sound of tires in the driveway exactly one minute before curfew.

…leadership is not rooted in power and authority, but in service and wisdom.

Regarding the Pledge of Allegiance: As I grew to understand the gifts of the earth, I couldn’t understand how “love of country” could omit recognition of the actual country itself. The only promise it requires is to a flag. What of the promises to each other and to the land?

His favorite times are spring—when “the sap is rising and the energy of the earth is flowing into the tree’—and fall, “when the energy is flowing back to the ground.”

John keeps to the tradition of the Honorable Harvest: take only what you need and use everything you take.

…how do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives that we take? Our ancestors, who had so few material possessions, devoted a great deal of attention to this question, while we who are drowning in possessions scarcely give it a thought.

We have enjoyed the feast generously laid out for us by Mother Earth, but now the plates are empty and the dining room is a mess. It’s time we started doing the dishes in Mother Earth’s kitchen.

…many of our days in the woods were spent felling, hauling, and splitting wood. “Firewood warms you twice,” he would always say as we emerged from the woods hot and sweaty.

It is not just changes in policies that we need, but also changes to the heart.

Picture Rock Trail near Lyons, CO: The trail is part of the Heil Valley Ranch Open space which was purchased from the Heil ranching family in the mid-1990s. The Heils owned the property from 1949 until they sold most of it to Boulder County. They continued ranching activities on a smaller portion of land until 2012 when they sold the rest of it to the county, increasing the open space even more. The name Picture Rock is taken from the sandstone up here which was quarried and used for many buildings along the front range, including the University of Colorado in Boulder. The sandstone has some interesting natural designs created by chemical leaching between layers of deposited sand; this is what gives Picture Rock its name. Although my daughter-in-law suggested it was named because I took so many pictures of rocks, including one that was in the shape of the state of New Mexico!

The trail starts near a huge prairie dog town and is routed around the dog-town for nearly a mile before heading gradually uphill for the next 4 miles. There are nice views of Lyons along the first couple of miles before it heads into the pines. At around 3 miles I ran into some old stone buildings from the late 1800s quarry and a couple of old, abandoned cars from around the 1940s or 50s. At 5 miles I reached the intersection with the Wild Turkey and Ponderosa Loops. I wasn’t half-way tired yet, so I kept walking along the loops, hoping for a western view towards Rocky Mountain National Park. I finally got my view at round 7 miles in; Longs Peak. It turned out to be a longer hike than expected (14.4 miles), but the uphill was very gradual, and the footing was good, so it wasn’t too bad, but my feet were sore that night. I saw lots of deer and prairie dogs, plus a very plump rabbit. On this Wednesday, I encountered only 3 other hikers, but also 42 mountain bikers and 9 trail runners, most of which were after 4pm during the last 3 miles back to the trailhead as people were getting off work and trying to get a workout in. I imagine that this place is zooming with mountain bikers on weekends so I wouldn’t recommend a hike here then. If I do hike it again, I will start earlier to avoid the after-work workout rush.

Winding path

New Mexico rock

Fat bunny

Trail art

Burned area from the October 2020 fire

Burned trees silhouetting a blue sky

A lot of work went into clearing this area after the fire

Deer everywhere

Wapiti trail closed due to fire and mud

Meeker and Longs Peak

Nice views up on top

Rock stairway

Tree framed view

Views eastward to the plains

Bonnie and Clyde's car?

Building remnants in a nice valley

Old farm equipment and building remains

Old farm silo

Old truck becoming one with nature

Nice views along the trail

Material for the newborns probably

View of Lyons from near the trailhead

Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – This novel is on so many “best of” lists that you’d need a list of “best of” lists in order to whittle it down. But some include: The Guardian's "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read"; Goodreads' “Best Books Ever”; and the Norwegian Nobel Institute’s “Most Influential Books Ever.” When the novel was first published as a serial magazine piece, it was attacked for obscenity due to its depiction of adultery. The resulting trial in January 1857 made it notorious (viral in today’s language) and after Flaubert's acquittal, Madame Bovary became a bestseller. Flaubert spent a lot of time writing about the psychological states of his characters which was a new idea for its time, and he’s considered the creator of this type of writing that was eventually also used by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.

I usually try to find the best translation for a book written in languages other than English and I found that Lydia Davis’ version had many accolades. The translation of a novel can make a huge difference in its enjoyment and in its faithfulness to the original version.

The Madam Bovary in the book is Emma, who at a young age marries Charles Bovary, a simple country doctor in the Normandy (northwest) region of France. Emma is a romantic and quickly becomes bored with her country life and her simple husband. She would read novels voraciously and wanted the romantic and luxurious lives she was reading about. Emma’s desires eventually lead her to affairs with other men and to purchases beyond her means (after she was able to secure Power of Attorney for her oblivious husband). All of this does not end well for the main characters in the book, and I would have to say that the ending is quite possibly one of the saddest I’ve ever read; hardly anyone in her life escapes the dire consequences of her life choices. But even so, I enjoyed the book and its characters and the dialog. Here are some of my favorite lines:

Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon.

