Colorado Experience: Million Dollar Highway

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- Well, I call Red Mountain Pass the Highway to Hell. - People stop all the time for photographs and they also drive off the road and fall precipitously, hopefully not to their deaths. - I don't care if it's July, you're going to see results of avalanche debris down in the river below you. - Previous attempts to get through the San Juans failed because of the steepness of the mountains. - It was all new to them. They knew nothing about mountains, mountain weather, avalanche hazard. - They said it was going to be impossible to ever go through that canyon in any way whatsoever, on foot or horseback or anything else. It was that bad. - The toll roads were really a feat of engineering, and some of them were just so dangerous. - A lot of people were killed building the Million Dollar Highway. - The Yankee Girl mine made millions and millions of dollars. - That's the whole theme of why we got moved off of the lands we had was because somebody's seen those lands as being great locations to mine for minerals, and that's how a lot of the mountain towns became established. Places like Silverton, which is on the path to the Million Dollar Highway. This program was made possible by the History Colorado State Historical Fund, supporting projects throughout the state to preserve, protect and interpret Colorado's architectural and archeological treasures. History Colorado State Historical Fund. Create the future, honor the past. With additional funding provided in memory of Deanna E. La Camara by Hassel and Maryann Ledbetter, and by members like you. Thank you. A special thanks to the Denver Public Library, History Colorado, and to these organizations. With major funding provided by Rudy Davison - To experience Red Mountain pass means you're going over the Million Dollar Highway, and that is an experience for everybody. - The first time I saw the Million Dollar Highway would've been from the back seat of my family's automobile, and I distinctly remember the heavy breathing of my mother in the front seat. And my stepfather had--had his hands gripped on the steering wheel. And I looked out the window... and I realized there were no guardrails. There were no trees. There was this large drop off... and it was pretty exciting. - I first was introduced to the Million Dollar Highway when I was small with my parents. It was late in the evening and it was starting to snow. I guess the word that I best describe that when I was young, it's squiggly and scary and there's no guards on the side there. And, you know, once you go up, you go off. There's really no do overs. [chuckles] - The Million Dollar Highway has more avalanches that cross it than any other publicly maintained highway in the United States. It is an extraordinary route for the state of Colorado and the dedicated staff at the Colorado Department of Transportation. To keep that road open is just a feat of endurance, of dedication. - Every time I drive over. Just the whole San Juans and the landscape and the dramatic relief. It inspires me. - The Million Dollar Highway name actually comes from the 1920s where they say, boy, this is costing us a million dollars a mile. There are also great stories that there were gold and silver mines near the highway. And so that's the gravel they use. So they paved it with gold. - Or my favorite, I wouldn't drive that road for a million dollars. - Some of the rocks in the Uncompahgre Gorge are well over a billion years old. It's the roots of the earth. It's from the basement of time, and they're hard rock. And so it has always been a barrier to travel. And yet absolutely beautiful. Just stunningly beautiful. The iconic Red Mountains tower at the center of this mineral laden range, which is now traversed by Highway 550. But in the heyday of gold and silver mining, its impassable terrain stood between miners and their dreams. Building a road to get precious ore in and out of these steep volcanic peaks was deemed impossible. - The Silverton Caldera was one of the big volcanoes that began erupting 35 million years ago. It was a shield volcano, a lot like Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea in Hawaii. There are three smaller volcanoes that erupted inside the Silverton Caldera in the latter phase of the volcanic eras. When they ran out of magma, the lavas went back down into the ground and this whole caldera collapsed and the Red Mountains were formed. - Red Mountain is red because it's full of iron. Now, the iron that's inside the mountain is ferrous iron. It is sort of a light, pale, greenish color. It's very soluble in water. So when the mountain erodes, that iron dissolves in the water, and as soon as dissolves in the water, the oxygen oxidizes it to iron three, which is essentially rust. So if you go up and look at the Red Mountains, they're just bright red and it's just a--a pale of rust all over the mountain. If you look in Red Mountain Creek, it's kind of an orangish red. People look at that and they go, "Oh, my goodness, how polluted that is" That water looked exactly the same 1000 years ago because it's that rust, that iron oxide, but it isn't the orange color that's the problem around here that's been there forever. The Red Mountains have a rich human history beyond their minerals. The Ute peoples' creation story tells of their ancestors moving across the San Juan mountains... since the beginning of time. - And the Utes