America’s Mountain
In the mountaineering parlance of the Western United States, a “fourteener” is a mountain peak with an elevation of at least 14,000 ft. The 96 fourteeners in the United States are all west of the Mississippi River and Colorado has the most (53) of any single state.
Last week, Tony and I—on a two-month hang-out with our grandson in Denver, Colorado—drove to the top of the most famous fourteener of all: Pikes Peak, often called “America’s Mountain.”
In my family, driving across the country has been a multi-generational tradition. Mountains were the stars and Pikes Peak was mythical. My Swedish grandmother—who worked in a match factory in Boston in the late 1800’s, attended Radcliffe College, then married my California grandfather turned mathematician—had Pikes Peak on her list of places to see as she and her beloved motored their Model T from Northwestern University in Chicago, where my grandfather taught, to Redlands, CA where he spent his boyhood.
Multiple sclerosis soon darkened her story, and I don’t know whether my grandmother ever made it to the summit of America’s Mountain—a hole in our family lore.
But the quest did not end there.
At age five, more than half a century later, I had my own Pikes Peak moment as I succumbed to motion sickness in the backseat of our family’s 1950 Plymouth station wagon, flanked by my two older brothers, as we wound our way to the top of the 14,115 foot summit. We were enroute from Princeton, New Jersey, where my father taught math at the university, to his summer employment at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, CA. (Perhaps you’ve figured this out: math, mountains, and cross-country trips were a trinity in my family.)
It’s a vague childhood memory, but reconstructed I think it went like this: While everyone else took in the high altitude panorama, I holed up in the car, praying I wouldn’t throw up and dreaming of the small peanut-shaped swimming pool at our Denver motel. My older brother, who leaned towards gloating over my misfortunes, likely purred with an account of what I’d missed.
Last week, at age 75, I experienced Pikes Peak under my own steam, courtesy of our 2023 Subaru.
The view from the summit was breathtaking, literally and figuratively. I videoed the panorama and sent it to my brother in New England with the caption, “Seeing what I missed long ago.”
Though it was midweek, tourists packed the overlooks offering views in every direction. A group of Amish visitors posed for a photo next to a monument with stanzas from “America the Beautiful.” A couple in their sixties put down their backpacks after hiking the 13-mile trail to the summit, an 8,000 foot ascent. Bikers replenished their water bottles and checked their brakes, preparing for the coast down the Pikes Peak Highway with its 156 turns over 12 miles.
America’s Mountain
An expansive exhibit at the visitor center at the top of Pikes Peak helped me understand why it became America’s Mountain, despite its height placing it 59th among the country’s highest mountains.
You may not be a mountain buff, but it’s a remarkable story.
Like almost all histories in the Western United States, Pikes Peaks’ begins with Native Americans—the first Americans—who roamed the Rocky Mountains some 15,000 years ago. Known as the Clovis Culture, they were descendants of an ancient people who crossed the Bering Land Bridge between Russia and Alaska at the end of the last ice age.
Centuries later, in 1700, the Ute Indians became the peak’s title owners, referring to it as “Sun Mountain Sitting Big.” They believed that the entire world was created at this location by the Great Spirit who poured ice and snow through a hole in the sky to make the mountain.
(In the Pacific Northwest, where we’ve put down new roots, it’s routine for public events to open with a “land acknowledgement” to the Native Americans whose land we stole.)
Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Pikes Peak became part of the United States. In 1806, American brigadier and explorer Zebulon Montgomery Pike, after whom the peak is named, was sent on an expedition to explore the new territory as well as establish “friendly relations” with Native American nations. On November 15, Pike spotted the magnificent peak and, a week later, he and several of his men set out to climb it. They had underestimated the mountain’s size, however, and due to the lack of proper gear and treacherous weather, they turned back.
Fourteen years later, a young and better equipped botanist, part of a new expeditionary mission, made the first recorded summit of Pikes Peak.
In 1858, gold was discovered in the area of present-day Denver and newspapers referred to the gold-mining area as “Pike’s Peak,” giving rise to the Colorado Gold Rush slogan Pike’s Peak or Bust. In fact, major gold deposits were not discovered in the Pikes Peak area until the Cripple Creek Mining District was developed southwest of Pikes Peak and led, in 1893, to one of the last major gold rushes in the lower 48 states.
