Nothing Ever Peaked Here!
Pikes Peak Meadows is officially located in Fountain, Colorado. It is
halfway between Fountain and Wigwam, off of Interstate 25, nowhere near
the actual Pikes Peak. It opened in May of 1965, hoping to fill a void
between the end of racing at Turf Paradise and the start of the
Centennial meet. The track lasted but four years and ended life as Pikes
Peak Turf Club, a name change for a struggling track is never a good
thing! At the end of the fourth season the track was sold.
New ownership was unable to turn the track around and struggled to reopen, managing to run a weekend only schedule late in 1971 and even that was cut short. Fast forward twenty one years, Centennial Park the "Santa Anita of the Rockies" was a golf course, it's successor Arapahoe Park had already gone under and was barely on it's second try and somebody wants to bring Pikes Peak Meadows back to life.
I guess you know the rest of the story, the 1993 season lasted only 19 days. You would think with it's dismal record, Pikes Peak Meadows would rank as the biggest failure in horse racing history? Actually I'm going to say it ranks as number four behind The Phoenix Trotting Park, Parr Meadows and Pinnacle Park. Wow, they all start with the letter P, guess if you open a track don't name it starting with P.
They still go in circles in Fountain (ok ovals) but they do it with horsepower not horses. Sometime in the ninety's the site was converted to auto racing. Today it goes by Pikes Peak International Raceway, there is a grandstand located in the vicinity of the old horse track one, but I don't think any of it is part of the original structure. Yes, you can still go there, but don't expect to find any sign of horse racing.