Winter Hikes and Sacred Trees

Jim and I have been going on winter hikes the past few weeks. I took these pictures at Fox Run Park. There was an article in the paper last week about these twisted trees. I always wondered how trees grew in such an unnatural way. Turns out these trees are sacred and were cut this way so the Ute tribes prayers would be heard for 800 years, and that the trees are twisted to point to Pikes Peak. As you can see we found a few of them on our usual trail. When these trees were cut to form these twists they would have been much shorter and closer to the ground. many of these sacred trees have been destroyed during development and our recent forest fires.