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One of the delights of being a railroad buff in Colorado is the abundant reference material. No matter what the topic, be it a main line like the Colorado Midland or an obscure spur like the D&RG's Hecla Branch, or even something that was never built, like the Denver, Laramie & Northwestern's extension into Wyoming, there are articles and sometimes whole books.
But highways seldom get the same sort of attention -- there is, after all, a romance of the rails -- and so there's not nearly as much material available.
This comes up because the Eagle County Commissioners are considering a proposal to name part of Interstate 70 (you know, the multi-lane all-weather route through the Rockies that provides exciting five-hour traffic jams) for that county's most famous part-time resident, former President Gerald R. Ford, who died late last year.
What other Colorado highways, or portions thereof, have names as well as numbers?
Interstate 25, as it passes through El Paso County, was in 2001 christened the Ronald Reagan Highway. The main mover for this was Doug Lamborn, who now represents Colorado's 5th Congressional District in Washington. He was then a state senator and he had something of an obsession with nomenclature, for he also proposed swapping the names of Mt. Democrat (14,140 feet in Park County) and Republican Mountain (12,323 in Clear Creek County) so the Republican would be higher.
Lamborn's 2001 effort was probably inspired by the Reagan Legacy Project, which wants every county in the United States to name something prominent after Reagan. Around here, we have some prominent features -- e.g., the Climax Mine and the Monarch Quarry -- that shut down during the Reagan years. My suggestion that the remaining pits be named for the 40th president and the economic policies that eliminated union jobs in rural areas has not gained much traction, though.
Back to the highways. There are two main north-south
roads in the San Luis Valley. One is Colo. 17, which may be
the longest straight stretch of road in the state. It may
also be the weirdest, with an alligator farm and a UFO
observatory, among other oddities. The other is U.S. 285,
sometimes known as the Gunbarrel
for its lack of
curves.
Portions of those highways have been officially named
Korean War Veterans Memorial Highway.
That's because
they cross the 38th Parallel, the dividing line between
North and South Korea, and because Lew Entz, then serving
as a state senator from the San Luis Valley, is a veteran
who served during the Korean War, though not in Korea.
No one ever recognized us when we came home,
he
explained. What we did was fade into the woodwork and
people didn't even realize what was going on in that part
of the world.
Those are the only three officially named stretches of numbered highway that I could find, though it's certainly possible that there are more. Highways that share routes with named streets (i.e., U.S. 40 and Colfax Avenue) don't count, and neither do features along the highways, like the Eisenhower and Johnson (named for former governor Edwin C. Johnson, not the American president) tunnels on Interstate 70.
There was a time, though, when highways had names
instead of numbers. The most famous is U.S. 30, the Lincoln
Highway, but it's not a Colorado route. U.S. 50 from Pueblo
to Grand Junction was once known as the Rainbow Route,
which still survives in Salida's Rainbow Boulevard
as the highway passes through town. The rainbow name was
not picked to promote diversity; it apparently goes back to
a road-improvement meeting in 1911 where rainbow trout was
on the banquet menu.
U.S. 40 was the Victory Highway, named after World War I to honor veterans of that conflict. The name still exists as Victory Boulevard, the main drag in Craig.
I have encountered occasional references to U.S. 285 in Colorado as the Tenderfoot Trail, but I've never found anything official. The same holds for U.S. 160 and the Navajo Trail.
The longest of these old names from 80 years ago appears
to be the Pikes Peak Ocean-to-Ocean Highway
for U.S.
24, which now terminates near Minturn, a long way from the
ocean.
Nowadays, the state does name scenic byways
that
generally employ several different numbered roads, like the
Lariat Loop or the Los Caminos Antiguos. There's one called
Top of the Rockies that follows some of the old Pikes Peak
Ocean-to-Ocean which was once part of the route of the new
Gerald Ford Highway.
Little wonder that the transportation history buffs focus on Colorado's railroads -- highway names are just too confusing, and we keep adding to the confusion.
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