The ‘Pikes Peak or Bust’ Challenge : Mountaintop Activities Can Leave You Breathless

Waitresses at the nation’s highest restaurant here atop 14,110-foot Pikes Peak are ever alert for pale faces, as they call those about to faint.

“Almost every day we get one or more customers who pass out as we take their order or deliver their food,” Jill Knudson, 18, said. “They can’t take the high altitude.”

What do you do when that happens? “You remain calm,” she replied. “Only thing you can do. We have oxygen and smelling salts ready. Hopefully, you catch them before they hit the floor.”

Such is one slice of life in Colorado, which has America’s greatest concentration of towering mountains. It is a state with more than 1,000 peaks over 10,000 feet, one of only four states with mountains soaring above the 14,000-foot mark.

Colorado has 54 peaks higher than 14,000 feet; Alaska has 19; California, 12, including Mt. Whitney at 14,494 feet, highest in the contiguous 48. Washington has three.

Seventeen of Alaska’s highest peaks are higher than Mt. Whitney, including Mt. McKinley at 20,320 feet, highest in North America.

Pikes Peak, Colorado’s 31st highest mountain, is also the highest place in the United States where people live and work on a continuous basis several months of the year.

‘Sick the First Night’

This summer, 30 men and women, two dozen of them college students like Jill Knudson, who came here from her home in Titonka, Iowa, are working at the Summit House, a Pikes Peak restaurant and gift shop.

“Everybody who works here gets sick the first night they spend on top of the mountain,” said Bill Carle, 58, owner of the Summit House. “Dizziness, headaches, nausea. They toss and turn, unable to sleep. It’s like being on a ship on a rough sea the first night out. It takes three or four days to get adjusted to this altitude.”

He ought to know. He has been spending six to seven months on top of Pikes Peak for the past 36 years. Before Carle took over, his wife’s parents owned and operated the restaurant and gift shop, beginning in 1916.

People who meet the “Pikes Peak or Bust” challenge and drive the 20 miles on the narrow, winding road--half paved, half dirt--or ride the 8.9-mile Pikes Peak Cog Railway to the top generally spend, at most, an hour or two in the thin air.

They enjoy the incredible view, maybe have a bite to eat or at least a cup of coffee, perhaps buy a “We Made It! Pikes Peak” bumper sticker or other souvenir, experience shortness of breath, the weird, woozy lightheaded feeling--and then leave.

Problems With Thin Air

Even Carle has problems with thin air. He admitted: “I’m beginning to puff a little now that I’m getting older.” So, instead of sleeping up here, he drives down to the Glen Cove Inn, run by his wife at 11,425 feet, and is more comfortable.

Yet, his mother-in-law, Grace Wilson, was active running the place and living on top of Pikes Peak until she was 87.

Valerie Voyles, 36, manager of the mountaintop establishment, has for the last 18 years come up in the middle of April through deep snow drifts. She stays until mid-November, leaving only three times during her long stay, then for only a few hours each day.

“I feel better up here. I think living at this altitude improves your health and life expectancy. You’ve heard about people living to be 120, 130 and 140 in the Himalayas and high mountains in South America,” she noted.

Scientists have discovered that flowers and animals living at higher elevations in Colorado live longer than those living in lower areas. At the town of 9,896-foot-high Fairplay there is a monument to Prunes, a burro who packed supplies to miners for more than 60 years.

“It’s the pure air up here,” Voyles said. “You have to breathe slow and deep. I walk a lot. I love it. It’s like being on top of the world. In the mornings when it’s socked in it looks like you could walk to Kansas on the clouds below. Kansas is 150 miles from here.”

Magnificent Night Air

She tells of the magnificent night sky “with a moon you could almost reach out and touch,” the dazzling lights of Denver below, looking down the backbone of the Continental Divide from Wyoming to New Mexico.

When she vacations from November to April, Voyles travels to high mountain country in Scandinavia and Europe. She avoids lower elevations.

No carbonated soft drinks sold here. Carbonated beverage cans explode at this elevation. Nor does Carle sell alcoholic beverages on the mountaintop. “Flatlanders can’t handle alcohol at this elevation,” he said.

Leona Reinert, 56, is a Pikes Peak cook four months each year. She works in a ravioli factory in her home town, LaPorte, Ind., the rest of the year. “Everything about cooking is different up here,” she said. “It takes two hours to boil water. Oh, it boils before that but doesn’t get hot enough. It takes twice as long to bake a cake. It takes a half hour to get a soft boiled egg.”

Bryan Staddon, 28, engineer on the Pikes Peak Cog Railway, which has been carrying passengers to the top of the mountain ever since 1890, tells of the lightning storms. “Lots of lightning on top, especially summer afternoons. Static electricity is everywhere in the air. You can smell it. You can feel it. Your hair stands on end. Static is all around you. It stings your ears.”

Temperatures are generally in the 40s and 50s on summer days. It freezes nearly every night. A snowstorm may happen any day of the year on Pikes Peak.

Wellesley College English professor Katharine Lee Bates was so inspired by what she saw from Pikes Peak during her visit here in 1893, she sat down and wrote the words to this nation’s national hymn, “America the Beautiful.”

