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Now you see them

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Contributed by: Dennis Huspeni on 12/22/2006

Pikes Peak is more than a tourist attraction and a national icon. It's home to all sorts of animals, from bull elk to yellow-bellied marmots, from bighorn sheep to bald eagles and endangered trout.

"The most common stuff we see is deer," said Mike Doty, a longtime Pikes Peak Cog Railway engineer. "Marmots are cute. We see those all the time."

Doty has taken almost 2,000 trips up - then down - America's mountain during his 13 years with the Cog, the world's highest cog railroad.

He said it's not unusual to see herds of elk above timberline during the summer.

"They like to go up there to cool off," Doty said. "Kind of like we do."
Another engineer, Steve Houser, saw a bull elk on the tracks charging the train.

"He jumped on the tracks and started coming straight for the train," Houser said. "He was huge. I saw eye to eye with him, and I'm way up high on the train."

The bull stepped off the tracks, apparently deciding the train might win that encounter.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife's Brian Dreher, a wildlife biologist, counts bighorn sheep on Pikes Peak. He estimates there are 300 to 350 sheep on the mountain.

"It's interesting that we have so many critters that live above the tree line up there," Dreher said.

Some of the animals that live on Pikes Peak include yellow-bellied marmots (otherwise know as "whistle pigs" for the way they bark at intruders); the pika, a ground squirrel with large ears; black bears; mountain lions; coyotes; rabbits; turkeys; bald and golden eagles; red-tailed hawks; ravens, the Clark nutcracker (a nuteating bird) and the infamous "camp robber" birds, the gray jay.

Some of the more unusual wildlife found there, Dreher said, include the Brazilian free-tailed bat or blue grouse. The bald eagles and the sometimes-seen-at-lower-elevations Mexian spotted owl are on the U.S. government's "threatened species" list.

Fish found in the peak's lakes include greenback cutthroat trout - an endangered species - brook trout, lake trout or rainbow trout.

"It's a higher elevation, so they have to be cold-water species," he said.
Dreher prefers watching elk and sheep.

"The sheep are indigenous," he said. "They go back to settlement times."
Dreher suggested, for those who want to spot elk herds, to head up the road as early as possible during summer. The elk like to hang out near Beaver Creek, or the big bowl off Windy Point.

"It's nothing for a person to see large herds of elk there, sometimes 100 or more," Dreher said. "Especially on those early summer mornings."
But it can take a bit of luck to spot Pikes Peak wildlife.

"It's neat to see a lot of animals and stuff," Doty said.
"But our conductors always tell people, it's not like Disneyland. You're not going to see them all the time, every time."

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