Pikes Peak

The orange line was built as a toll road in 1915. The race that made it famous was invented the following year, to get people to notice the road.

Spencer Penrose had made money in mining and wanted more visitors at his hotel in Colorado Springs. He widened the old carriage road up the mountain, charged fifty cents a car, and then organized an automobile race to the summit so the papers would write about it.

The first Pikes Peak Auto Hill Climb ran over three days in August 1916. Rea Lentz, twenty-two years old, won it in 20 minutes and 55.6 seconds. It has run almost every year since and is now the second oldest race in America, behind only the Indianapolis 500.

Twelve and a half miles, 156 turns, and 4,720 feet of climbing. The surface was gravel until 2011, when a lawsuit over erosion into the tundra finished the paving.