Interstate 70 has spurred rapid development in scenic valleys west of Denver. Photo © Allen Best
On a summer morning dazzling with sunshine, you can drive west from Denver on Interstate 70 past the old gold-mining and silver-mining towns, their hillsides splotched with amber-colored ore dumps; past where snow slides snuffed the lives of miners during harsh winters; past the 14,000-foot peak that Custer climbed once before his summer on the Little Bighorn.
It’s up, up, up past mountains named Bethany, Kelso and Sniktau, each one a picture and thick with stories, too, but at seventy-five miles an hour there’s time for neither because interstate highways are made for speed, not dawdling. And ahead are ski trails, now verdant braids through the trees, and beyond that, tundra leading up to the Continental Divide, still fringed with cornices of snow in August.
One final push on the accelerator and you’re at 11,000 feet and in the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel, the world’s highest automobile tunnel, but still 1,000 feet lower than the old two-lane highway across Loveland Pass, which is misery itself during a winter storm—or in any season when caught behind a Coors beer truck. It’s an engineering marvel, this two-mile bore through fractured rock, with fans the size of two-story houses scudding the carbon monoxide out of the twin tunnels.
Once you’re out of the tunnel you are on the Western Slope of the Rockies, where Interstate 70 swoops like a landing jet down, down, down into Summit County and past ski areas, condominiums and rows of burger joints. The giant hump of Buffalo Peak broods over all of this area that calls itself Colorado’s Playground, 83 percent of it in federal lands, mostly U.S. Forest Service. Ahead is Vail Pass, and more federal playgrounds, and beyond that majestic Glenwood Canyon. Just stay steady with these four lanes through the wilderness and you’ll be at Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, just seven hours out of Denver. There you can linger.
This interstate highway system, authorized fifty years ago this past March with the flourished signature of President Dwight Eisenhower, can be delightful. For seeing the nation’s western forests, these roads are like high-speed websurfing: fast and featuring remarkable visuals, if frequently superficial. The West is thick with these sinuous four-lane highways: Interstate 15 loping across the Montana hills into Idaho, Interstate 80 cresting California’s Sierra Nevada at Donner Summit, and Interstate 40 ascending from the hot Arizona desert into the ponderosa pine forests of Flagstaff.
Transportation transforms landscapes, and the interstate highways are a testament to that simple fact. But I-70 stands out, for nowhere else have the barriers to road-building been so great, nor the physical, cultural and economic changes wrought by a highway so extensive, as on this corridor west of Denver. In these highlands are origins of three of the nation’s major rivers, the greatest congregation of ski areas in the Western Hemisphere, and the nation’s third most heavily used national forest (the White River, for recreation). The urban and suburban areas are among the nation’s fastest growing, with a sort of cosmopolitan flair that at times exceeds that of San Francisco or Boston.
The engineers who built the interstate defied geography, imposing their will on the land. But their success is also a cautionary tale, for this highway of triumph is littered with regrets and questions.
Gateway across the Rockies
Interstate 70 follows no natural transportation route. Pottery shards, projectile points and other artifacts attest to the presence of American Indians in the area long ago, but no ancient highway. Gold miners who flooded the Rockies similarly avoided these two walls of mountains, first the Front Range and then the Gore Range.
Denver’s original route to Salt Lake City slanted northwest across the Continental Divide at the 11,315-foot Berthoud Pass. A patchwork of mostly gravel country roads, the route gained the determined name of the Victory Highway during World War I, but later was assigned the more clinical title of U.S. Highway 40. It remained, until the mid-twentieth century, the dominant route west out of Denver and also the access to several of the first ski areas.
Miners veered southwest, first to the gold camp of Breckenridge and then the silver bonanza of Leadville. As the historian Marshall Sprague pointed out in his book The Great Gates: The Story of the Rocky Mountain Passes, all the world wanted to get to the wondrously burdened soils of Leadville in the 1870s, and normally the fastest route is the straightest. The route of I-70 approximates a straight line to Leadville, but most travelers—and the railroads—veered south, avoiding direct confrontation with the Front Range. To do that would take other dreams and fortunes.