were known as the Mountain People, the San Juans, the shining mountains. There were archaic hunters, there were paleo Indians there thousands of years earlier, hunter gatherers. But in terms of what we would call a modern tribe, that would be the Utes. - There are three Ute tribes, the Southern Ute tribe, the Ute Mountain Ute tribe, and the Ute Indian tribe of Utah. And they say it's 10,000 years of history recorded. We have to remember who's doing the recording and why my life, and in, in visiting with my family and my elders, my grandparents, and knowing how... the existence and evidence out on the land show. When you really think about it in the context of a, of a window of time, it's much, much more than that. We were well known for--for moving around, moving according to what resources were available. We moved along the land, along the rivers, and we moved fluidly according to seasons and according to what was available in terms of resources. We roamed the entire state of Colorado, what is known as Colorado today, and a good part of two thirds of Utah. - It'd take 5000 acres for one Ute to do a reasonable amount of hunting and gathering for their families. It took an enormous amount of land for the Utes to live with a nomadic way of living. The Americans didn't think the Utes were using it because the Americans thought of it if it wasn't being mined or if it wasn't being farmed, or if they weren't running livestock on it, it was useless land. But the Ute people were using the Red Mountains... in their way. They tread gently upon the land rather than extracting what lay beneath it. It wasn't until after the Spanish arrived in 1540 that anyone was interested in exploring for gold here. Some Spaniards made their way north from New Mexico into the San Juans. But this was an area that was declared off limits by their own government. - There were Spanish here, but not very many of them. It was illegal for the Spanish to be here. Spain had a decree from almost the time anybody even thought about coming up into this area, back in the 1700s, they had a law that it was illegal to even be here. And if they were caught, they would take away their furs. They take away any gold if they had found it, they would throw them in prison. - There are no records. There are no really written accounts of the Spanish miners. On purpose. So they did not want anyone in Santa Fe or Taos or Abiquiu to know they were up here. But all our place names, you know, the Piedras, the La Platas, the San Juans, those are all Spanish names. The Spanish were here, but they purposely didn't keep records because if they found something, they wanted to bring it as gold bullion to the settlements themselves. And they didn't want anybody to know where their mines were. - After 1821, we were part of Mexico and the Mexicans made it legal again to do trapping and trading with the Indians and to go into the mountains. After Spain and Mexico governed this area, it was finally turned over to the United States in 1848. - Early Anglo attempts to get through the San Juans failed because of the steepness of the mountains. Explorers simply went around, often to the south, sometimes to the north. Gunnison will go north and avoid the San Juans. Fremont, same thing trying to build a railroad, to go east to west. And the stubborn idea that you can go in a straight line from St. Louis to California. He encounters the San Juans and winds up in desperate straits on the other side of the continental divide. His troops are in starvation mode. - The first major entry of American prospectors into the San Juans occurred in 1860. It was a group called the Baker Expedition. - But the snows are immense. The snows are incredibly deep. They can't stay the winter and the Civil War is about to cut off all their supply lines. - And the San Juans were kind of un-prospected during the Civil War and for three or four years afterwards. Yet once significant gold and silver were discovered in the Southern Rockies, western expansion into Ute lands was ruthless. By 1868, pressure had grown to compel the Utes to yield mining lands to the U.S. - The whole San Juans become part of a purchase to basically buy the tops of the mountains and allow for the mining. So, it had all been Ute territory. The 1868 Ute Treaty gives the Utes the entire western third of Colorado, all the way from the essentially Wyoming border, all the way down to New Mexico. - That said that all land that was to the east of the continental divide would be American land, and the west of the continental divide would be Ute land. The United States agree that the following district of country, set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians herein named, and the United States now solemnly agree that no persons may be authorized to enter upon Indian reservations, or reside in the territory. - Despite the treaty's legal protections, the Utes' boundaries were not respected. Prospectors encroached constantly, also discovering farmlands as rich in potential as the mines. So just five years after the 1868 treaty was signed, the government began talks with Chief Ouray to take the territories just formally deeded to the Utes--back. The 1873 surrender of land is known as the Brunot Agreement, named for the Chairman of the Board of the Indian Commission, Felix Brunot. Ute negotiator, Chief Ouray observed, "The agreement an Indian makes to a United States treaty is like the agreement a buffalo makes with his hunter when