It’s nice to know no matter how important you are, how sophisticated your fail-safe systems, how nuts the world gets (and face it, it’s pretty far gone) every now and then in Colorado your world stops utterly and completely for a snow day.
Oh, how I love them.
You build a fire, put a pot of beans on the stove and watch the white stuff drift across the driveway. Add a good book or a bad movie, maybe a nap, and you have a perfect way to wallow in found time.
Meanwhile, your tax money is being put to frenzied good work along with a small army of public employees who brave the elements to get you back to your real — if occasionally tedious — life.
When at least 32 bank slides closed Highway 40 for four days this month, workers from as far away as Greeley were enlisted to help clear the road over Berthoud Pass.
One slide on the west side of the pass in Grand County trapped 10 cars.
Another spectacular slide occurred on the highway close to the access road to the Mary Jane ski area. It was an estimated 200 yards long and 10 feet high.
“It was the first employee-observed slide in at least 30 years,” said Elise Thatcher, Region 3 communications manager for CDOT.
And the snow just kept coming.
CDOT crews had to move 5-to-10 feet of snow from miles of the highway, stabilize the slippery mountainsides and field calls from cranky travelers and business owners pleading for the Colorado Department of Transportation to reopen the pass — stat.
“We do receive a lot of pressure to reopen a roadway,” said the excruciatingly polite Thatcher.
And it’s not like the folks at CDOT are oblivious.
“We have firsthand knowledge of the impact a closure has on a local community,” she said. “A lot of our employees live in Grand County, and they faced the same problems everybody else did.”
Problems and, well, opportunities.
Since most Front Range school districts closed on Jan. 16 because of extreme cold and widespread frozen pipes, a lot of families extended their Martin Luther King Day weekend for another day of skiing, another evening in a brew pub, then drove the long way home via Kremmling and Highway 9 to Interstate 70.
Not everybody was in a holiday mood, though.
Trucks with supplies for grocery stores and restaurants were detoured and delayed; flights were missed or canceled; inviolable schedules were blown to smithereens.
Face it, for everyone enjoying that delicious found time, there’s somebody on the losing end, stuck in traffic gridlock with a crying toddler and five appointments to reschedule.
But despite walls of snow thundering onto Highway 40 and the folks who missed their flights home to LA or Chicago, nobody was hurt.
And, quaint as that sounds, that’s still CDOT’s priority, Thatcher said.
No injuries were reported on the pass and “there wasn’t even a single fender-bender” reported on the alternate route between Kremmling and I-70. Despite the harsh conditions, she said, “people drove slowly and paid attention.”
Given the wind, the icy roads and the high volume of traffic, “that’s really impressive.”
As the post-snowmageddon analysis continues, we can expect a few tweaks to protocols for handling future blizzards. This storm cost taxpayers an estimated $13,000 during the Jan. 14-17 period, but some will argue that wasn’t enough.
Some will call for more workers, more plows, more public announcements about when the road has closed and when it might reopen, maybe even better technologies for predicting slides … who knows.
Others will demand more buses, trains, magic carpets.
Systems can always be improved. I’m all for it.
And even though the state spent $65 million to widen the road and stabilize the banks in a project that took from 1999 to 2006 to complete, we can’t expect traveling Highway 40 to ever be like a Sunday drive across Ohio.
And that’s a good thing.
A story in Colorado Highways magazine waxed poetic about the road over Berthoud Pass when it opened in 1924.
“Traversing the Continental Divide, it carries you through a country rich in the mythical lore of the Indians, through scenes of the wild rush as the gold strikes were made — it brings back reminiscent thought of pioneer struggles and hardships. It opens a vista avenue of lodgepole pines, cavernous gorges, fascinating valleys and panoramic views incorporating a number of our more important peaks whose hoary and lightning-scarred crowns are resting places for fleecy clouds.”
Yowza.
Still, that’s little consolation for the thousands of people mired in traffic in Silverthorne, waiting and waiting to get on I-70 at the end of that long weekend.
But face it. It’s the risk you take.
We’re here in Colorado not because it’s an easy place to live, but because it’s still a little weird and a little wild, a place where the snow in the high country arrives by the foot and delivers powder days you’ll never forget.
Deal with it.
Diane Carman is a Denver communications consultant.
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