…like most people born of countryfolk, whose souls always retain something of the callousness of their fathers’ hands.

I do have a religion, my own religion; in fact, I have even more than any of them, with their masquerades and their hocus-pocus. Unlike them, I worship God. I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whoever he may be, I don’t really care, who has put us here on earth to perform our duties as citizens and family men; but I don’t need to go into a church and kiss a silver platter and reach into my pocket to fatten a pack of humbugs who eat better than we do! Because one can honor him just as well in a forest, in a field, or even by gazing up at the ethereal vault, like the ancients. My own God is the God of Socrates, Franklyn, Voltaire, and Beranger.

…her plans for happiness…were cracking in the wind like dead branches…

...everything was returning to normal: the masters were bullying the servants, and the servants were beating the animals.

Lake Estes Loop in Estes Park – On a recent road trip to Rocky Mountain National park, I dropped off my wife and her mom in downtown Estes Park so they could cruise all the little shops. Since the temperature was in the 30s, I decided that waiting for them outside the shops wouldn’t be so pleasant, so I decided to walk around Lake Estes. Driving into Estes Park from the east on the 36 highway you get a view of this beautiful town with its namesake lake, deep in a valley with snowcapped mountains framing it to the south and west. The lake is part of the Colorado-Big Thompson water project which brings mountain water to the cities in the front range. Estes Park currently gets around 20% of their electricity from the hydro-electric plant on this lake.

The loop around the lake is just under 4 miles in length and the views are really spectacular to the west and the south. The eastern part of the trail heads away from the lake for a bit to get around the dam, but the highlight of this part of the trail was spotting a herd of elk bedded down in a meadow below the dam. I saw several people fishing along the shore of the lake and in the Big Thompson river above the lake and below the dam. Many of them were catching fish! I finished the loop in about an hour and a half, drove back downtown and picked up my wife and mother-in-law and we headed home.

Beautiful views along the lake trail

Some homes right on the edge of the lake

Elk bedded down below the dam

The Rockies trying to peak through the clouds

Small pine clinging to the edge

Fisherman in the Big Thompson

Perspective shot

Marshy area in the upper portion of the trail

View of the Stanley hotel of "The Shining" fame

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman: Published in 2011, this book was on the ‘best books of the year’ list from many publications including The Economist, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and LA Times. Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 even though he is a behavioral psychologist and has never even taken a course in Economics. Much of his work in behavioral psychology however has huge impacts on economic thinking and decision making.

He covers a LOT of ground in the book, and I couldn’t possibly describe it all here, but thinking fast and slow centers around the theory that humans have two distinct modes of thought which he calls System 1 and System 2. System 1 includes our fast thinking, instinctive, and emotional thoughts (like knowing what 2+2 is, or immediately deciding if you like someone when you first meet them or driving a car on a lonely road). System 2 is our slower, more deliberate, and logical thought pattern (used to compute 24 x 37 or parking a car in a tight spot or determining the right behavior in a specific social setting). System 1 is impulsive and intuitive; System 2 is capable of reasoning, and it is cautious, but at least for some people it is also lazy. He goes on to discuss human biases like loss aversion where we’re willing to do more to prevent a loss than to obtain a gain. Much of the book references several different decision-making experiments which he and others have conducted over the years. He then assigns a name to the specific result of the experiment which tries to explain why people make certain decisions even when the decision is not in their best interest. This was the author’s aim in the book: improve the ability to identify and understand error of judgment and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them. I’m not sure he succeeded, because I got a bit lost in all the different names and tended to focus more on the actual experiments. Here are some (actually many) interesting excerpts from the book:

People seem to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.

When it comes to rare probabilities, our mind is not designed to get things quite right. For the residents of a planet that may be exposed to events no one has yet experienced, this is not good news.

When the driver of a car is overtaking a truck on a narrow road… adult passengers quite sensibly stop talking. They know that distracting the driver is not a good idea, and they also suspect that he is temporarily deaf and will not hear what they say. Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention.

The law of least effort applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

…tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both fatigue and hunger probably play a role.

Reciprocal links are common in the associative network. For example, being amused tends to make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused.

Half the participants were told to nod their head up and down while others were told to shake it side to side. The messages they heard were radio editorials. Those who nodded (a yes gesture) tended to accept the message they heard, but those who shook their head tended to reject it.

A study of voting patterns in precincts of Arizona in 2000 showed that the support for propositions to increase the funding of schools was significantly greater when the polling station was in a school than when it was in a nearby location.

He describes an experiment at an office coffee room where employees voluntarily contribute whatever they want to the till. During weeks when a picture of staring eyes was hung near the till, employees donated three times the amount than in the weeks when a photo of flowers was hung near the till.