pierced with arrows. All he can do is lie down, and give in." - Back in the 1860s, Ouray was a pretty minor Ute. There were lots of Utes that were more powerful inside the tribe than he was. This goes back to Kit Carson. Kit Carson was made the agent of the Tabeguache in the San Louis Valley. And Kit Carson complained that his interpreter couldn't speak Ute, which was a fairly major problem... in dealing with Utes. So he was being replaced by Ouray. Evidently, Ouray and Kit Carson had a lot of talks. Carson could speak fluent Ute, they would eat together quite often. Carson was impressed, and he eventually suggested that Ouray be the one that go to Washington for that 1868 treaty. - Chief Ouray spoke many languages, and that's the reason why the federal government utilized him in that capacity was because he could speak various languages. - So, he's fluent in Ute, but he's also fluent in Spanish. And then he picks up English. So he's a--he's a trilingual person. He's known as a genízaro, a de-tribalized Indian. And so he is sort of adopted by the Utes but he's a multilingual, multicultural person. - Chief Ouray was the chief of a single branch of the Utes and the government, since he spoke English and Spanish assumed that he was the chief of all of the Utes. They probably knew that he wasn't the chief of all the Utes, but he was a person they could deal with, they could understand him, and so he was a logical person for them to latch on to. But the fact that he was only chief of one band of the Utes caused some--a lot of resentment when the government gave treaties and assumed it applied to all of the Utes. - We did not have one specific chief that was like head ultimate leader of--of all the bands. We had several different chiefs and we had chiefs that were leaders in the capacity of hunting and--and leading war parties and--and being able to gather people for ceremonies. So, the chief status just depended on what activity and event was occurring. But it was because of the conversations and the dealings with the federal government, and it was actually the federal government who sort of designated him as the chief and voice of the Ute people, which didn't always play well within the people themselves. And a lot of people didn't speak too highly of him because of that. - Ouray had been to Washington. He knew the might of the United States and he knew that if they fought the white man, they would all die. And so, he negotiated. Today, there's an ambivalent feeling about Chief Ouray. Did he give away everything or did he save the tribe? - In those contentious times, people didn't want to give up their home. They did not want to leave having access with the hunting areas. We didn't want to leave that. And so he tried to be that great mediator and bring those voices together and try to make sure that, you know, we needed to understand that the newcomers, the settlers, they were going to come. They weren't going to stop. They weren't going to turn back. This was something that was going to continue. And as much as we wanted to believe that we could chase people back out of our homes and our living territories, that just wasn't a reality. U.S. negotiations with Chief Ouray were in large part carried out by a Colorado businessman named Otto Mears. Mears was one of the few white people to learn the Ute language, although he did speak it with a heavy Russian accent. The immigrant who had come to America in 1851 went from selling newspapers on the streets of San Francisco to building a transportation empire in the mountains of Colorado. - Otto Mears was a good friend of Chief Ouray, and he-- he helped negotiate some of the treaties. - Otto Mears went to Washington with Ouray. They met President Grant. He and Mears toured New York. They went to the theater together, to museums. - The friendship between Mears and Ouray is sad because what Mears represents is everything Ouray doesn't want, which is more accessibility for white people. And yet they do become friends. And I think Ouray does that because he feels he can trust Mears, even though he doesn't like what Mears represents. And what Mears represents is the future, the mining future of the San Juans. So they have an interesting relationship. Otto Mears is a great story in Colorado history. He is a young Jewish immigrant, an orphan and Civil War veteran. - Otto Mears was born in Russia in 1840, and Jews had really experienced tremendous discrimination in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe. That included lack of economic opportunity, strict laws that even sometimes governed where they could live or whom they could marry. - Mears comes to Colorado, you know, after the Civil War and realizes that there's money to be made in the silver and gold mines of the San Juans, but even more money in connecting the much-needed supplies and the mines themselves. - Otto Mears was a wonderful businessman. Otto was a Republican. He was very conservative. He hated unions. And in fact, in the latter years of the 19th century, if you wanted to hold statewide office in Colorado, you needed Otto's approval. Mears was a very amiable person. He was very easy to get along with. He only had a fourth-grade education. His parents died when he was about two or three. He was then shuttled into various uncles. Couldn't get along with the uncle in Russia, went to England. Couldn't get along with the uncle in England, was sent to New York. Same story, couldn't get along. So finally, they