DENVER — Actor Kevin Bacon hiked 4,300-metre Pikes Peak on Saturday to play a concert at the top as part of an event to raise money for a cancer charity.

Bacon woke up before dawn to make the roughly six-hour climb with his brother, Michael, and about 95 hikers at an event to raise money for the Love Hope Strength Foundation cancer charity.

Michael Bacon's wife and son also joined the hike in weather that switched from chilly to sunny and back.

"It's one of the hardest things I've ever done physically," Kevin Bacon said after the trek. "I'm in pretty good shape, but it still really kicked my ass."

At the mountaintop, Bacon took a puff of oxygen before The Bacon Brothers performed three songs.

Cy Curnin of rock group The Fixx hiked with the group, and played his song "Remember Me When I'm Gone" in a tribute to Farrah Fawcett, who died Thursday after battling anal cancer.

The Love Hope Strength Foundation has held fundraising concerts at Machu Picchu in Peru and Mount Everest to raise money for cancer centers and to raise awareness about bone marrow donation. The Bacon Brothers got involved through a friend of a friend who leads the foundation.

After the climb, the brothers rushed from Colorado Springs to Denver for a nighttime concert to raise money for the foundation -- a long day for the folk-rock duo.

"When I'm in Los Angeles I go for a few hikes a week, but I don't go out for six hours at 14,000 feet (4,300 metres)," Kevin Bacon said. "That was new."