Colorado Experience: Million Dollar Highway

thanks, well I call Red Mountain Pass the Highway to Hell, people stop all the time to take pictures and they also go off the road and fall precipitously, hopefully they don't die. I don't care if it's July, you'll see the results of Avalanche Debris in the river below you. Previous attempts to cross the San Juans failed due to the steepness of the mountains. Everything was new to them. They didn't know anything about mountains. Climate in the mountains. Avalanche danger. They said it was going to be impossible. Getting through that canyon any way, on foot, on horseback, or whatever, was so bad that the toll roads were actually a feat of engineering, and some of them were so dangerous that a lot of people died building the Million Dollar Highway. .

The Yankee Girl mine made

million

s and

million

s of

dollar

s, that's the thing about why they took us off the land that we had because someone saw those lands as great places to extract minerals and that's how a lot of the mountain towns became places established. Like Silverton, which is on the way to the Million Dollar Highway, this program was made possible by history. The Colorado State Historical Fund supports projects across the state to preserve, protect and interpret Colorado architecture and archaeology. The history of treasures. The Colorado State Historical Fund creates the future and honors the past. with additional funds provided in memory of Deanna e La camera by Hassle and Marianne Ledbetter and members like you, a special thanks to the history of the Denver, Colorado Public Library and these organizations with significant funds provided by Rudy Davison to

experience

the media from Red Mountain Pass.

You are going through the million

dollar

highway

and that is an

experience

for everyone. The first time I saw the Million Dollar Highway would have been from the back seat of my family's car, and I clearly remember my mother's heavy breathing in the front seat. and my stepfather had his hands on the steering wheel and I looked out the window and I realized there were no guardrails, there were no trees, there was a big drop and it was very exciting when I first found out about the million dollars. Road when I was little with my parents it was late at night and it was starting to snow.

I guess the word I best described was when I was younger, billowy and scary, and there's no guards on the side and you know, once it's up, out, there's really no turning back. The Million Dollar Highway has more avalanches crossing it than any other publicly maintained road in the United States. It is an extraordinary route for the state of Colorado and the dedicated staff that the Department of Transportation of Colorado to keep that

highway

open is simply a feat of endurance and dedication every time I drive throughout San Juan and the dramatic landscape and relief that I they inspire The million-dollar highway's name actually comes from the 1920s, when they say, boy, this is it.

It costs us a million dollars per mile. There are also great stories that there were gold and silver mines near the road and that is the gravel to use so they paved it with gold or my favorite. I wouldn't drive that way for a million dollars. of the rocks and at Compadre Gorge they are over a billion years old, they are the roots of the earth, they come from the basement of time and they are hard rocks, so it has always been a barrier to travel and yet absolutely beautiful, incredibly beautiful, red. Tower of mountains at the center of this mineral-laden range that is now traversed by Highway 550.

But in the heyday of gold and silver mining, its impassable terrain stood between miners and their dreams as they built a road to obtain precious minerals on and off these steep volcanic peaks were considered impossible. Silverton Caldera was one of the large volcanoes that began erupting 35 million years ago. It was a shield volcano very similar to Mauna Loa Mauna Kea in Hawaii. There are three smaller volcanoes that erupted within the Silverton Caldera when the last phase. of the volcanic eras when they ran out of magma, the lavas went back down to the ground and this entire Caldera collapsed and the red mountains were formed.

The Red Mountain is red because it is full of iron, now the iron that is inside the mountain is ferrous iron. A light pale greenish kind, it is very soluble in water, so when the mountain erodes, the iron dissolves in the water and as soon as it dissolves in the water, oxygen oxidizes it to iron three, which is essentially rust, so if you go up and look at the Red Mountains they are just bright red and it's just a bucket of rust all over the mountain. If you look at Red Mountain Creek, it's kind of orange-red.

People look at that and say: My God, how contaminated that water is! It looked exactly the same a thousand years ago because it is rust, iron rust, but it is not the color orange that is the problem around here that has been there forever. The Red Mountains have a rich human history beyond their minerals. The story of the creation of the Ute people tells. Their ancestors moved through the San Juan Mountains since the beginning of time and the Utes were known as the San Juan Mound People the Shining Mountains there were archaic hunters there there were paleo Indians there thousands of years before hunter-gatherers but in terms of what we would call a modern tribe which would be the Utes, there are three Ute tribes, the Southern U Tribe, the Mountain View Ute Tribe and the Union Tribe of Utah, they say that's 10,000 years of recorded history. , you must remember who is doing the recording and who. in my life and visiting my family and my elders, my grandparents and knowing how existence and evidence shows up on earth, when you really think about it in the context of a window of time, it's so much more than that.

