Pikes Peak carries the name of Zebulon Pike, but he never made it to the top. This episode reconstructs the messy, heavily mythologized life of the army officer whose expeditions blurred the line between frontier exploration and international espionage in the early 1800s.

We follow Pike from his frontier upbringing and his unauthorized arrest of a French general, through his service under the scheming General James Wilkinson, his 1805 Mississippi expedition, and his 1806 southwest expedition that ended with Spanish authorities taking him into custody. We then look at how his captivity yielded valuable intelligence, how he died at 34 during the attack on York in the War of 1812, and how his journals shaped the Santa Fe Trail.

• How Pike shot down the British flag at Leech Lake and misidentified the source of the Mississippi
• The failed November attempt to summit the mountain in waist-deep snow and summer uniforms
• Whether his crossing into Spanish territory was a genuine accident or a deliberate intelligence mission
• His treatment as a guest of Spanish officials in Santa Fe and Chihuahua while gathering information
• The magazine explosion at Fort York and the myths that grew around his missing journal pages