Never Drive Pikes Peak Without Checking Your Brakes First

The Pikes Peak Highway is a 19-mile toll road that climbs more than 6,700 feet from near Cascade, Colorado to the 14,115-foot summit of Pikes Peak. Most people worry about the climb. The climb is not the problem. Thirteen miles into the descent, at Glen Cove, rangers stop cars and point an infrared thermometer at the brake rotors. Above roughly 300 degrees Fahrenheit you are directed into the parking lot to sit until the metal cools. From the summit down to that checkpoint is about 4,500 feet of descent in six miles, with no flat section to let anything cool and no alternate way down. The road exists because Spencer Penrose paid for it. He put 500,000 dollars of his own money into converting a carriage road into an automobile highway in 1915, because he owned the Broadmoor hotel and needed a reason for tourists to come to Colorado Springs. For most of the next century the upper road was loose gravel. Around 150 million pounds of it washed off the mountain every year, which was the same amount that had to be hauled back up every year to keep the surface usable. The same weight of rock went up and came down, forever. It filled alpine ponds and buried the forest floor below the road under two to four feet of gravel. The asphalt you drive on today is not there because anyone decided the road needed improving. It is there because the Sierra Club sued Colorado Springs under the Clean Water Act in 1998, the city lost, and the settlement required the whole thing to be paved. That work finished on 1 October 2011. Sources and further reading: City of Colorado Springs, Pikes Peak America's Mountain, mountain driving guidance and highway operations History Colorado, Race to the Clouds Colorado Encyclopedia, Pikes Peak Sierra Club v. City of Colorado Springs, Clean Water Act litigation and settlement records, 1998 to 2011 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb historical records If you have driven the Pikes Peak Highway, tell me in the comments what it was actually like, especially coming down. The people who drive it regularly know things about that road that no report records.