decided to ship into San Francisco, where his last uncle was. Took a boat down to the Isthmus of Panama. Walked across the Isthmus of Panama. Took another boat up to San Francisco. He's 11 years old. He's on his own. A woman befriended him. And when the boat landed in San Francisco, they found out the last uncle had left for Australia some time ago. - When he came to America, it was the land of opportunity, and he thought that anything was possible. There was nothing that wasn't possible for Otto Mears. - So, he sold newspapers and did other odd jobs, started working at a very young age and earned his own money. And he never quit. - Went into the gold fields. He discovered something very, very important. He discovered that the people who make money out of mining are very often not the mine owners because the mines often didn't pan out. People who really made out were the people that supplied the machinery, who supply the food, who supplied the equipment that they used. - But then as a young man, the Civil War broke out and he joined the Union Army, and it was via the Union Army that he came back towards Colorado and New Mexico. Otto Mears earned the nickname the Pathfinder of the San Juans for his ability to build seemingly impossible roads. Where others just saw mountains, Mears envisioned routes and from his perspective the San Juans needed to be tamed, tame by toll roads--that would make him rich. - He was a typical 19th century businessman, did everything self-serving. He wasn't averse to bribing, any way he could get things done. What he would do is he would find something that was needed, something that people were going to pay money for, whether it was a toll road or a railroad. He would then line up a whole bunch of investors, and Otto always invested in his own scheme. And so, once he had the investors, he would then go out and hire the best surveyors, the best people to do it. He would pay them well. He would push all of the earnings back into the stockholders. So they made a lot of money. - Otto Mears was one of these people that was, I think, a natural entrepreneur. When he was looking for how to support himself after the Civil War, he had a grist mill. He was going to sell this to the U.S. Army and he had to deliver it. Well, on one of his excursions to deliver grist... his wagon broke down. - He ran into William Gilpin, first territorial governor, and his horse and wagon were upturned. And Gilpin stopped to talk to him and told him, you know, the future, um, in the West is in transportation. - He said, by the way, don't make the toll roads too steep because later on we'll probably get railroads and you'll already have a right of way to use for a railroad. And this is something Mears took to heart because he did develop several short line railroads. - All in all, he was pretty much responsible for the development of southwestern Colorado. But for Mears to develop roads through the Red Mountains, the U.S. government had to clear the area of its rightful owners, the Ute people. This removal in 1873 was directly in Mears' self-interest, of course, yet he was one of the men who negotiated the deal with Chief Ouray. - Otto Mears bless his soul, who was supposed to be a friend of the Utes went to them and convinced them that he would give them two silver dollars if they would sign this treaty, and that two silver dollars was much more valuable to them than a piece of paper that would be signed for a treaty. The Native Americans totally hated Otto Mears. They tried to kill Otto Mears and everybody got so mad at him they were going to kill him and he had to make a run for it in the middle of the night. - The Utes are forced out of their ancestral lands because of the mineral wealth of the San Juans. So that's the treaty that in 1873 where they're forced out of the high country. - They wanted to be able to work the land and so, following that agreement or treaty that was pushing the Utes onto reservations, we're looking at that whole entire area being taken away and then being pushed down into this southwestern portion of Colorado where it almost looks like a strip. In addition to taking Ute lands, there was a national movement calling for the forced assimilation of Native Americans. And in 1879, Indian agent Nathan Meeker tried to compel the Yampa White River Band of Utes to Westernize. The Utes revolted, killing Meeker and ten others. Newspapers throughout Colorado immediately branded the resistance at the White River Indian Reservation--a massacre. It was enough to provoke a rallying cry across the state of "The Utes must go." And go they did. Most were banished from Colorado to Utah. - We came back to that same sentiment that we had to go, the Utes must go. So, we even though we don't have a Trail of Tears, I believe that was our Trail of Tears when we were told to leave those areas and walk back to the other side of what's now known as the Ute Mountain. We walked back. We were forcibly walked back. This is a wound that lives, um historically there's so many traumas that have--have transpired over the years physically, through policies. It's--it's dislocated us and we have disconnections with these places. We don't even say the names of those places anymore because this place that a lot of us find that used to be in our vocabulary, in our daily presence, we would acknowledge them like family members. But when you're not with family members or a family member passes, you don't find yourself calling