Pikes Peak or Bust: The Mountain Pike Never Climbed

On a November morning in eighteen oh six, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike stood on the high plains of what is now Colorado and peered through his spyglass at a white-capped summit rising from the flat horizon. He called it Grand Peak. He had not been sent to look for mountains.

He had been sent by the U.S. Army to map the southwestern edge of the Louisiana Purchase, and Grand Peak simply rose into view, enormous and apparently close, about sixty miles south of where the gold that would one day carry his mountain's name was actually buried.

Pike decided to climb it. In November. In the southern Rockies, with a small party of men wearing light overalls and no stockings, carrying almost no food.

They struggled for days through waist-deep snow and reached a secondary summit. The true peak remained above them. Pike declared, in his journal, that no human being could ever climb it in winter.

He turned back. Edwin James, a geologist with the Long Expedition, reached the actual summit in July of eighteen twenty, fourteen years after Pike's failed attempt. For a while the mountain was called James Peak in his honor.

But history does not always follow the first man to the top. By the time gold was found in the Rockies in eighteen fifty-nine, the slogan that swept a hundred thousand people westward was already fixed: Pikes Peak or Bust. The irony is sharp.

Most of the gold was found sixty to seventy miles north of Pikes Peak, nowhere near the mountain. But the peak was visible for two hundred miles, a landmark on the horizon that became the entire idea of Colorado before the state existed. Its name, borrowed from a man who failed to reach it, stuck to everything.