On most days, hikers start clambering up the Manitou Incline long before dawn and traffic grows steadily, cresting at about 200 hikers per hour mid-morning.
The rate dips to a few dozen per hour through midday before cresting again at about 5 p.m. when people get off work. Hikers continue climbing well after dark.
One or two daring night owls regularly ascend the 2,700 crooked railroad ties that climb Mount Manitou in the dead of night. During a full moon, the nocturnal numbers spike.
These are the findings of a task force formed by Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs to study opening this wildly popular but illegal trail.
In order to better understand the Incline, the task force installed an automatic counter to record everyone who passed. It counted 23,562 hikers on the trail in September.
“Based on those numbers, we could have 300,000 to 500,000 people per year up there,” said Aimee Cox, senior analyst for the Colorado Springs parks department.
Those numbers may make the Incline the most heavily-used trail in the region by far.
The task force, made up of landowners, concerned residents and staff from Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs, will unveil its recommendations for opening the trail to legitimate hikers at a public meeting Thursday. A copy of the draft plan given to The Gazette lays out, in broad strokes, what the first phase of a legalized Incline would look like:
• Colorado Springs would manage the trail, with basic maintenance and parking enforcement help from Manitou Springs.
• Trailhead parking for 10 cars would be created in the Pikes Peak Cog Railway lot at the base of the Incline. In exchange, the cog would get specially-designated parking spots on Ruxton Avenue.
• Pets would be banned.
• The Incline would be closed dawn to dusk. (Sorry, full moon hikers.)
• Barr Trail trailhead would become a pay parking lot with a fee structure that encourages all-day and overnight use and discourages short-term Incline use.
• To manage the sometimes cutthroat parking situation on Ruxton Avenue, 59 of the roughly 159 parking spaces on the street would be reserved for residents. Many of the others would be limited to 3-hour parking. Manitou officials would look for an area to build a bigger trailhead with more parking.
• Social trails connecting the top of the Incline to Barr Trail would be closed and a more sustainable connection would be built.
• A coalition of volunteers and professionals would stabilize the ties and create drainage controls for the 25 percent of the trail that is in poor condition, then continue to improve the trail as time and funds allow.
Ideas and comments on the draft plan are welcome at Thursday’s meeting.
Incline plan public review meeting
7 p.m. Thursday
Manitou Springs City Hall, 606 Manitou Ave.
