The view that inspired America's most beautiful song

In 1893, a teacher scaled Pikes Peak in Colorado and penned one of the US's most cherished songs, "America the Beautiful". Today, travellers can retrace her historic ascent.

The tip of my trekking pole bites into the rocky path. "Hang on," I wheeze to my husband, who is plodding several paces ahead. Pausing to gulp water, I survey the landscape below. Pine-stubbled peaks surround us, dappled in cloud shadows and sloping downward to meet a lush valley criss-crossed with roads.

"Ready?" my husband asks. I reluctantly get back to my feet, and our trekking poles resume their clacking rhythm. The mountaintop is still hours away.

We're hiking up to America's most-visited mountain summit: Pikes Peak in Manitou Springs, Colorado. One hundred and thirty-three years ago, the view from the top inspired Katharine Lee Bates to pen "America the Beautiful," a poem that became one of the nation's most well-known patriotic songs, played at sporting events, recited on the Fourth of July holiday and taught to American school children. But not all of us know about the author or why she wrote it.

Having moved to Colorado just a few years ago, I too was unaware of the backstory. But in honour of America's 250th anniversary, I'm attempting to follow Bates' journey up this 14,415ft (4394m) high peak to see if the view of our country's landscape still inspires the same way.

In 1893, 33-year-old Katharine Lee Bates was teaching English literature at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, when an exciting opportunity arose: the chance to lead a summer session at Colorado College.

Colorado had only become a state 17 years earlier, and the college was then barely two decades old. It was a period of social and political unrest – Grover Cleveland was in his second presidency, the US stock market was nosediving and unemployment was at a high. Nonetheless, Bates was eager to see the expansive views of the American frontier. She boarded a steam engine train and headed west.

In Melinda M Ponder's biography of Bates, Katharine Lee Bates: From Sea to Shining Sea, she writes that upon arriving in Colorado Springs, the intrepid teacher was instantly charmed by the progressive energy of the young city. She and her companions made the most of their free time. "We were driven to Manitou, to The Garden of the Gods… to canyons... and cascades innumerable, all so marvelous that our stock of exclamations gave out," Bates journalled. "An enchanted summer!" 

Leah Davis Witherow, curator of history for the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, explains that many travellers at the time were captivated by the American West. "This was the era of the picturesque, so this scenery would have been wildly fascinating to her," she says. "It would have been exciting and strange, and it must have inspired awe."

It wasn't long before Pikes Peak tempted the group of adventurers. Forgoing the ease of the recently built Cog Railway in favour of a more nostalgic, pioneering journey – a horse-pulled wagon up the carriage road – Bates and her colleagues started their bumpy ascent. 

Today, the Cog Railway still runs along its original 1890s path, but the tracks have been replaced and the steam locomotives swapped out for diesel-electric trains. For an experience that more closely resembles the slow, arduous uphill climb of Bates' wagon we also chose to skip the train and take the journey on........

© BBC