The woods around the five-mile mark of Barr Trail have been quiet for hours, with the exception of chirping birds and an occasional woodpecker, when Zach Miller rounds a corner in a bright yellow jacket and snowshoes, thumping along the trail and spraying up snow as he runs downhill.
It’s not uncommon to find him on these trails. In fact, it’s more unusual not to see him out there as he trains for his next high-caliber race or tends to his responsibilities as caretaker of Barr Camp, the off-the-grid cabin halfway up Pikes Peak. Miller, a 31-year-old world-class ultrarunner, has been a caretaker at the camp for four and a half years. The job has included a range of responsibilities including late night rescues, cooking breakfast for dozens of eager campers, cleaning the compost toilets and making 13-plus-mile errands down to town.
That’s been his life for half of the past decade. But in early April, he’ll make a different kind of descent.
Because this time, the man who has called the mountain home all those years is coming down, for good.
Barr Camp is nestled all in its lonesome at 10,200 feet in the Pike National Forest, just west of Colorado Springs. The grounds include a main cabin, yurt, upper cabin and a handful of lean-to shelters.
The campground is almost always covered in snow through the winter. In the thick of tree trunks and branches, you may not realize you’re there until you see the wooden fencing, which invites weary travelers across a short bridge, under a welcome sign, and to the front deck. After the climb to the camp — which is six and a half miles and 3,800 feet uphill from the main trailhead in Manitou Springs — the cabin somehow feels both out of place and perfectly put on the mountainside.
Continue onward and the Barr Trail would lead you another eight miles and 4,000 feet up to the summit of Pikes Peak.
It’s a route Miller knows well. He has served as a full-time caretaker at Barr Camp for the past four and a half years, plus an additional six months when he was in training for the role.
He still remembers thinking the cabin was a bit peculiar when he first stumbled upon it, which wasn’t long after he moved to the Manitou Springs area from Pennsylvania in 2014.
“Like, there’s this cabin and I think there’s people in there but what are these people like?” he said he remembered thinking. “They just live up here in the woods? It seemed kind of weird.”
He’d soon find himself in an ironically similar situation: Miller offered up his bedroom to his roommate’s parents while they were visiting, and made camp on Pikes Peak near the cabin. He’d run down the trail to work and then run back up at the end of the day. To him, it was a perfect set-up — he was knocking out his commute and training for his next race all in one.
During that time, he gradually became familiar with the Barr Camp caretakers. When he learned that the board of directors for the camp were looking for a few new caretakers in 2015, he jokingly asked his sister if she’d want to do it too. To his surprise, she was all on board.
“We applied and we weren’t sure we’d get it,” Miller said. “Then we did, and it took off from there.”
Miller started training for the position part-time in the spring of 2015 before moving up full-time in July.
He quickly learned that the job demanded a slew of skills.