When you feel strained, you are more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make fewer errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative than usual.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth (he wrote this well before the repeated false claims of election fraud in 2020).

…when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

The dynamics of memory help explain the recurrent cycles of disaster, concern, and growing complacency that are familiar to students of large-scale emergencies.

…estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. The coverage itself is biased towards novelty and poignancy.

…basic limitation in the ability of our mind to deal with small risks: we either ignore them altogether or give them far too much weight –nothing in between. Every parent who has stayed up waiting for a teenage daughter who is late from a party will recognize the feeling.

With a few horrible exceptions such as 9/11, the number of casualties from terror attacks is very small relative to other causes of death. Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns, such as Israel, the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths….it is difficult to reason oneself into a state of complete calm. Terrorism speaks directly to System 1.

Taleb suggests that we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous—and it is also essential.

People and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers.

An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality, but it is not what people and organizations want.

The main benefit of optimism is resilience in the face of setbacks.

Even ostensibly sure outcomes are uncertain: when you sign the contract to buy an apartment, you do not know the price at which you later may have to sell it, nor do you know that your neighbor’s son will soon take up the tuba.

…our brains are not designed to reward generosity as reliably as they punish meanness.

Lotteries and terrorism: In both cases, the actual probability is inconsequential; only possibility matters.

The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects.

Thought experiment: What if, at the end of a vacation, all pictures and videos will be destroyed. Furthermore, you will swallow a potion that will wipe out all your memories of the vacation. How would this prospect affect your vacation plans? How much would you be willing to pay for it, relative to a normally memorable vacation?

Thought experiment: Imagine you face a painful operation during which you will remain conscious. You are told you will scream in pain and beg the surgeon to stop. However, you are promised an amnesia-inducing drug that will completely wipe out any memory of the episode. How do you fell about such a prospect?

Manitou Incline / Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs, CO – I had seen photos of the Manitou Incline and decided that I needed to try it. 2,744 steps (or 2,768 depending on which sign you read). Less than a mile. 2,000 feet elevation gain. It’s like climbing the Statue of Liberty six times. But harder, because at least the steps on the Statue of Liberty are all uniform. The steps on the Incline range from 3 inches to 18 inches high (which seemed even higher the further up you went). I’m not in the best shape but I’m not in bad shape either and this was really tough. I plan to try it again at the end of the summer when I’ll be in presumably better shape after lots of mountain hiking. There were people of all ages and shapes hiking the Incline on this Monday, most of whom were struggling to some extent. There are bail out places along the way where you can head back down on a less demanding trail, or you could just walk back down the stairs which some people did. Every 100 steps there is a marker to indicate where you are…700…1,000…1,700….on and on and on. I thought a lot about my dear late friend and Hiking Buddy on this climb. He HATED steps of any kind. I wish he were still alive so I could tease him about doing this hike....

You need reservations to hike the Incline due to covid restrictions. They limit it to 45 people every half hour. It’s no problem on weekdays but weekends are tougher to get. There are two designated parking spots, one is about 1.5 miles from the start and costs $1 per hour, the other is near the start and costs $10 and requires reservations. Of course everyone who knows me knows that I chose the one that is 1.5 miles from the start….I decided to walk those 1.5 miles since I’d never been to Manitou Springs which is a nice little touristy town with lots of shops and restaurants. When I finished the hike however, I chose to take the free shuttle back to the parking lot😉

When I finally reached the top after several breaks to catch my breath and stretch out a cramping calf muscle, it was a great feeling. And then it was a really cold and windy feeling, so I headed back down on the Barr trail which takes 3 miles to navigate the 2,000 feet rather than the 0.8 mile Incline. By the way, the Barr trail will eventually get you to the summit of Pikes Peak in about 13 miles....maybe one day!

My legs were pretty tired, but since I was in Colorado Springs, I wanted to see the Garden of the Gods which is the area’s top attraction. I can see why. It’s stunning; a bit like a combination of Sedona and Monument Valley all crammed into a much smaller space. Yes, it was crowded and touristy, but it was still beautiful. I got some nice shots of rock climbers heading up impossibly narrow rock walls. I only walked a couple of miles around the Central Garden area, but I would like to do some of the longer peripheral hikes the next time I’m in the area.

The “founder” of Colorado Springs, General William Palmer, convinced his friend Charles Perkins to buy land in this area because it was so stunning. Perkins bought the land, but upon seeing it, he decided not to build, but instead wanted the public to enjoy it in its natural state. So, two years after his death (1909), his children donated the land to the City of Colorado Springs where "It would be known forever as the Garden of the Gods where it shall remain free to the public, where no intoxicating liquors shall be manufactured, sold, or dispensed, where no building or structure shall be erected except those necessary to properly care for, protect, and maintain the area as a public park." Good for them, but I’m pretty sure some of those rock climbers had some brews for their post climb celebration….