< PREVIOUS ] [ 1989 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Winter Park citizens just agreed that their town's credit can be used to help raise some of the estimated $250 million that a Berthoud Pass tunnel would cost.
Winter Park already sits at the west portal of the 6.1-mile Moffat Tunnel. The Front Range is pierced by many other bores: Alva Adams up by Grand Lake, and to the south, Vasquez, Jones Pass, Henderson, Eisenhower, Roberts. Most of that expensive underground mileage hauls water away from the Western Slope, so it's easy to understand why some Western Slope interests are promoting a tunnel that does something else.
Summit County was a serene place -- I recall a dog sleeping undisturbed in the middle of Main Street in Breckenridge during a summer afternoon in 1970 -- before the Eisenhower Tunnel opened in 1973. After that, skier-days zoomed because 11,990-foot Loveland Pass, with the Seven Sisters and attendant horrors, no longer stood in the way. Some people even moved to Summit County and commuted to jobs in Denver.
The promoters of the Berthoud Pass tunnel would like to see that happen at the headwaters of the Fraser River. It is not coincidental that they own substantial real estate there, and would profit handsomely if their Grand County land began to fetch Summit County prices.
They certainly have the right to advance their interests, but there isn't much in this for anyone else.
A Berthoud Pass Tunnel would not substantially improve access to the northwest corner of the state; the Eisenhower Tunnel already serves for Steamboat Springs and Craig if you take Colo. 9 from Silverthorne to Kremmling.
Interstate-70 is approaching capacity, and we hear expensive talk of adding lanes to mitigate the Floyd Hill bottleneck. But a Berthoud Pass tunnel would use I-70 for its eastern approach. If the tunnel met its promoters' goals, I-70 would become even more overcrowded between Empire and Golden, Denver's air pollution would worsen, and more foreign oil would have to be imported.
The economic considerations are much more substantial than merely financing tunnel construction (who pays for a bigger I-70?) and the environment issues extend far beyond just finding an acceptable place to dump the waste rock.
Even so, there may be a real need for another passage through the Rockies. The northern Front Range area has substantial cities -- Boulder, Longmont, Loveland, Fort Collins, Greeley -- and no year-round route west other than Cameron Pass, long, twisting and narrow.
A tunnel west of Nederland or Ward that ran under Buchanan, Pawnee or Arapaho Pass and emerged near Grand Lake would serve that need much better than a Berthoud Pass tunnel. About 25 years ago, one such proposal got as far as a favorable preliminary engineering study. But the people who live in the mountains west of Boulder didn't move there because they wanted to live by a highway, and they were able to quash any further work.
Another proposed tunnel made more progress. One of our
more interesting historical footnotes is Marcus M.
Brick
Pomeroy, who in 1890 raised millions for a
five-mile bore above Georgetown. The Atlantic & Pacific
Tunnel Co. went bankrupt after about a mile.
Even when tunnels were holed through, they didn't always bring prosperity. Down here, one of our tourist attractions is the collapsed east portal of the Alpine Tunnel. The first tunnel through the Divide, it opened in 1881, and the last locomotive chugged through it in 1910. West of Leadville are two more expensive and abandoned railroad bores, the Carlton and Hagerman tunnels.
When tunnels don't fit into our transportation needs, they waste money and lives. Attractive as it might sound to Fraser-valley property owners, a Berthoud Pass tunnel is simply in the wrong place.
Most Colorado tunnels have been stupid investments, but what can you expect when the promoters are really offering nothing but blue sky that passes through a hole in the ground?
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1989 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >