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The preservation of such sanity as I possess recently dictated a few days in the woods where there were no telephones, fax machines, modems or computers. Granted, some people contrive to take that stuff with them, which defeats the point of leaving town, but why be judgmental?
We did get stuck in the mud (if you must know the location, it was at the junction of Forest Roads 768 and 770 near the head of one of the several Taylor Canyons in Colorado). But at least we were not marooned by a mudslide, while thousands of people did endure delays caused by active landscapes along Interstate 70 and other paved roads last week.
Colorado is essentially a desert, so our state isn't built to handle much water, especially a streak of soggy days. That was part of the problem along I-70 -- hillsides that were relatively stable under normal and anticipated circumstances got hit by continued rain that saturated and lubricated the soil and rocks.
Normally, each brief thunderstorm is followed by copious and brilliant sunshine, allowing the slopes to recover before gravity takes over. This summer's weather has been about as normal as a Republican demanding better mass transit.
Another part of the problem along I-70 is that its route was determined more by politics than by engineering. When the national interstate system was being planned by the auto makers and petroleum interests who set policy in the Eisenhower administration, I-70 was supposed to arrive from the east and hit a dead end at Denver.
Even though the Continental Divide reaches its highest elevations due west of Denver (Gray's and Torrey's peaks, the only 14ers on the Divide), and can be reached only through narrow and twisting canyons, Denver's leaders have never accepted this geography as a limitation.
Instead, they tried a narrow-gauge railroad in the 19th century. It never reached the Divide, but part of it remains as the rebuilt Georgetown Loop. As this century began, they supported David Moffat's $10 million effort to run a standard-gauge line west from Denver, even though Colorado had a perfectly good line that crossed the mountains from Pueblo.
So when it was time to deal with an east-west interstate in the 1950s, Denver insisted that the road keep going west, and that it go directly through Denver, no matter what the financial and social costs.
The staggering cost of building west of Denver
through the Rockies held up construction for years, while
I-80 zoomed through Wyoming and I-40 breezed through New
Mexico,
according to Stephen J. Leonard and Thomas J.
Noel in Denver: Mining Camp to Metropolis,
their
fine history of the city and its suburbs.
The city's movers and shakers enlisted Gov. Ed Johnson,
who went to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who vacationed
in Colorado. Johnson gave the president Colorado
Fishing License No. 1, along with an elaborate presentation
book that made the case for I-70. The president smiled and
later helped persuade Congress to approve a 90 percent
federal match for state funds.
Instead of building in then largely vacant Adams and
Jefferson counties, I-70 sliced through several poorer
neighborhoods on the northern edge of Denver, destroying
many homes and bisecting blue-collar communities such as
Globeville and Swansea.
I have been told by engineers and geologists that if one felt compelled to stretch a major highway across the northern part of the state, the best route would be from Brighton west past Boulder to a tunnel under Arapaho Pass.
But Boulder wanted to be bypassed just as much as Denver didn't, and the boosters then scheming to host the Winter Olympics wanted a direct route from Denver to Copper Mountain, their proposed site for the alpine events.
Thus I-70 was routed due west from Denver -- not because it was the best corridor, but because Denver wanted to maintain its role as the region's transportation hub.
This process continues to this day. Denver's leaders expressed no significant opposition three years ago to a railroad merger that closed the route west of Pueblo -- Denver, after all, has been trying to put Pueblo out of business since about 1858. And now there are proposals -- some of them even sound serious -- to run a high-tech monorail transit system along the I-70 corridor.
Never mind that the corridor passes through plenty of unstable geography, zones of falling rocks and sliding soils where our mountains can get in a hurry to reach their eventual fate as marine sediment.
The decisions have been made. As certain right-thinking
essayists often remind us, ideas have consequences.
Getting delayed, or perhaps even buried, by a landslide
happens to be one of those consequences.
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