Pike's Peak, and the Cog RR

	The Pike's Peak Cog Railway is a train that runs up the side of Pike's Peak. It travels on a grade of up to 25% (that's a one foot rise for every four feet horizontal). Those steep highways you've driven are a max of a 6% grade. In order to keep the wheels from spinning on the track, or sliding back down the mountain, the trains have gears that roll up a meshing rail between the two normal rails. Evidently we're all more comfortable with this.
	The trains are actually individual cars, and they run three at a time. We were in the front of the front car, these images show the grade going up, and two of the other cars (unfortunately out of focus). We had the same seats going back down, meaning we were in the back of the last car - they don't turn them around at the end.
Speaking of the end, the end of the track at the top stops right at the edge. Sarah was avoiding the view to the right as we passed over a 3000 foot drop, so I told her to look straight forward instead. She about killed me as the view of the end of the tracks and a cliff burned onto her retinas.

I had a stupid thought on the way up about whether birds could fly well at that altitude. There was a colony of crows that were thriving at the top and showed us a thing or two about soaring in the wind at 14,000 feet.

I took the GPS up with us. Here's a picture of it at the top. 14.1 kilofeet, a new unit of measurement I wasn't familiar with. Important to note also is the time: 5:12PM. The train left the bottom at 2:40 and arrived at the top almost two hours later. The trip down was a bit faster, but overall the round trip is almost four hours. We weren't aware of this until we were boarding the train.
The most significant ramification of this was that we were really tired. I'm not sure why, because all we did was sit there the whole time. Here's a picture of Sarah on the way back. Notice her eyes are closed.