The highest road in America isn’t the one up Pikes Peak; it’s the 27-mile, narrow paved road from Idaho Springs to the top of Mt. Evans, 14,264 feet. The road winds its way around the shoulders of Colorado’s 14th highest peak without a protection rail, hanging precariously over steep cliffs that drop off several hundred feet.

Coloradans like Greg Miller, 25, a law student, and his friend Lori MacDonald, 24, drive up to Mt. Evans for the exhilarating view. A small University of Denver high altitude research lab on the peak is used by scientists from time to time but not continuously during summer.

Every weekend, from June through August, Dave Moore, 30, a Lakewood, Colo., chemist, runs to the top of the mountain and back. Why run here? “I’m a masochist,” he said, laughing. “No, really, it’s a sense of accomplishment. I look at the top of Mt. Evans from my office in Denver during the week and think to myself, I run to that.

‘I Get Fuzzy-Headed’

“It will either kill you or do wonders for you. Sure I get dizzy, have a hard time breathing at times, get headaches. Sometimes I get fuzzy-headed from the effects of the altitude. The brain is the first thing that suffers with the lack of oxygen.

“It’s like banging your head against the wall. It feels so good when you stop. . . .”

Earning Scout Patch

Hiking up Mt. Evans was Denver scoutmaster Al Vitil, 45, and three Boy Scouts, Scott Unruh, 11, Doug Rothenburger, 14, and Mark Thompson, 12. They were hiking six miles up and six miles down to earn their Boy Scout Fourteener Patch, which is given to Colorado scouts for climbing any one of the state’s 54 highest mountains.

One of the most spectacular scenic drives in America has got to be the 48 miles through Rocky Mountain National Park on Trail Ridge Drive alongside 62 snow-shrouded peaks, all higher than 12,000 feet. One-third of the park is so high it is above the tree line.

Eight miles of the road is above 11,000 feet, three miles above 12,000 feet, the highest point being Iceburg Lake at 12,183 feet. It is said to be the highest continuous road in the United States.

In the national park near the ghost town Lulu City are the headwaters of the mighty Colorado River, a pipsqueak of a stream in its beginning. Headwaters of the Rio Grande and Arkansas rivers are also in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

Rosy Mastripolito, 82, is a testimony to high country longevity. She is a lifelong resident of Leadville, elevation 10,188. It claims to be the highest incorporated town in America.

Mastripolito has been pumping gas at Rosy’s gas station, same location (new pumps now), continuously since 1930. Her husband died in 1929, leaving her with three small children to raise. She started the gas station to keep the family in groceries.

“My daddy said as long as you have the station you and the kids will have enough to eat because you have a good location,” Mastripolito said. “He was right.

“This is a good area. People from down below can’t walk and keep up with us,” she said.

People down below can’t keep up with Leadville’s high school cross-country team either. Coach Frank Mencin’s boys’ team won the last 13 out of 18 Colorado state championships; his girls’ team the last five of six state championships, tying a national record.

“Anywhere we run is lower by thousands and thousands of feet than Leadville,” explained Mencin, 33. “Our kids produce more red blood cells, carry more oxygen. They train running trails up to 13,000 feet, six days a week.”

‘The Heart Attack Season’

Football coach Doug Thompson plants “Welcome to Leadville, Elevation 10,188 Feet” signs on the edge of the football field to psych out visiting teams who take oxygen during the games to keep them going.

At St. Vincent’s Hospital, nurses and doctors call summer “the heart attack season” as each year several visitors unaccustomed to the high altitude have heart attacks.

Tailings are piled high above Leadville, one of the richest silver camps in the nation a century ago. Many famous characters of the Old West call Leadville home--Unsinkable Molly Brown, Leadville Johnny, Broken Nose Scotty and Soapy Smith.

It was here that Horace Tabor made a fortune and lost it. On his deathbed he told his wife, Baby Doe, to hang on to the Matchless Mine as it would make millions. She hung on for 36 years in poverty. She was found frozen to death in an old miner’s shack in 1935.

This is a town that constructed the gigantic Leadville Ice Palace, a 450-foot-long, 320-foot-wide, 60-foot-high castle made of 5-foot-thick solid ice blocks.

Inside was a huge ice rink, a hall of ice statuary, exhibit booths and special rooms. The Ice Palace, said to be the largest ice structure ever constructed, was open to the public from Jan. 1 to March 28, 1896.

It began to melt March 15, and on March 28 it was closed for safety reasons.

Grand Lake, altitude 8,153 feet, has been boasting since 1902 that it is the location of the world’s highest yacht club.

Ted James, 53, defensive end on the University of Nebraska 1952-53 football team, commodore of the yacht club 1980-81, claims it’s the highest, and so do all 300 members of the club. James, who has been blind for five years, believes he is the only blind person ever to be commodore of a yacht club.

But at Dillon, another town in the high country with a lake at the altitude of 9,017 feet, there also is a yacht club that claims to be the highest on earth. Members wear jackets embossed: “World’s highest yacht club.”

“They’re a good bunch of people at Grand Lake,” said attorney Vern Corporon, 48, commodore of the Dillon Yacht Club. “They were the highest yacht club for so many years. When we formed in 1968, they just didn’t have the heart to admit someone else finally topped them. They still won’t admit it.”