Millions of travelers on Highway 550 in Colorado pass by the avalanche runs unharmed, due in large part to the careful watch kept by dedicated crews. Photo © JT Thomas
Like the silver ore that once lured prospectors into its high alpine valleys, Highway 550—the sole contiguous north–south corridor for travel and commerce in western Colorado—beckons for exploration. Hatchet-cut through the heart of the San Juan Mountains, with vertigo–inducing vistas, the road is virtually unprotected on all sides. And when the snow is flying and the asphalt is glazed with an inch of ice, the highway demands complete attention from the intrepid men and women who share the job of keeping the fifty avalanche-prone miles between Durango and Ouray open.
The Colorado Department of Transportation and the avalanche forecasters from the Silverton office of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center are charged with the task—part meteorological, part intuitive and part wizardry—of predicting not only when any of the year’s 140-plus looming avalanches might trundle onto the highway, but also how deadly they will be.
When an avalanche does hit the road, it hits hard, leaving behind carnage of cemented snow, splintered trees and shattered rock. And as the roadside memorials remind us, the snowy torrents have claimed many travelers, an event that every forecaster fears.
Second-year forecaster Mark Rikkers knows how tricky the task of estimating the hazards can be once a big southwesterly snowstorm charges into the San Juans. Last winter, during a late-night drive from Durango to his post in Silverton, he found himself nearly pinched between two of Lime Creek’s adjacent slide paths. With what looked like a narrow opportunity to avert entrapment between the two hazardous zones, Rikkers turned around and flagged traffic to do the same. “At 4 a.m. I called the [Department of Transportation] boss in Durango and told him we needed to close the road immediately. And that is certainly not what the boss wants to hear at any hour.”
Early morning calls are not fun to make or to receive, and Rikkers’s decision to call for closure—debatably more conservative than that of a more seasoned forecaster—turned out to be a bit premature, but any suspicion of an avalanche calls for action. Department of Transportation officials, roused from their beds, attempted to trigger the suspected avalanches by firing at them with what they call “the big guns”—75 and 105-mm howitzers. As Rikkers recalls, “nothing budged.”
Though initially humbled by the anticlimactic results of early ballistic efforts, Rikkers’s intuition was affirmed a dozen hours later when a single howitzer load liberated snow from the iconic Battleship Slide, a steeply pitched swath of public land that covers nearly eighty acres and sits in clear view of Highway 550.
Momentarily the blast appeared futile, and then the whole thing cracked apart like eggshells under a steamroller. By the time it was halfway down the throat of the slide path, the melange of erupting snow, uprooted spruce trees and rocks was traveling more than 150 miles per hour, scattering the control team and a handful of visiting college students down the highway in a frenzy.
Such a spectacle is not for the faint of heart. But when slides like the Battleship are triggered, it is a reminder that Highway 550 is just a thin thread in the wild fabric of the San Juan Mountains. Long before snowplows and avalanche forecasting, miners, train conductors and others attempting to cross this serrated alpine terrain became part of a tragic legacy of avalanche fatalities.
But despite the efforts to preserve safe transit through the mountains, it’s still a treacherous journey. All the forecasting in the world can’t mitigate the stress experienced by truckers hauling full loads of fuel, milk and other supplies over Red Mountain Pass, or soothe the nerves of plow drivers forging through a blizzard at 3 a.m. above the massive yawn of the Animas River gorge. “The plow jockeys don’t stop driving till they can’t see past the steering wheel,” says seasoned forecaster Jerry Roberts. “And I have heard of truckers who, after sucking down a pack of smokes, get out of the truck in Ouray and walk away from their rigs, forever.”
The number of avalanche-related accidents and fatalities has diminished over the past fifty years, in large part due to the cooperative efforts of the Colorado Department of Transportation, the Avalanche Information Center and the various land agencies that have a vital stake in this high-maintenance corridor. Given the increase in use from recreationists taking advantage of the highway’s nearly seamless access into the San Juan, Uncompahgre, Rio Grande and Gunnison National Forests—and almost immediate access into the Mount Sneffels and the Weminuche Wilderness Areas—it is a remarkable achievement.
“On all sides you have this insane and insanely beautiful terrain,” says mountaineer Vince Anderson. “But the shoulderless margin between you and the void is also always there.”