Santa Fe trail
Rating 4.3: flat
http://www.elpasoco.com/parks.asp
In my latest post I wrote about the Santa Fe Trail, but it was incomplete and without pictures because I only ran on the trail for a mile or two. I actually failed a second time to run the Santa Fe trail, but it was an interesting story, and can mostly be avoided if you decide to run it. After Google Earthing, yeh it’s a verb now, but spell checker disagrees, the trail I thought that I had a pretty good understanding of its location. I thought that I could just travel to Palmer Lake through the Monument exit, off I-25. This logic was mostly true, but I drove to the wrong side of the lake, and I couldn’t see where the actual trail starts because it was getting dark. In conclusion, a lack of planning and a random bobcat siting diverted my run a few more days. This mistake sucked because I had used up some car borrowing political capital just so I could go running, and I just ended up going to Five Guys without exercising. After some extensive research on the El Paso County P&R website, I had a better idea where the trail began, plus I thought I may have seen the trailhead after failure two. Finally this past Sunday I took a much needed study break and I drove back to the Monument trail head to go for a run.
Once I finally got to the trail head there was a well labeled map, I guess it’s getting its internet debut, which showed where the different trailheads were. There were a few different trails; the first was the Front Range Trail System that haphazardly connects different areas from Pueblo, Colorado to Denver. Within the FRTS, the Santa Fe Regional Trail runs from the South Gate of the Air Force Academy to Palmer Lake/Monument, Colorado. The Santa Fe Trail is about 16 miles in total, but is only well marked from the South Gate of the Air Force Academy to the North Gate of the Academy and also the path that I ran on Sunday
Starting at the Monument trailhead the well packed dirt trail is guided by the Santa Fe Railroad which winds around the different rock formations, cool, but less interesting than the Garden of the Gods, for about 3.2 miles until it tapers out alongside Palmer Lake. The trail as part of the FRTS has three mile markers and one imaginary mile marker. The beginning mile marker is the imaginary one, if there were a marker than it would read 53 miles, the distance from the beginning of the FRT in Pueblo? After that there is the 54th, 55th, and the 56th mile marker placed just before the lake. This means if you run all the way to the lake and around it you have run about 6.2 miles or 10K.
The actual trail started off a little rocky, figuratively, the first thing that you see besides the gorgeous Rocky Mountains and the awesome rock formations is a storage area for El Paso county park vehicles. Not only was it ugly, but the vehicle area hadn’t been maintained so it was just a giant mess of ugly white utility vehicles and weeds. The trail did get progressively better there were some pine trees at many points whose foliage had fused together to create some shade over the trail to grant protection from the brutal December sun. Seriously, it has been 50-60 degrees here for the past week, Dec 14th timeframe. After the small forest type areas, about a mile into the trail, it continues along the railroad to wrap around some rock formations in a relatively secluded area. Then it continues for another two miles to Palmer Lake. I don’t know much about Palmer Lake, but it appears as you some around the last corner of the trail. I’ve included some pictures of the lake.
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