Detour #215: Colorado's Independence Pass will leave you breathless, USA

You’ve heard of Sleepless in Seattle, but for Antony Ingram it was breathless in Colorado when he took on the Independence Pass.

This is going to sound like a statement from Field Marshal Obvious, rapidly promoted through the ranks of the Army of Painfully Apparent Statements, but I didn’t really understand the American taste for horsepower until visiting America itself.

I know, right? A keen observation worthy of history's greatest minds. But in my defense, I was forgetting not the country’s wide open plains, along which big numbers matter more than low weight or agile handling, but some of the taller, pointier bits, and just quite how far above sea level some of those tall, pointy bits happen to sit.

Take the Independence Pass in Colorado. It’s 12,095ft or 3,687m at the road’s highest point, and the thinner air, with its lower levels of oxygen, means the average car will be making a third less power than it would be alongside the Pacific, 900 miles due west. Your Mazda MX-5 making 90 horses at the wheels on a good day will be struggling along with just under 60bhp by the top. It’s no wonder one of the world’s best-known MX-5 tuning shops, Flyin’ Miata, is based in Colorado; they probably need to bung in a Corvette engine just to get up some of the hills.

Things weren’t quite so drastic for my Hyundai Elantra rental car, with its quoted 145bhp at the crank, assuming less at the wheels, and saddled by an automatic transmission, although I’d be surprised if there was 80bhp to call upon by the top. With most of the past few days already spent at altitude (by the time I’d even entered Colorado from Nebraska I was already at more than 3,400ft) the Hyundai’s increasing wheezing was less apparent than it might have been, though getting out at the top and walking briskly to the viewpoint, my own wheezing suggested I was adapting to the altitude somewhat less effectively.

Part of a cross-country trip that had started in Chicago, I meandered briefly east to catch a show in Cleveland, and then headed west again, Colorado was offering up comfortably the best scenery so far. As soon as you clear Denver the Rocky Mountains begin, and you’ll be spending the next two or three days among the peaks at more than 5,000ft. The wheezing sneaks up on you; one day you're fine, the next you're wondering why movement is a struggle, or why a single Coors on an evening goes straight to your head.

With no real destination and no time to be there by, I took a detour off the I-70 that cuts through the state at a place called Copper Mountain (prospectors were nothing if not to-the-point), and headed south through the amusingly-named town of Climax (11,318ft above sea level, and over all too soon), the picturesque main drag in Leadville, and down to Twin Lakes, a westward turn at which starts you off on the Independence Pass towards Aspen.

The pass was first discovered (in the western, colonialist sense) by Zebulon Pike – the man better-known for his eponymous hill-turned-motorsport venue around 80 miles to the east – then made navigable in the late 1800s, and saw its first metalled road in the 1920s. It is nominally twisty, but not one of the world’s great driving roads, nor even one of the best in the state. The scenery though isn’t to be sniffed at (to catch your breath or otherwise) and on an east-west road trip, there’s a satisfaction simply in using it to cross the continental divide – the point at which all water on one side ultimately runs to the Pacific, and on the other ultimately runs to the Atlantic.

Even if it was a brilliant driving road, a tired Elantra wouldn’t have been the right car for it, but since everything that goes up must come down, the metaphorical tumble downhill towards Aspen and ultimately the pretty town of Glenwood Springs was much more fun, and the road here comprises sweepers rather than switchbacks.

And going downhill, all an obsession with power gets you is a long brake pedal, so I was quite glad to be in something slower, and my passenger quite glad by proxy. Just don’t plan to cross the continental divide in the winter time – all the power in the world won’t help you when Independence Pass is officially closed.

Words & Photography Antony Ingram Twitter | Instagram

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ROADBOOK

CLASS: Mountain Pass

NAME: Independence Pass

ROUTE: Twin Lakes to ASpen

COUNTRY: USA

DISTANCE: 43 miles

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