    
Location: The Mile High City | I have driven the De Soto over Trail Ridge Road several times and that gets up to about 12,500 feet above sea level. I have driven to the top of Mt. Evans and Pikes Peak, but not in the De Soto. Both of those are 14'ers. I installed an altimeter in the De Soto, so maybe I will give one of those a shot!
They are pretty hairy in a modern day vehicle. The last time I drove up Mt. Evans, they were testing a bunch of new GM products. Now I understand both roads are paved. I think I would use the gears to get down, rather than the brakes. |
Expert
Posts: 1288
| Lads --
Living here in Colorado Springs at the foot of Peek's Pike (uh, Pikes Peak), I have been up it a few times as well as Mt. Evans since they are great places to take acrophobic relatives and house guests. The road up "The Peak," while quite not the "highway" as it's titled, is paved all the way to the top, or 14,114 feet. The same is true of that at Mt. Evans, but the Evans road doesn't go all the way to the top (or 14,271 feet), just to the Crest House, though this is at 14,120 and thus six feet higher than The Peak. But the actual crest is a fairly easy stroll from the parking lot. I think the road up to Sandia Crest outside Albuquerque is a bit more difficult, although paved and only up to 10,678, because the turns are a bit sharper and more obscured with greater forest growth. An even more interesting cruise is over the "Skyline Drive" west of Canon City. This paved single lane, one-way road is built upon the crest of an uplifted portion of the Pierre Shale formation. It literally is on the top edge of the shale and follows it like a roller coaster for about three miles.
The only "situations" I've encountered driving these mountain roads usually involved getting stuck behind some "flat land tourister" with his white knuckles crushing his steering wheel while he keeps both feet on the brake -- even going uphill! This can generate a problem with such cars as an '86 Trans Am which had no grill and relied on an air dam to scoop cold air up to the radiator cores -- it actually started to overheat and the %*@$&^ flatlander was too afraid to move over so I could pass. However, using an all-synchro multi-speed manual trans makes both the ascent and descent more fun.
The DeSoto Division of Chrysler furnished that '56 Adventurer Pace Car, but I believe it was prepared by a local dealer, now Perkins Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep. The Pikes Peak Hill Climb is actually the second oldest automoble race in the U.S. (the Indy 500, of course, is the oldest), but it generates all kinds of foreign interest.
Joe Godec |
Pikes Peak Hill Climb
