14,500-feet, 19 miles, and not a barrier or safety fence in sight. Anyone who plays video games has blasted through the Nurburgring or scaled Pikes Peak hoping to catch a glimpse of what the professionals see. I am definitely one of those people, so when I got a chance to drive up Pikes Peak on Monday, I was ecstatic.

The temperature was 82-degrees at the bottom of the mountain. My two buddies were crying in the car wanting to know why we were going to waste two hours driving up and down this mountain. As we started scaling, I knew it was going to be an awesome experience. Six or seven miles in, I found the starting line to the Pikes Peak Hill Climb. It wasn't that difficult to find as it was comprised of about 3,000 strips of rubber for a few hundred feet. At that moment, I was in heaven. I knew where all the turns were going. With no speed limit, and no one for miles, there were no rules and no one to help if you plummeted to your death off the side. One thing very different from the video games...the road is narrow, very narrow. I had two hands on the wheel at al times, even though we were averaging a slim 50 mph. Half way up, the road disappears and you are driving on a dirt road with a grade well over 10% vertical. We stopped to take some pictures dressed in short and tee-shirts and were not happy to see the temperature had dropped some 30-degrees to 54. 4,000 miles to go. Fog was setting in now and visibility was extremely low. 1,000 miles to the summit and there was no trees to be found: just dirt and rock. Oh yea...and three inches of snow. As I stopped the car on top the hill some 45 minutes from beginning the trek, I immediately became dizzy due to the high altitude. Walking in itself was difficult between being 15,000-feet up and in 28-degree weather. Though, at the end of the day, I scaled Pikes Peak, and would do it again a million times.