I hiked with Peggy Parr for the first time in 1993. It was April, and Cheyenne Canyon’s trails were still clogged with thigh-deep snow. There were five women who formed a loosely organized hiking group with Peggy, and I had been invited to write a story for The Gazette about the group’s treks. We post-holed through the deep snow, covering seven miles in about four hours. We had a six-minute lunch break. Afterward, Parr said she “took it easy” on me because we had never met before and she wasn’t sure about my hiking stamina.
She was 70 then and I was …much younger. And she kicked my butt. We hiked many more times over the next decade and each time, Peggy entertained with a story or two, including her chance encounter with a naked hiker on the Barr Trail and her discovery of a dead body that had been thrown over the side of Gold Camp Road (when she was a member of El Paso County Search and Rescue).
But Peggy never talked much, and was frankly and openly annoyed by hiking groups that she determined too chatty for her tastes. She lived near Cheyenne Canyon, and that was where she could be found much of the time. But she also treasured Barr Trail and spent many days there, stopping only for short breaks at the Lunch Tree (remember the Lunch Tree?) on the way up or down.
She told me once that she only felt her age when she looked in the mirror, and that when that happened, it was “quite shocking.”
But she was philosophical about aging and hiking, and told me for a story that ran in The Gazette, “As the hiker picks up age, he can still hike quite fast and quite far but he doesn’t want to. He has gotten some wisdom with his years. He walks along, and stops to pause and see the woods.”
Peggy died April 2 at age 87.
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Tags: Colorado Springs, hiking, Pikes Peak
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