out those names anymore. We don't say the names of those places anymore because we're not out there. We don't sing. We don't dance out there anymore. We've been so disconnected from these places. - I want to tell you a story about the sounds I used to carry. Long ago, our tongues formed tones, notes that sang across the Milky Way to our ancestors from before. Everything was and is connected in this way. From the earth to the sky. Each leaf to tree. They say the old ones' voices are grounded in each root and echo through the mountain's memory. If you know how to listen, a song can hold you like a prayer. The way roots hold a tree swaying in the wind and a sky can hold the moon while the stars sing a song we all used to know, a melody we carried in our throats before it was stolen. As we were. Ripped from our homelands, we lost the words in each wound we never let heal. And we search for earth to ground ourselves in. We slip into memories like rivers carrying us back to the sacred parts of us. - The mines on Red Mountain were developed in the early 1880s. The whites discovered gold in the San Juan mountains. And of course, now we can't have the Utes there. And so, lots of trouble, a few skirmishes and the treaties move the Utes off of that mining territory. - The geology of Red Mountain is very unusual because it not only has the veins that prospectors were normally looking for, but it also has what are called chimneys, which are ore bodies that go as far as 2000 feet into the ground. Normally, you're following a vein which may run for several miles on the surface, and no such thing existed there, and it was necessary to go straight down. - You've got to drill down; you've got to haul the ore out. And then as soon as you get a hole in the ground, it fills up with water. And the water is very acidic because of all of the-- the iron minerals that are in the mountains. - They discovered that the iron from the Red Mountains themselves was producing sulfuric acid and it would eat away the cables that took the mine cars down into the earth. And there were some pretty wicked accidents where the cables actually broke and people fell hundreds and hundreds of feet down to the bottom of the shafts. And the sulfuric acid would destroy the nails that were in the ladders, and sometimes they'd be climbing up and the ladders would just give way, and they'd fall, again, hundreds of feet. Very dangerous work. - There were about five or six mines that were really very good producers. The biggest, of course, was the Yankee Girl. - The Yankee Girl was isolated, actually lay a little bit closer to Ouray than Silverton. And it was sort of the-- the main mine that produced a rush to the Red Mountain mining district. - The Yankee Girl mine made millions and millions of dollars between the early 1880s and the mid-1890s. And they were silver. They only had silver, and they had lots and lots of silver. - Once you have that rich a strike, it's only valuable if you can ship the ore. So now you need roads. So, the competition really is between the business communities of Silverton and Ouray as to who is going to be able to connect to the mines first. The business people in both communities want the same thing, but they want it the same time. - So both Ouray and Silverton wanted to reach the Red Mountain Mining District. But back in 1875 you had the Wheeler Survey Party that came into the San Juans. And one of their members proclaimed that this country is impassable. You will never get a road built through there. - The very reason that the mines are there is why the roads were so hard to build. The gold and silver deposits in the San Juans came up in vents, straight up out of the bottom of the earth. So that rock is as hard as it can get. And that's why all the mines are at 12,000 feet 11,000 feet, because they're following the--the course of the minerals. Gold and silver in these mountains formed at the top of the volcanic vents. So that's where a road would have to go. But how? Despite the challenges, the town of Ouray was determined to get a trail in and out of the Red Mountain mining district. The obvious, but expensive choice was to hire Otto Mears because of his uncanny ability to discover buildable routes. Mears' reputation was for transforming the impassable into the possible. Whatever the cost in dollars or lives. - The original highway came about in 1882. It was started by the County of Ouray. The county just gave up. They just realized they couldn't do it. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the skills. They--they just could not do it. But Otto Mears appeared on the scene and Mears came in and said, "I can do it" - His price was very high and they, actually um both towns, went to other suppliers, other merchants to build the roads and none of them could do that. And they had to go back to Otto Mears, who was able to do it. The city fathers may have been very irritated at having to pay such a high price, but I think they also realized that you could count on him to deliver the goods. - In the meanwhile, Silverton was getting very upset that they were going to lose all their business to Ouray. So Silverton talked to Otto Mears and asked if he would build them a road up to the Red Mountain area and within a year there was a road from Silverton up there also. - And eventually in 1884, the two roads were joined together to form a continuous 24 or 25-mile road between the two communities. - So now you had Otto with a