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Pike National Forest
Colorado
Perhaps as embedded in American folklore as the Brooklyn Bridge, Pike's Peak is America's easternmost 14'er (a mountain with an elevation of 14,000 feet or higher). The sentinel rises suddenly, as if to declare this is where the prairie ends, and has greeted settlers heading west much in the same way that the Statue of Liberty greeted immigrants into New York Harbor.
Spruce Grove campground
It is atop Pike's Peak that the song"America the Beautiful" was written, and understandably so. The view from this lofty height is changing on a weekly basis as Colorado's suburban wall of sprawl stretches ever further up and down the corridor between Denver and Colorado Springs. This ecologically conscious suburbia is snaked with numerous green belts and effectively serves as the eastern boundary of Pike National Forest.
Just as these two urban centers function as iron lungs for the region's economy, the forest serves as its green lungs, where the exploding population spends its weekends seeking solitude and a place to hike, bike, fish, explore, and sometimes simply a place to chill.
There are still pockets of quiet to be found within these mountains - - such as the Mount Evans and Lost Creek Wilderness - - where visitors can experience the rawness of an uncontrollable earth as they walk across moraine-covered valleys and into giant amphitheaters of silence surrounded by glacial cirques. Wander through thick stands of cone-bearing forest, and at lower elevations listen to the soothing sound of aspen leaves rustling in the mountain breeze.
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