Mount Blue Sky Scenic Byway

The byway was born of civic competition. Colorado Springs had its Pikes Peak Highway drawing crowds, and Denver wanted a mountain of its own to lure the growing wave of automobile tourists in the 1920s. The answer was to build a road up the great peak west of the city, and to build it higher than anything else in the country, high enough to be the highest in the world when it opened.

Crews began work in 1923 and pushed the road up through forest and then across the fragile alpine tundra, a hard and slow job at altitude, and it opened to the public at the start of the 1930s. The engineering feat of laying pavement across ground that spends much of the year buried in snow and battered by wind is part of what makes the drive feel improbable even now.

The peak and its byway were renamed to Mount Blue Sky in recent years, honoring the region's Cheyenne and Arapaho heritage and setting aside a name tied to a figure from the state's darker past. The road itself, and the astonishing height it reaches, is unchanged.

One of the quiet pleasures of the drive is watching the world change as you rise. You start in the montane forest of pine and aspen, pass mountain lakes cupped in glacier-carved basins, and then break above the tree line into the alpine tundra, a low, tough carpet of grasses and tiny wildflowers that survive one of the harshest environments in the lower states.

Up here you meet the residents. Herds of mountain goats and bighorn sheep are often right beside the road near the top, unbothered by cars, and yellow-bellied marmots sun themselves on the rocks. In July the tundra can be dotted with alpine wildflowers that bloom in a rush during the few warm weeks they get.

Near the upper reaches grow Rocky Mountain bristlecone pines, gnarled and wind-sculpted, some of them thousands of years old and among the oldest living organisms on the planet. To stand beside a tree that was already ancient when Rome was young, at the edge of the sky, is the kind of thing this road quietly offers.

This is a drive to take slowly and respectfully. The upper road is narrow and switchbacks tightly, with steep drop-offs and stretches without guardrails, so keep your speed down, use the pullouts, and let anyone in a hurry go past. The reward for patience is a long list of places to stop, from the lakes on the way up to the summit parking area at the top.

The altitude is real. Above 14,000 feet the air holds far less oxygen, so take it easy, drink water, and give yourself time to acclimate rather than sprinting up the short summit trail. Weather at the top can swing from sunny to snow and lightning in a single afternoon even in midsummer, so pack warm layers and rain gear, and be ready to turn back if a storm builds.

The road only opens for the warm season, roughly late spring into early fall, and closes with the snow, and in recent years a timed-entry reservation has been required in peak months. Plan the trip in advance, aim for a clear morning, and you get one of the most extraordinary short drives in the country, ending quite literally at the top of the paved world.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.