The Mile High City: A Cycling Tour from Gold Rush to Gold Dome

Denver's story runs a lot deeper than the gold rush that built it: dinosaur bones still turn up beneath its streets. On this cycling tour, you'll pedal through 170 million years of history, from ancient seabeds to the city's gold-domed capitol. You'll also meet the prospectors, socialites, and scandal-makers who shaped Denver along the way.

The tour starts in Larimer Square and drops onto the Cherry Creek Trail, where you'll learn how Chief Little Raven welcomed the first gold-seekers and how a catastrophic 1864 flood nearly destroyed the fledgling city. You'll hear how rival towns Denver and Auraria merged into one city on a torchlit bridge, then wind through leafy residential streets toward Washington Park, one of Denver's most cherished green spaces.

Along the way, you'll find out why so many Californians and Midwesterners have relocated here for the mountains and three hundred annual days of sunshine, and how a University of Denver piano student named Condoleezza Rice ended up shaping American foreign policy. You'll pass through the old-money Country Club neighborhood before reaching Cheesman Park, built atop a former cemetery whose relocation went gruesomely wrong. The tour ends at the Colorado State Capitol, its dome covered in real Colorado gold.

On this 90-minute ride, you'll have a chance to:

• Hear how the Unsinkable Molly Brown went from shunned mining-camp wife to Titanic survivor and Denver legend
• Learn about Silver King Horace Tabor, whose fortune and scandalous second marriage ended in poverty and heartbreak
• Discover how altitude gives Colorado's endurance athletes a physiological edge over sea-level competitors
• Stand at the Cheesman Park pavilion for panoramic views of Pikes Peak and the Front Range
• Hear the story of Denver's unsolved 1922 Mint robbery, complete with a shootout and a frozen getaway driver
• Find out why the state song, Rocky Mountain High, once faced a radio ban

By the time you reach the Capitol steps, marked One Mile Above Sea Level, you'll understand exactly how a played-out gold rush built a city that still gleams.