That new vision emerged in the 1920s, and from somewhat unlikely sources. In 1922, former Forest Service landscape architect Arthur Carhart penned an essay for Denver Municipal Facts, a magazine issued by Denver’s city government, in which he conceived the idea of “Denver’s Recreational Fan.” Carhart argued that Denver’s ultimate economic strength was not in mining or even agriculture, but in its proximity to the mountains, with their potential for recreation.
Meanwhile, in the decaying mining town of Red Cliff, located on the western flank of the Gore Range north of Leadville, a newspaper editor was espousing something resembling Interstate 70. O.W. Daggett had been a rancher, miner and merchant before he bought a newspaper, which he renamed the Holy Cross Trail. Daggett advocated improved roads in his newspaper, and took his campaign for a new highway spanning the Rockies from Denver into the offices of mayors, editors and even the governor. As he saw it, the new road would cross Loveland Pass and then the Gore Range at an obscure 11,089-foot pass with an advantageous view of the Mount of the Holy Cross.
In the end, the state highway bureaucracy chose a nearby low point on the Gore Range that hitherto had accommodated only a horse trail. Aided by an increasingly robust federal roads budget, Colorado’s chief highway engineer, cigar-chewing Charles D. Vail, had crews hew a road across the range from 1939 to 1941, and when it was done, a sign was posted naming the pass Vail. By 1941, the route was on national maps as a key strategic defense highway.
At the same time, an interstate network of limited-access highways had been proposed and enthusiastically supported by President Franklin Roosevelt. Congress approved the project in 1944, but not the necessary money. The crucial agreement about funding—a combination of new and elevated user taxes—was not brokered until 1956. The federal government agreed to pay 90 percent of the costs of the initial outlay of 40,000 miles of interstate.
But this legislation authorized I-70 only from Baltimore to Denver. Like the miners, the highway authorities thought the way west too difficult and expensive. The Rockies remained flyover country, with the ski areas still small and widely scattered. Old mining towns like Breckenridge were decaying. Property tax rolls in Summit County were shrinking. Vail was not yet a destination.
In 1957, Congress agreed to extend the highway 547 miles from Denver to Summit Cove, Utah. The official reasoning was that it would reduce the driving distance between Denver and Los Angeles by 128 miles. Although no records confirm it, the route’s proximity to uranium resources may have figured into the justification by the federal highway bureaucracy and Congress—the United States was in the grips of the Cold War.
Construction of I-70 across the Colorado Rockies took more than thirty-five years. The highway itself can be seen as a timeline of engineering techniques. Early on, function trumped form. Segments of the road close to Denver manhandled the landscape, with mountains moved to expedite pavement. More balance is found in later segments, including Vail Pass. Cut-and-fill techniques were minimized. Bridges gracefully arc across tributary streams. Still later came the segment of road along the Colorado River through Glenwood Canyon. Even today, critics concede the assorted cantilevered platforms, tunnels and bicycle paths in the eighteen miles of the canyon provide compelling evidence that man’s ingenuity, when challenged, can do justice to nature’s handiwork. Revealingly, this was the most expensive segment of interstate highway in the nation when finally completed in 1993.
But problems soon became apparent as travelers found this portal to paradise anything but. Weekend skiers returning home to metropolitan Denver complained about congestion. By 1985, just six years after the second tunnel through the Continental Divide opened, state officials were studying how to increase traffic capacity.
Environmental impacts also became evident. By the late 1980s sand from cut-and-fill embankments between the Eisenhower tunnels and the town of Dillon had sloughed into Straight Creek, strangling Dillon’s water supply. The highway across Vail Pass had similar problems. Black Gore Creek—which runs, like Straight Creek, mostly on Forest Service land—had become desert-like in appearance, even industrial. Supported by the Clean Water Act, the Vail-area Eagle River Watershed Council began focusing attention and marshalling local, state and federal money to prevent more pollution from sand spread to provide winter traction. Sand clogs habitat needed by insects and fish and, given time, will migrate down-valley. Creeks filled with sand are less able to accommodate spring floods. The builders of I-70 knew this could happen, but traffic volume exceeded their expectations, accelerating the problems.