We were well known for moving according to the available resources we moved across the land along the rivers and we moved fluidly according to the seasons and depending on what was available in terms of resources we traveled throughout the state of Colorado, which is known as Colorado today and a good two-thirds of Utah to control 5,000 acres to do a reasonable amount of hunting and gathering for their families, it took an enormous amount of land for yeast to live a nomadic lifestyle. The Americans didn't believe the Utes were using it because they thought that if it wasn't being mined or if it wasn't being farmed or if they weren't raising cattle on it, it was useless land, but the young people used the red mountains in their own way, they tread lightly. the earth instead of extracting what was beneath it.

It wasn't until after the arrival of the Spanish in 1540 that anyone was interested in exploring for gold. Some Spanish headed north from New Mexico. in San Juan, but this was an area that was declared off limits by their own government, so this year we are spam, but not many of them, it was illegal for the Spanish to be here. Spain had a decree almost from the time someone even thought about coming to this area in the 18th century. They had a law that said it was illegal to even be here and if they were caught they would take their furs and gold.

If they found him, they would be imprisoned. there are no records, there are no really written accounts of the Spanish miners by the way, so they didn't want anyone in Santa Fe, in the house or in Abiquiu to know that they were here, but all the names of our places, you know, the Stones, the Plates, the San Juan. They are all Spanish names the Spanish were here but they deliberately didn't keep records because if they found something they wanted to bring it back as gold bars to the settlements themselves and they didn't want anyone to know where their minds were after 1821. part of Mexico and the Mexicans legalized again capture and trade with the Indians and entry into the mountains after Spain and Mexico ruled this area, it was finally given to the United States in 1848.

Early Anglo attempts to cross the San Juan failed due to the steepness of the mountains. mountains, the explorers just went south, sometimes north, Gunnison will go north and avoid San Juan, Fremont, same thing trying to build a railroad, trying to go from east to west and the stubborn idea that you can go in a straight line from San Luis to California it meets the San Juans and ends in Desperate Strait on the other side of the Continental Divide its troops are in starvation mode the first major entry of American prospectors into the San Juans occurred in 1860 was a group called The Baker Expedition but the snows emit, the snows are incredibly deep, they can't handle the winter and the Civil War is about to cut off all their supply lines and sand wines were little explored during the Civil War .

War and for three or four years later, once a significant amount of gold and silver was discovered in the southern Rocky Mountains, western expansion into Ute lands was ruthless in 1868, pressure had mounted to force the Utes to cede mining lands to the US, all of San Juan became part of a purchase to basically buy the mountain tops and allow mining, so it had all been Ute territory. The youth treaty of 1868 grants the Utes the entire western third of Colorado, from essentially the Wyoming border to New Mexico. this said that all land east of the Continental Divide would be American land and west of the Continental Divide would be Ute land.

The United States agrees that the following District of the country set aside for absolute and undisturbed use and occupancy: The Indians here in Maine, in the United States, now solemnly agree that no person may be permitted to enter upon Indian reservations or reside in the territory , despite the legal protections of the treaty, the limits of young people were not respected. Seekers constantly invaded and also discovered farmland as rich in potential as the minds. Just five years after the 1868 treaty was signed, the government began talks with Chief Yuray to take the territories newly formally transferred to the young men after that the surrender of lands of 1873 is known as the Bruno agreement named the president of the board of the Indian commission Félix Bruno, the chief negotiator, Uray, observed that the agreement between an Indian mixture and a treaty with the United States is like the agreement that a buffalo makes with its hunter when they pierce it with arrows.

All he can do is lie down and give in in the 1860s. Uray was a fairly minor young man. There were many young men who were more powerful within the tribe than him. This goes back to Kit Carson. Kit Carson was appointed table guard agent at Sandlery Valley and Kit Carson complained that his interpreter couldn't talk much, which was a pretty big problem when dealing with young people, so you replaced him. Ray, evidently, Yuray and Kit Carson had a lot of hawks. Carson could speak fluent Liberty together quite often. Carson was impressed and finally suggested that you could be the one to go to Washington.

