Down On The (Two) Mile High Street: 1947 Dodge Fire Truck
The street-parked old cars I photograph in my Denver neighborhood live at one mile elevation, give or take a few feet. Drive about 100 miles southwest from here, however, and you’ll end up in Leadville, which stands at two miles above sea level. Last weekend, I ventured out to Leadville and found this painfully original 1947 Dodge brush fire truck parked downtown.
Technically speaking, Leadville is 408 feet shy of two miles high, but even just 10,152 feet of altitude means that oxygen for internal combustion is in short supply. Fortunately, this old Dodge has Chrysler flathead six power and super-short differential gearing, which means it can still climb a steep goat trail in a blizzard, oxygen or not.
The owner, whose facial hair is remarkably similar to my own (we might have to sign him up for 24 Hours of LeMons Supreme Court duty), found this truck in a barn on a cattle ranch, where it had been sitting since the middle 1980s. All its equipment was more or less as it had been during its 35 years of fire duty at the ranch, and it came with a parts truck.
The siren still works.
The tube-operated VHF radio, which was used to communicate with fire-fighting aircraft back in the day, is still installed and functional.
You want original? Here’s a 1949 Colorado tax sticker.
There’s even a vintage bullet hole in the windshield post. The slug is still embedded in the weather stripping.
The truck was sold in Leadville and hasn’t been anywhere near sea level since. The owner uses it it for daily-driving use around town, but avoids highways due to the gearing-limited 45 MPH top speed.
In my opinion, this is the best-looking grille of all the quasi-postwar Detroit trucks.
We’ll check out the neighbor’s nicely preserved Corvette in a future DOTS installment.
Most of these photos were shot with my stereo camera rig; if you have any sort of 3D glasses, head over to Cars In Depth and check out this Dodge rampaging in three dimensions.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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A lovely survivor. "Well preserved" might be the first phrase many would apply but I don't think it's appropriate here. After all, this is a 64 year old who's still hale, healthy and working for a living every morning.
This reminds me in a way of the 1947 or '46 Ford pickup I saw in Gig Harbor (a town near here) last summer. It looked like an immaculately-kept original inside and out, with all the cream-colored trim paint still there and looking good against the dark green main color. It had standard California truck plates, not YOM or collector/historic plates. The topper - in more ways than one - was the carefully hand-made and varnished hardwood topper on the pickup box, which for all I know could have been as old as the truck. And me without my camera!!