The Berlin Wall
Wildlife has also taken a beating along the I-70 corridor. Despite eight-foot-high fences that line the highway, a great variety of animals—some of them endangered species—get crushed routinely. Since 1999, three of the Canada lynx that were reintroduced into Colorado have been killed on the highway, and in 2004 a wolf that had wandered 500 miles from Yellowstone, the first in Colorado in more than a half-century, was killed. Such incidents lend credence to the nickname given the highway by biologists: “The Berlin Wall to Wildlife.” Activists, working with state and federal wildlife biologists, are pushing for installation of vegetated wildlife overpasses, such as are found in Banff National Park. It’s not just a matter of wildlife getting squashed, they say, but part of a broader problem of habitat fragmentation, which causes island-like effects that threaten small populations of species.
Noise is another complaint. Earth berms and concrete walls line the highway to dampen the roar. Vail, which for years has talked about putting the interstate underground, now talks about tunnels, similar to what are found in the Alps. Meanwhile, hotels have taken to installing air conditioners. In the old days, cool evening breezes sufficed. Now, highway sounds are too oppressive.
But I-70’s greatest impact may be as an agent of developing the new economics of mountain recreation and leisure. The old mining and ski towns—Breckenridge, Vail and Aspen among them—have been seeds for now valley-long sprawls of golf courses and gated communities, shopping clusters and big-box stores. Hard along the highway or within forty-five lateral miles are some sixteen downhill ski areas, most of them located primarily, if not totally, on Forest Service lands. The White River National Forest, where most of them are found, is thick with summer recreation, too. As an old ski town saying goes, “Winter’s why we came here, but summer’s why we stay.” And stay they do. Population growth has been among the most rapid in the United States. Summit County, the first playground, was the fifteenth fastest-growing county in the nation during the 1990s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and Eagle County, where Vail is located, was tenth. Nor is the spree over. State demography officials project populations of 50,000 and 100,000 in these once sparsely settled mountain valleys.
None of this makes them unique in the West. Places far from interstate highways—Montana’s Flathead Valley, Oregon’s Bend area, and Wyoming’s Jackson Hole—all wrestle with similar dynamics of change and population growth in a new economy predicated on access to and views of public lands. What sets the I-70 corridor apart is the magnitude of change. The recreational empire that Carhart envisioned for Colorado more than eighty years ago has been realized.
Trains, Greyhound and Automobiles
The future of I-70 is hotly contested. Ample evidence suggests the mountain environment would be bludgeoned by a wider highway, the first choice of state and federal officials. It’s not clear who would pay for it. Unlike the original highway, the federal government would only be paying half. Others support mass transit, preferably something using steel wheels, but even they can offer no precise precedent. Despite the extensive train network of the Alps, visitors there have steered toward automobiles. Successful mass transit needs a high-density population to support it, but many along I-70 would prefer worsening congestion to more sprawl.
Still, I-70 remains a far more efficient means of crossing the Colorado Rockies than either Amtrak’s inexpensive but slow-as-molasses Zephyr or the cheap, but unpleasantly cramped, Greyhound buses. Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes, a professor of transportation studies and the West at the University of MissouriŠSt. Louis, has dim expectations of Westerners returning to rail. In his 2003 book, Going Places: Transportation Redefines the Twentieth-Century West, he reasons that the future lies in cars. “Given all that westerners have done to reconfigure space during the twentieth century, it is almost impossible to image a workable alternative to the automobile in most places and under most circumstances,” he writes. “Perhaps the best we can hope for in a modern system of transportation is improvements that make our automobiles more efficient users of highway corridors already in place.”
Pouring money into highways may have been misguided, says former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, now living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the 1950s, he was a representative from Arizona, and he voted for the law authorizing the interstates. But while interstate highways were supposed to strengthen national defense, he believes they have made the United States a weaker nation. Highways have fueled sprawl and made it nearly impossible to function without a car, increasing our oil dependency. Passenger trains—which held up admirably during World War II—have nearly vanished. “We threw it away,” Udall says. As for the interstate highways, “I think in hindsight that this was a huge mistake,” he adds. “I regret my vote.”