road and controlling all of the trade. - Certainly, in Otto Mears' day when he's building the Million Dollar Highway, really the 12 miles through the Uncompahgre Gorge, there's no safety concerns. You take your own risks both as a road builder and as a construction worker. And those were real. Men died. And I'm sure there were explosions. I'm sure there were injuries. - The Million Dollar Highway south out of Ouray is probably the most spectacular part of the highway. It clings to the side of the--of the mountain. And when Otto Mears built that, they had to let the miners down who were going to drill the holes to put the black powder in, and they would stuff the hole with black powder and light it, and then they would be pulled up and it would explode. And so very, very dangerous work. - When Otto Mears is making trails which become roads, dynamite is just about to be used. It doesn't even have the name dynamite. It's called giant powder. And it's highly explosive. And you have to blast shelves. So, if you've got a steep mountain and you're trying to make a road, you have to turn that 45-degree angle into a flat angle and you have to move tons and tons of rock. - When you go up Black Canyon Creek, it went up in 18% grade until it reached the level of the shelf road. And then where the little tunnel is, that's just north of where Bear Creek Waterfall is, that was a barrier because it was like a peninsula of rock. - And the reason for putting the tollbooth there was because the cliffs around there are so steep no one, unless they were walking, could take his horse or take his wagon around the tollbooth. So, Otto put the tollbooth where everybody had to stop. - He charged $5 a wagon, $1 a person, this at the time was expensive and people complained about that. But his answer was, sure, if you don't want to use the toll roads, you know, find your own way. There was no other way. - Otto Mears was also very farsighted, and he wanted to make the grades of all of his toll roads easy enough that a railroad could come along later on. That road from Silverton eventually became the Silverton Railroad. - In the 1880s, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad ran a survey from Silverton up to the top of Red Mountain Pass because they knew that it would be really great if you could get a railroad up there. Well, the DNRG concluded that that railroad could not be built. So, in 1888, Otto Mears took that survey and built the railroad. It's called the Silverton Railroad. Not to be confused with the Durango and Silverton. It started in Silverton, went over the top of Red Mountain Pass. In the early 1890s, it was the best paying railroad mile per mile in the whole United States. It had some really wonderful architectural features on it, such as a covered turntable on the mainline railroad. - The corkscrew turntable was at a spot where it was just absolutely impossible to make the turn, and a turntable on the main line of a railroad was unheard of at that time. But that's one of the three miracles that Mears came up with in doing the Silverton Railroad. The other two were putting a depot inside the Y in Red Mountain. There was no space to have a depot, and he got the train built, so he had to put the train station in the middle. And the third was what was called Chattanooga Curve. That steep part of the highway follows it. The Denver and Rio Grande engineers thought that was impossible, but not Mears. - And it was a very, very good paying railroad until the silver crash of 1893. 1893 brought an enormous economic depression to the United States. While there were many causes of the decline, in Colorado it was about Silver. The Sherman Silver Act of 1890 had required the U.S. government to buy millions of ounces of silver every month, making the silver rich Red Mountain mining district very lucrative. At the time, the country followed a bimetallism standard using both silver and gold to back the dollar. But President Grover Cleveland was not a fan of silver and thought that mandatory government purchase of the metal was bad for the economy. Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Act in 1893. And it was a disaster for Colorado. - There has always been struggle in the 19th century over whether we would have a gold standard or a silver standard. And the politicians that decide in the 1890s no, let's switch to a gold standard, immediately devaluing all the silver mines. - And when that happened, the price of silver dropped from $1.50 an ounce to $0.50 an ounce almost overnight. - Well, Red Mountain was a silver camp and overnight the camps are abandoned. Plates are left on-- on tables. People just simply walk out because the value of the--their mineral has really fallen. But because there was a road, there was opportunity. This time, profits would come in a tourist rush. In 1894, the Circle Stagecoach Company started using their mud wagon coaches to take travelers on Mears' dirt road. But then when Henry Ford's new invention came along, there was a different challenge to bringing in tourist dollars. Otto Mears' highway might have been just good enough for wagons and stagecoaches, but not for the Model A. - The advent of the automobile when people were using it for pleasure, for transportation, for vacations, Colorado was way behind in the development of roads. If you were in Ouray in 1910 and you had an automobile, you couldn't go anywhere because the roads were horrible. It was just a nightmare. Just to try to