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Fortunately for us in this part of the state, the Colorado Department of Transportation did not promote one shorter detour for those traveling from Denver to Grand Junction last weekend.
A detour was required because Interstate 70 was closed for a day by an immense rockslide in Glenwood Canyon on Thanksgiving Day. The road is open now, but with only one lane in each direction; it will be months before it returns to normal.
According to the official state highway map, it is 248 miles from Denver to Grand Junction via I-70. There were several recommended detours, all to the north to Steamboat Springs and Craig, then south to Rifle and west to Grand Junction.
Sometimes the Denver TV reporters mentioned one town along the way, Wolcott. They should know that it is pronounced WOOL-cut, not WALL-COT. It was almost as jarring as the time I heard about an accident in CONE-joss County. Anyway, the shortest of those detours was 356 miles.
It's only 331 miles from Denver via U.S. 285 to Poncha
Springs, then west on U.S. 50 to Grand Junction. But the
weather here was miserable all weekend; Monarch Pass, Blue
Mesa Summit (known as Son of a Bitch Hill
to the
traders of the 1820s bound for Fort Robidoux near present
Delta) and Cerro Summit can provide plenty of accident
business on snowy weekends without additional traffic
diverted from I-70.
So it was just as well that they didn't mention this route. I did not hear much about the most sensible and comfortable way to travel from Denver to Grand Junction, especially in the winter -- the bar car of Amtrak's California Zephyr.
Once there was another alternative, the road people took before 1937 when the highway was built through Glenwood Canyon. It's one of the three Cottonwood Passes in Colorado. This one runs from Gypsum southwest to cross a ridge at 8,280 feet before dropping into the Roaring Fork Valley near Carbondale. In recent times, when transportation planners gasped at the environmental and financial costs of a four-lane through Glenwood Canyon, Cottonwood Pass was considered as a route for I-70.
According to The Passes of Colorado
by Ed and
Gloria Helmuth, it was one of the most important passes
in our state fifty years ago, but it is almost unknown
today.
The Eagle County Road Department maintains it in
the summer, but not in the winter.
I crossed it once, about 20 years ago on one of those beater-pickup Western Slope back-road excursions that may have started at the Gold Pan in Breckenridge and ended, more or less, at the Midland Saloon in Basalt. For various reasons, my memory is rather vague about the pass, but I was with fellow writer Allen Best, who has in recent years been trying to peddle a book about I-70 in our mountains, covering everything from route selection to how it transformed a scenic two-lane backwater into a four-lane dystopia of access-ramp big boxes and shopping malls.
He once told me that he'd learned that the federal highway planners wanted I-70, arriving from the east, to dead-end in Denver. But the city's movers and shakers agitated and lobbied, so that the western terminus was moved about 500 miles to southwestern Utah.
Despite that immense wall of mountains toward the sunset, Denver has always wanted to be on a major east-west route. The city gets what it wants, from the Moffat Tunnel to I-70 to Denver International Airport.
Part of the city's brand
is that the mountains
are easily accessible by auto, and the metro area provides
plenty of weekend traffic on mountain roads.
In other words, metro residents use rural roads. A gravel pike could handle the commerce between Saguache and Salida, but metro traffic bound to and from Durango and Santa Fe requires a handsome paved road with passing lanes and broad shoulders.
On that account, I'm dubious about recent claims that the metro area isn't getting a fair share of the state funds for highway maintenance and construction -- something like 54 cents back for every dollar paid in gas taxes.
The rest of the money is spent throughout the state. But that seems fair, considering how so much rural traffic derives from the metro area. Just look at the consternation in Denver last weekend on account of a rockslide 140 miles away.
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