The scene comes back to Mary Burger like a dream: crystal-clear waters tucked between stream-lined meadows and forests and Pikes Peak’s granite shoulders, rising and falling around this glacier-carved basin above 10,000 feet. This is Pikes Peak’s south slope, where Burger led volunteers a lifetime ago as a founder of nonprofit Friends of the Peak. They built a trail that would go from McReynolds Reservoir to the uppermost Boehmer Reservoir — a trail to meet the first visitors of South Slope Recreation Area in 2014.
Very few, if any, can be found on the trail today. Ten years ago, the gate lifting at South Slope symbolized the end of a century-long wait to access the waters tightly guarded by Colorado Springs Utilities. Still today, the landscape feels out of reach for many — including for Burger, 73, who indeed describes it more like a dreamscape.
“I know a lot of people who wanted access,” said Burger, thinking back to negotiations more than a decade ago, “and they’re very frustrated we own the property but we don’t have access.” Dense forests and lush greenery cover an overlook at the south end of the Boehmer Reservoir on Thursday, July 11, at the South Slope Recreation Area. Into its 11th season — typically the end of May through September — South Slope is open three days a week, Thursday-Saturday, to a limited number of people willing to pay for a $20 permit and make the long drive out on rough, winding roads outside Victor.
The isolation, the plac.