get from Ouray to Ridgeway would have been a problem, let alone try and go over Red Mountain Pass. But of course, people will always try. When the road left Ouray in 1883 had had a 20% grade. Now that's an enormous, impossible grade. No automobile could do that. And then around 1910, 1911, they seriously improved the road and put in some switchbacks. The first automobile to successfully get over the top of Red Mountain Pass from Ouray happened in 1910. - It was a publicity stunt to be part of the first car to come over Red Mountain. - It had a problem, I believe, as the story goes, that it had to have a little help from a horse at the top of the pass, but it did manage to get over and down the other side. - It had flats, it broke down, but they got it over. - The automobile changes the Old West because you don't need a railroad. You don't need railroad investors, you don't need ribbons of steel, you don't need wooden ties. You just need something that's relatively flat and gravel and without obstructions. Well, the Million Dollar Highway was none of that. And so, as it becomes an auto highway, that is a major feat. And so the idea of actually creating the Million Dollar Highway is a dream of the Colorado Department of Transportation in the 1920s. They permanently connect Silverton and Ouray, so the--the Western Slope from north to south. So in order to level a slice of a mountain and turn it into a flat surface, it's an enormous amount of drilling and rock removal. And in the 1920s, there are some machines that'll do that, but nothing like we have today. So, you're dealing with very dangerous explosions of blasts using dynamite. - The current switchbacks going out of Ouray are what were built in the early 1920s. When that road was built, there were these beautiful sandstone guardrails. - The highway had guardrails, big blocks of stone that were put along the entire outside. But they found that they couldn't push the snow off the highway during the wintertime doing that. And so about two or three years after--after they opened it with all those blocks, they pushed them all over the side. Having snowplows easily beat out having guardrails. Since the Million Dollar Highway gets about 350 inches of snow each year. Snow removal was - and still is - critical. - Their first snowplows were very rudimentary. They--they had a little hand-crank on the inside to raise the plow and lower, they didn't have windshield wipers. I mean, it was rude, and they were pretty ineffective. - Snowplow drivers are definitely Old West heroes. - I think those drivers are very heroic. I wouldn't do it. They go up there... when the rest of us are home in bed and they're up there clearing the-the highway. - Million Dollar Highway is probably one of the worst avalanche areas anywhere in the state of Colorado. Every year the highway is closed for hours, if not days. And in the great snow that we had in the 2018, 2019, when we had more snow than we'd had forever, the road was closed for weeks. - Well, the dangers are the fact that you can be injured and or killed in an avalanche right from the road. Countless places you can get right out of the car and step directly into a hazard zone and get killed. Just because you're on a highway that's paved and someone maintains it doesn't necessarily mean that there's not risk literally right outside the door. - When an avalanche is triggered, if it is running on a confined large path, that's going to drop two or three thousand feet... if it's a loose snow avalanche, the powder cloud in front of that snow that's coming down can reach speeds of over 200 miles an hour. Hurricane speed. - The East Riverside Slide is the most destructive and deadly avalanche in an area where there's the most in North America that go over a major highway. - Riverside is the one that they usually do more mitigation on because it is a big slide. There's an east and west side and it'll cover the canyon and--and blow snow up on--onto the highway. Before the snow shed was completed, the avalanche would come down and cover the road and we've had quite a few fatalities. - There were seven people that have died underneath East Riverside. First one was a miner. Back at the turn of the century, he and his dog and a horse were killed. And then a minister and his two daughters were killed, 1963, they were coming over to Silverton so he could preach. They found him the next day. His daughter a week later. Second daughter three months later. She was downstream like 300 feet. And then Eddie Imel was killed in 1992. I was involved with that one. He slipped a chain on the north side of the snow shed and they were underneath trying to put it on and East Riverside buried their truck. Danny Jaramillo dug himself out 10 hours later and went to the phone. It was in the snow shed and called and said, "Hey, come and get me and bring a pack of smokes." But Eddie died. They're hurricane force natural disasters and they make snowplows look like Tonka Toys that have just been run over by a semi. It--it's awful what it does, but it's nature. - I've been caught in a couple of avalanches and thankfully not injured. You feel completely out of control. You can't grab onto things because you're flying through the trees at 25, 30 miles an hour. The snow of avalanche debris can set up to be like concrete. And so even if your head is out of the snow, and if you're underneath, there's nothing you can do. Number of fatalities of people who've just been, you