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For years I agreed with the state troopers who have told me that Colorado's worst drivers, taken as a category, are skiers. I first heard this from a trooper who had been transferred to Grand County in the 1970s from the plains; before his prairie stint, he had worked in the mountains.
He was happy to be back in the mountains, except that
Now I'll have to deal with skiers again. They drive in
the worst weather, when anybody else would stay home, and
they're in a hurry, so they take awful chances.
My experience agrees. When you see somebody passing on a snow-packed blind curve in a low-visibility blizzard, that car almost always boasts a loaded ski rack.
However, people drive in Colorado for many other recreational reasons. Vehicle roofs boast mountain bikes and kayaks, pickup beds carry all-terrain-vehicles and dirt bikes, trailers contain those and more.
So it may be that skiers are no longer the worst drivers. But if they aren't, who is?
A Denver cab driver who emails me on occasion would
probably say that people like me -- small-town motorists
who aren't familiar with city ways -- rank near the top in
the when you see one coming, find another road
category.
I'm sure he's right. Urban drivers expect each other to be aggressive, and there I sit, unwilling to pull onto a street if any other cars are in sight. Even if I know where I'm going, often I don't know if the exit lane is on the left or right, so I'm straining to see signs while I'm poking along in the middle lane, backing up traffic. And when I get there, well, speedy parallel parking is not a skill one develops in Salida.
The cabby's complaint was that since the state quit issuing license plates that identify a car's county, he has trouble spotting hick drivers until it's too late. I advised that if the windshield is cracked, and the vehicle has not been washed since the administration of Bush the Elder, then it comes from the Colorado hinterlands.
In the hinterlands, the skiers might indeed be the worst, but they have competition. Rigs with bicycles on top are pretty well behaved when they're westbound on a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, but when they're headed back to the city on Sunday afternoon, they can't get there fast enough, so there's a lot of stupid passing.
This is a popular white-water area, so we see many spewts with kayaks or similar small vessels on top -- or at least, I hope that's what they're toting in those coffin-shaped roof-top containers. The drivers seem to have a problem like mine in the city -- they know there's a river access up there somewhere, but they don't know exactly where, so they tend to speed up and slow down at odd times.
Since few places have as little flat water as Colorado does, I've never understood why boats are popular here, and I really hate being stuck behind one headed for Blue Mesa when I'm going up Monarch Pass on the way to Gunnison. But the boaters are in general good drivers -- even on the downhill side, when you might expect them to try to make up for lost time, they're seldom foolish.
The same holds for hunters -- despite the stereotypes, they drive sensibly, to and from camp. Anglers aren't quite so angelic, since they're often looking for places to pull over and fish, especially during the May caddis-fly hatch. So they speed up and slow down, and they're not looking at the road as much as they should.
Until last weekend, I never would have put aspen
viewers
on a Colorado's worst drivers
list.
After all, they're just admiring the hillsides, and so
they're not in any special hurry, even if they're not
totally focused on the road.
We needed to attend a nephew's wedding in Arvada, and on the way down to civilization Friday afternoon, I saw more bad driving -- mostly stupid passing -- than I have ever seen in any other three hours of my life.
That is the most common hazard, according to Orville Wright of Broomfield, a retired state patrol captain. About 20 years ago, he was in charge of one five-person accident prevention team that intensely worked certain stretches in the foothills and mountains.
After bad passes,
he wrote me, the most common
violations were following too closely, speeding, DUI,
impeding traffic and driving on the wrong side of the
road.
Aside from the DUI, that's pretty much what you
find on mountain roads on sunny days when the leaves are
changing.
So perhaps aspen viewers, rather than skiers, are the worst drivers in Colorado. But I don't drive that much, so your nominations are welcome. Email them to me, and I'll try to make a column out of them sometime.
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