The day before, we had done a recce run to the summit, but it was so foggy then I could've been driving on the moon for all I knew. Peeking out over the top of a hill, one of the last of the dozen or so spotters the organizers had placed along the way came into view. His was a red flag, but I wished it were checkered to make it official. Flat-out past him, and I hit the stop button on our flight recorder. All three of us let out a collective sigh as I put the Jeep into park, jumped out, and took a deep lungful of the rare air depleted by 45 percent its normal oxygen content. Whew! I kissed the red dirt at my trembling feet. I had done it.
Not long afterward, Phil Leyton idled up in his pickup. "How'd you do?" A few keyboard strokes later, "15 minutes, 52 seconds!" I erupted. "Nothing to be ashamed of," he noted. "Like I said, you'll be back." Only after I had landed back home and watched Ari Vatenen in the "Climb Dance" film (do a Web search--it's breathtaking) a hundred times, did I learn that my pace would've been an overall record breaker in, get this, 1938. That is until Louis Unser made his 15:49.90 run that same season. Still, I can say I did it. I brought the Jeep (and all of us) back in original condition, and I have a T-shirt and these photos to prove it. But Phil was right. Just like the Baja 1000, one taste leaves you wanting more.
The End of an Era
At 6 a.m. on Saturday, August 6, 2005, only the first two miles of the course were paved--they'd been covered up in 2003. The rest of the treacherous two-lane route was a degraded granite road, conspicuously lacking guardrails that just might keep a misplaced tire from turning into a minute-long tumble down the mountain. That was, until 6:10 a.m. when the three of us roared past the construction crew at mile-marker 13, just above Glen Cove. The first guy in line waved a yellow flag and made the bobbing palm-down signal for me to take it easy. He didn't realize the rest of his crew, standing behind him, were all doing their impression of Pete Townshend's guitar windmill. Whom do you think I obliged? As I glanced in the rearview mirror, I saw the heavy machinery move into place, covering up my tire tracks and rooster-tail remnants.
Under pressure of environmentalists, the private-enterprise company that runs the Pikes Peak mountain park set into motion a paving project that will seal the entire sacred route by 2012. The mile-long section above Glen Cove, leading to and soon to include those famous switchbacks known as the Ws, is the first step in that process. Once completed, the race will never be the same. Ironically, the predictions are that times will get slower due to the difficulty to slide a vehicle rally-style through the corners. So by just a few minutes, I was the last person to have raced up Pikes Peak in its largely original state.