The Manitou Incline

Look up at the mountainside and you may see a nearly vertical scar climbing straight into the sky, dotted with people hauling themselves upward one step at a time. This is the Manitou Incline, one of the most punishing hikes in Colorado, and it began life as a railroad. Construction started in nineteen hundred seven, not for tourists but for engineering.

The Incline was a narrow gauge funicular railway, a cable-drawn car that hauled materials to the top of the mountain to build a hydroelectric plant and a gravity-fed waterline that supplied both Manitou and Colorado Springs. Once the construction was done, an entrepreneur named Doctor Newton Brumback bought the line and turned it into a scenic tourist ride, a sixteen-minute climb to a park at the top. The Broadmoor magnate Spencer Penrose acquired it in nineteen twenty-three.

For decades tourists rode the cars up for the view. Then in nineteen ninety a rockslide washed out the rail bed, and with high maintenance costs the ride shut down for good. The rails were pulled up, leaving behind the wooden railroad ties, which now form a brutal natural staircase.

Climbing it was technically trespassing for years, until two thousand thirteen, when the land issues were resolved and the hike became legal. It gains roughly two thousand feet in under a mile, and it has become a rite of passage for the region.