The Highway  

    
        
        1928 Standard Station still going near 
                 Chillicothe, Missouri
    
    
    
    
    
    The Pikes Peak Ocean-to-Ocean Highway:  it spanned the continent 
    from New York City to Los Angeles in a time when paved roads were rare
    and traveling by car for more than 10 miles was an adventure.  Going back 
    to at least 1912, PP-OO blazes adorned power poles and trees across to 
    center of the country, marking the route of this transcontinental 
    highway.  Begun by roads boosters who arranged with cities and towns 
    along the route to participate in this form of civic advertising, the route 
    was probably determined more by which towns would offer money and 
    road improvement than any logical routing design.
    
    Competing with its more famous cousins the Lincoln Highway and the 
    National Old Trails Road well before the national numbered routes existed, the 
    PP-OO, as its markers labeled it, has fallen into obscurity, virtually 
    unknown even to residents of the cities and towns along the old route. 
    
    Why?  One look at the municipalities it visited tells part of the story; 
    if you had to design a cross-country road which avoided any major city, it 
    would be hard to do better than the PP-OO.  After leaving NYC, the biggest 
    city it hit in the northeast was Harrisburg, PA.  Studiously avoiding 
    Columbus and Indianapolis, the route wound through one small town after
    another in the midwest, with Springfield, IL its major stop.  Through 
    the headquarters city of the PP-OO Highway Association in St. Joseph, MO, the 
    trail skirted the northern edge of Kansas, turning south to avoid Denver it 
    finally pulled into Colorado Springs, near its namesake mountain.  Through 
    numerous mountain and desert towns in Colorado and Utah, the main route hit 
    Las Vegas - then a sleepy desert town - and veered south then west into 
    San Bernardino and LA.  In a time when gas stations and the ever-required 
    auto repair shops were few and far between, this back-routing no doubt 
    hurt the commercial viability of the road.  Also contributing to its 
    nearly forgotten status is the US government's finally getting 
    into the highway business in 1926.  While the Lincoln Highway was largely 
    followed by the new US route 30 and the National Road became US 40, the 
    PP-OO was given fragments of many routes, with many segments of the old 
    road not assigned to a US route at all.  Only US 36, a second tier 
    east-west 
    route (not a multiple of 10) in the federal numbering system, was 
    associated with  
    a major part of the old PP-OO through Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas.
    
    
        
        Dirt road remnant in eastern Colorado
    
    
    On the other hand, such relative obscurity has left the old route more 
    pristine than its former competitors which now are either largely overridden