Defying gravity
As Tony and I entered the summit visitor center last Wednesday, I noticed a warning sign that explained:
At the peak, the partial pressure of oxygen is only about 60% of that at sea level. Water boils at 186 °F (86 °C) at 14,000 feet, rather than 212 °F (100 °C) at sea level. A faster rate of respiration is required by humans and animals not acclimated to high altitudes. Altitude sickness may develop in those who are sensitive or who overexert themselves.
Who would have thought that Pikes Peak, with these cautions, would become the most visited mountain in North America and the second most visited mountain in the world, behind Japan’s Mount Fuji? Its early boosters defied gravity. Manipulating the landscape was their groove.
In 1888, the Cascade to Pikes Peak Wagon Road was completed, offering carriage rides to the summit for those who did not want to hike or ride horseback. In 1916, the wagon road became a highway. A 1922 poster for the Pikes Peak Highway promised visitors “The maximum grade [of the mountain] is ten percent; all makes of cars make the trip, but your car does the best, no matter what kind of car you drive.”
Last week, after Tony and I paid the $30 toll at the entrance to the highway, the toll taker offered the same assurances: as long as we stuck to low-gear, our car would do fine.
In 1890, the mountain’s boosters came up with another option for reaching the summit: a cog railway. It remains the highest cog railway in North America. This past Mother’s Day, our young Denver family celebrated by hopping aboard the Pikes Peak cog railway only to be stopped a few miles short of the summit by two feet of new snow.
In 1908, local resident and tour guide Fred Barr began taking tourists on burro treks up the slopes of the surrounding mountains, and in 1921 he and a work crew finished Barr Trail, a burro route to the top of Pikes Peak. The Barr Trail remains the most popular human-powered route to the summit, thirteen miles (one way) with a 7,800 foot gain in altitude.
Tony and I looked for the trail’s end as we circled the summit; we have become regular, though moderate, hikers now that we live nestled against Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains. In the uber-athletic Colorado culture, we were not surprised to see a group of trail runners (yes, at 14,000 feet) sprinting to the finish.
Indeed, races have added to Pikes Peak’s standing.
The annual Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, or “The Race to the Clouds,” inaugurated in 1916, is the country’s highest altitude auto race and the second oldest motor race in the United States. The 12.4-mile event attracts racers from around the world driving at average speeds up to 75 miles per hour around more than 150 perilous turns and 1,000-foot drop-offs. The current race record, 07:57.148, was set in 2016 in a prototype electric Volkswagen.
Since 1993, the Barr Trail has been the location of the Pikes Peak Marathon. Due to the hazards and difficulty of the race, only 800 runners compete each year. The record time for going up and down the trail is 3 hours, 16 minutes, 30 seconds. It is the third oldest marathon in the country.
Women in ascent
Though my grandmother (probably) never made it to the top of Pikes Peak, perhaps she was inspired by other women who did.
In the 2015 book Early Ascents on Pikes Peak, there is an account of the first-known woman to scale Pikes Peak. A suffragist, abolitionist, mountaineer and journalist, Julia “Annie” Archibald Holmes took on the mountain in August of 1858 after several weeks of convincing her husband that the journey was a good idea. The author, Woody Smith, writes:
Though it took them several days to summit, the Holmes duo were well prepared for their journey with a supply list that would leave the REI crowd in tears. Included in the 35-pound (probably canvas or burlap) backpack Holmes carried up the mountain were:0 pounds of bread, 1 pound of hog meat, 3/4 pound of coffee, 1 pound of sugar, and 5 quilts.”
Thirty-five years later, in July 1893, Katharine Lee Bates, a professor of English literature at Wellesley College on summer’s leave at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, wrote the song “America the Beautiful,” inspired by the mountain.
“One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak,” Bates writes. “We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.” (Wikipedia)
In 1916, thirty women belonging to the National Woman’s Party (described as militants at the time) motored to the summit of Pikes Peak to plant a flagpole drawing attention to the proposed 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would grant women the right to vote. The amendment was ratified in 1920.
Reportedly, the suffragist and mountaineer Julia “Annie” Archibald Holmes, when she reached the Pikes Peak summit, wrote a note to her mother: “Nearly everyone tried to discourage me from attempting it, but I believed that I should succeed; and now here I am, and I feel that I would not have missed this glorious sight for anything at all.”
Go Annie!
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