know, literally inches below the snow pack but because they can't do anything, they're just stuck. It's not like you can just like take your hand and stick it out of the snow like you can water, you're set in the snow. - The day I got caught in an avalanche, I was out with a few people. People I had skied with forever. I was paying attention, but I wasn't paying attention. It was pilot error. I ignored the variables and it was a mistake and I triggered it. The snow underneath me fractured. And there's no way you could ski out of that, because snow is just breaking into pieces. Chunks. I got pushed down probably 500 feet. Wasn't that big of a slide, but it was big enough and I was buried two feet under. You only need to be buried a couple of inches to die because you can't breathe. When I was first buried, I just knew that I was screwed. I--I--I had my hands here. I had a--I had a pocket around my face so I could breathe a little bit. But I knew unless my friends got there quickly, I wasn't going to last. After 15 minutes, you're probably hosed. My heli-ski friends saw what had happened, they ski down the side, went out and dug me out in seven and a half minutes. So...yeah, I was blue, but I came right back. But because I had a little bit of an air pocket, there's probably some damage, some sort, but not--not serious. Maybe that's debatable. The interaction between people and nature always has its hazards, and the avalanche hazard is always going to be there as long as there's snow. - To improve safety up there they do a lot of avalanche mitigation. - The avalanche mitigation programs have changed over the years because of technology. Back in the 1880s there really wasn't technology. They tried to explode avalanches by sticking dynamite into a snow pack, and it just kind of made a hole. There's over 100 avalanche paths that have the capacity of hitting the highway, but only 63 that are really worried about With a force as strong and unpredictable as an avalanche, military weapons are deployed to actually trigger them. But the idea is for humans to pick the time and place, not nature. - The 105 Howitzer, a World War II weapon, can get them around pretty quickly, set them up. Very effective. The avalauncher was developed in the early seventies. An avalauncher, it looks like a big peashooter, 12-foot barrel with compressed nitrogen. It throws a 2 lb. charge up to three quarters of a mile, a mile in distance. And helicopters. The helicopter really opened up a new ballgame for avalanche mitigation. But there's a limit on what those helicopters can do and the elevations that they can gain. But it's every 12-year-old boy's dream to fly around in a helicopter and throw high explosives and trigger avalanches. - Most deaths on the highway are from inattentive drivers. Drivers that are trying to go too fast. A lot of people get distracted by scenery. I've actually pulled people over up on Red Mountain where the first words out of their mouth is, "Guilty as charged." He says, "I got to looking at the beauty of the mountains and wasn't paying attention to what I was doing." - We have many high roads in Colorado, we have many high passes. The Million Dollar Highway is unique in terms of the scenery, in terms of the mining history, in terms of the danger and the fact that it's used all year round. That's what makes it special. - It's just one of the most beautiful scenic drives anywhere in North America. And any time of the year is worth going on this highway. Start with spring when we've got a lot of snow there and the aspens are starting to come out and green up. The snowmelt is filling the creeks. You might have a summer thunderstorm. You might get the clouds swirling among the peaks. You get into the fall, the aspen trees start to change their golden colors. And then you go into the winter. Everything is white and it's just gorgeous. - One of the things that the Million Dollar Highway has done is allowed people to visit an incredibly beautiful area of the country and to experience almost like it was in the 1880s. And all that mining industry that you can look at as you drive along. It is a--a living history, if you will, because those sites can be visited. - It always used to amaze me how much energy and how much engineering went into carving that road on the side of the mountain. And how dangerous it was then and still is today, and how much work that it takes to repair and maintenance those roads it is pretty, pretty phenomenal. - I would describe Red Mountain Pass, Highway 550 as... a living highway. In the winter you have avalanches. In the summer you have rain and rockslide. You have too many people on the road. It's a very hazardous road, but it's one of the most beautiful, dynamic highways in North America. - It's a place of exploration, it's a place of serenity, it's a place where nature shows and you feel sometimes small in her presence. - We sit by the fire, holding sacred language in our mouths. Words that are ancestors breathed blessings into. And we feel their strength every time we inhale. We breathe and sit by the fire singing songs until they become a part of us.

Info

Channel: Rocky Mountain PBS

Views: 1,287,919

Rating: undefined out of 5

Keywords: colorado experience, krma, rocky mountain pbs, ouray, million dollar highway, colorado history, history documentary

Id: J6xq3DMjvrA

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 56min 40sec (3400 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022