The Pike National Forest is located in the Front Range of Colorado, USA, west of Colorado Springs and including Pikes Peak. The forest encompasses 1,106,604 acres (4,478 km²) within Clear Creek, Teller, Park, Jefferson, Douglas and El Paso counties. The major rivers draining the forest are the South Platte and Fountain Creek. Rampart Reservoir, a large artificial body of water, is located within the forest.
The forest is named after American explorer Zebulon Pike.
Much of the bedrock within Pike National Forest is made up of the coarse, pink to orange Pikes Peak granite.
Read more about Pike National Forest: Administration, Hayman Fire, Wilderness Areas
Famous quotes containing the words pike, national and/or forest:
“Did you ever hear tell of Sweet Betsy from Pike.
Who crossed the wide mountains with her lover Ike,”
—Unknown. Sweet Betsey from Pike (l. 1–2)
“I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)