Pikes Peak United States

Legendary

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Zebulon Pike never reached the top of the mountain named after him. He tried in November 1806, got turned back by a blizzard around 10,000 feet, and wrote that no one would ever climb it.

Fourteen years later, a botanist named Edwin James walked up in July with two companions and made it in two days. He picked the first blue columbine ever recorded, now Colorado's state flower.

The mountain rises 14,115 feet just west of Colorado Springs. It stands alone at the edge of the Great Plains, so it looks bigger than mountains that are actually taller.

Long before Pike, the Ute people called it Tavakiev, meaning Sun Mountain. Spanish explorers in the 1700s named it El Capitán.

Pike was a young army officer sent by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the land the United States had just bought in the Louisiana Purchase. He spotted the peak from far across the plains and called it the Great Peak.

In 1858, gold was found in Colorado, and thousands of people headed west in covered wagons. Many painted "Pikes Peak or Bust" on the canvas, even though the gold was actually 85 miles away.

The mountain became a symbol of the whole rush. The slogan stuck.

In the summer of 1893, a college professor named Katharine Lee Bates rode to the summit in a wagon pulled by mules. The view of the plains stretching east took her breath away.

That night in her hotel, she wrote a poem beginning "O beautiful for spacious skies." It became the song "America the Beautiful," and the "purple mountain majesties" in the lyrics are Pikes Peak.

By then, the mountain was already the easiest 14,000-foot peak in the country to climb without climbing. A carriage road opened in 1888, and a cog railway began carrying passengers to the top in 1891.

The first car drove up in 1901. Today the mountain gets more visitors than almost any other in the world, second only to Mount Fuji in Japan.

Ride the cog railway from Manitou Springs, the highest railway in the United States, and watch the trees disappear as you climb above the tree line. Drive the 19-mile Pikes Peak Highway if you'd rather go at your own pace, but book a timed-entry ticket in summer. At the top, try a doughnut from the Summit House, made with a special recipe that works at high altitude.