Although Ute Valley Park is surrounded by homes, most of the trail seems as if you are deep in the wilderness.

The most spectacular landmark is a hogback ridge, but it also has many sandstone cliffs and mesas and plus some flat and wooded areas.

So hiking in this park has many rich experiences of interesting landscapes and formations that can be discovered of many interesting intertwining trails.

And then there are some spectacular views of Pikes Peak one discovers as one reaches the high points of the trail.

Below are a couple of views from above looking down to just one section.

My hiking partner was a bit tired, so we took this hike at a very leisurely pace and didn’t go on all the loops. Which means there are some to be discovered on another visit to this park in the future. We set off on a lovely green path that took us deep into the park.

As we walked down the path, we had a glimpse of a snow covered Pikes Peak. Just a hint of what we would view later on the trail.

There are also views of the mountains that were burned in 2012 by the Waldo Canyon Fire. That is a sad sight indeed.

To the far right one can see a large bird flying in the sky above the park. There are eagles and hawks that build nests all around this park.

These were a couple that caught our attention. I am sure we missed seeing many others. We didn’t hike all of the trails and missed some of the most heavily wooded areas on the more southern trails.

What we had to constantly be on the watch for were Mountain Bikers. They were everywhere and fast moving in many sections of the trails. It seemed there were more than normal on a weekday. This is a favorite trail for Mountain Bikers and with some other trails closed because of flood damage on them in 2013 I am sure many more have come to use this trail than in past year. In fact the parking lot was totally full when we arrived, we had to wait for a couple of cars, including a mountain biker, to pull out before we could park. So it has probably experiencing more use this year since those paths were destroyed last year.

Most were polite and would call out to let us know they were coming up behind us, so we could move to one side or the other of the trail. But I did get startled a couple of times as one came around me with very little warning.