This Week's Find: 1947 Pikes Peak Hill Climb Spectator Tickets Lot #PIK-SP47

This lot contains a single ticket and pair of attached tickets from the 1947 hill climb event.

These tickets were acquired and cataloged for the collection in the last week. They came from another collector who found these at an estate sale near Chicago about 9 years ago.

The artwork here shows Al Rogers in his #9 Coniff Special, built by Joe Coniff of Colorado Springs. Rogers won the hill climb event in 1940, 1948, 1949, 1950, and 1951. After that, the Unser family would take over the top spot for most of the 1950s and 1960s.

The lot contains a total of 3 Pikes Peak spectator tickets. There is a pair of tickets that are still attached together, and a single ticket that sits alone in the trio.

Each ticket measures approx. 2 7/8" x 4 3/4". This requires a toploader that is bit bigger than a standard sports card toploader.

This was the first year that this ticket design was used. The same artwork would be used for several years to come, but the color schemes would change. Another change that would soon come to these tickets would be the presence of advertising. See these tickets from 1950.

The high-resolution scan below can be expanded to 4k pixels. This version shows lots of white spots that are not easily visible to the naked eye.

See more photos and discussion of these tickets on the permanent page within the Coloradotopia Archives Collection here.

A Preview of Next Week in the Archives

Next week, we will get into some old motion films from the mountains that have just been digitized. Is that really a young Sam Kinison doing ‘Dumbo ears’ on a ski trip to Colorado? No, but it certainly looks like it.

That unedited film is just over 4 minutes long. I hope that you will stay subscribed to see it. If you are not yet a subscriber, there should be a button down below to join.