Manitou and Pikes Peak Railway

When my brother and I did a road trip from Denver up to Yellowstone I couldn't pass on the chance for a detour down to Colorado Springs and a visit to Pikes Peak at the end of our return journey.

For motorsport fans, Pikes Peak is one of the classic motorsport venues: host to an iconic hill climb complete with the truly terrifying potential for dropping your car off the side of a mountain at almost any point.

In 1989 Jean Louis Mourey released a film on behalf of Peugeot showing Ari Vatanen breaking the hill record. It's a beautiful piece of film and see if you can count how many times Vatanen clips the edge of the road on the fall-a-really-really-long-way side of the track. Not one for the faint-hearted!

Much as I'm a bit of a boy-racer at heart and might normally enjoy driving up the 'track' (it's the public road to the peak for most of the year), the fact our rental car was an unwieldy Jeep Commander and some common sense got the better of me so we decided to take the cog railway instead.

I took this photograph on the way back down as we reached one of the passing points to allow another train coming up the mountain to go around us. By this point I'd become well aware of why they only let you stay on the peak for an hour: not long before we had to head back down I started to get a headache from a mix of altitude and probably not drinking enough water.