Living in Colorado, it's cool to think about how high up in elevation we can build structures and homes and even livable towns. I love traveling to Leadville, being not just a cool town but the highest incorporated town in the country. You have to drive a windy mountain pass nearly 2 miles above sea level to get there from any direction. It's in the valley of 14,000 ft mountains, including Elbert, the second tallest mountain in the Lower 48 (shown in the picture below). The town is great and has everything you need and isn't all to hard to breath or function at, 10,152 ft above sea level.
But go up higher than that, and it gets challenging to build. I attended a presentation on the structures sitting atop Pikes Peak last year, and was impressed by the huge obstacles they had to overcome. With a gift store and small power building and continuing construction (kind of annoying if you're hiking in the wilderness for 5 hours uphill only to reach a taped off construction site at the peak), they need to account for the extreme winds and snow loads way up high in the Rockies. You can count on feet of snow stacked on roofs every year even with the 100+ mph winds. Additionally, the foundation undergoes extreme freeze-thaw cycles and also bone dry conditions at times. To combat this, the buildings up on Pikes Peak are designed differently, and are shorter and bulkier and angled in a way to decrease the weather's impact.
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