By that 1868 treaty, Chief Erase spoke many languages ​​and that's why the federal government used him in that capacity because he could speak multiple languages, so he's fluent in English, but he's also fluent in Spanish and then he learns English, so he is a a trilingual person uh he is known as a haymaker a detribalized Indian and that is why he is adopted by the youth but he is a multilingual multicultural person Ray was the head of a single branch of the youth in the government since spoke English and Spanish assumed that he was the boss of all the young people, he probably knew that he was not the boss of all the young people, but he was a person they could deal with, they could understand him, so he was a logical person to whom cling on, but the fact that he was only the leader of a gang of youths caused a lot of resentment when the government gave treaties and assumed they applied to all Hoots.

Yeah, we didn't have a specific boss that was like the ultimate leader of all the In the bands we had several different bosses and we had bosses that were leaders in the ability to hunt and lead war parties and be able to gather people for ceremonies, so the Chief status only depended on the activity and event that was occurring, but it was due to conversations and dealings with the federal government and it was actually the federal government that appointed him as the chief and voice of the youth, which It didn't always work well within the people themselves and many people didn't speak too loudly about him that's why you had actually been in Washington he knew the power of the United States and he knew that if they fought against the white man everyone would die and that's why he negotiated today there are an ambivalent feeling about Ray's boss. he gave everything away or saved the truck foreign times people didn't want to leave their home they didn't want to leave having access to the hunting areas we didn't want to get out of that and that's why he tried to be that great mediator and unite those voices and try to make sure that we knew that we needed to understand that the newcomers, the settlers, were goingto come, they were not going to stop, they were not going to come back, this was something that was going to continue. and as much as we wanted to believe that we could expel people from our homes and our living territories, that simply was not a reality.

The United States' negotiations with Chief Yuray were largely conducted by a Colorado businessman named Otto Mirrors. Mears was one of the few whites to learn the youth language, although he spoke it with a strong Russian accent. The immigrant who had arrived in the United States in 1851 went from selling newspapers on the streets of San Francisco to building a transportation empire in the mountains of Colorado. Mirrors was a good friend of the chief and helped negotiate some of the treaties. No Mirrors went to Washington with you, Ray, they met with the president. Grant, he and the mirrors to New York went together to the theater, to museums, the friendship between the mirrors and Eurasia is strange because what the mirrors represent is everything which uray doesn't want, which is more accessible to white people and yet they become friends and I think he already does because he feels he can trust the mirrors even though he doesn't like what the mirrors represent and what they represent The mirrors are the future, the mining future of the San Juans, so they have an interesting relationship.

Auto Mirrors is a great story in the history of color. He is a young Jewish immigrant, orphan, and Civil War veteran. Auto Mirrors was born in Russia in 1840 and Jews really had to experience tremendous discrimination in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, which included lack of economic opportunities, strict laws that even sometimes governed where they could live. or who they could marry. Ramírez comes to Colorado, you know, after the Civil War and realizes that he can make money in the silver and gold mines of the San Juans, but even more money to connect the much-needed supplies and the minds themselves. . a wonderful businessman Otto was a Republican, he was very conservative, he hated unions, and in fact, in the last years of the 19th century, if you wanted to hold state office in Colorado, you needed Otto's approval.

Ramírez was a very kind person, he was very easy to get along with. Furthermore, he only had a fourth grade education. His parents died when he was two or three years old. Then they transferred him to several uncles. He couldn't get along with his uncle in Russia. He went to England. He couldn't get along with his uncle. sent to New York the same story did not get along well so they finally decided to embark to San Francisco where his last uncle was he took a boat to the Isthmus of Panama he walked across the Isthmus of Panama he took another boat to San Francisco he is 11 years old he is only one woman became friends with him and when the ship docked in San Francisco they found out that the last guy had gone to Australia some time ago when he came to America it was the land of opportunity and he thought that everything was possible, there was nothing .

That was not possible to Ottoman ears, so he sold newspapers and did other odd jobs. He started working at a very young age and earned his own money and never quit. He dedicated himself to the gold fields. He discovered something very, very important. He discovered that the people who make The money that is obtained from mining are often not the owners of the mines because many times in Dubai it did not work out. The people who really benefited were the people who supplied the machinery, who supplied the food, who supplied the equipment they used, but then, as a young man, the civilians.

War broke out and he joined the Union Army and it was through the Union Army that he returned to Colorado and New Mexico. Otto Mirrors earned the nickname Pioneer of the San Juans for his ability to build seemingly impossible roads where others simply saw mountains, Mirrors and vision routes and from his perspective, the San Juans needed to be tamed by toll roads that would make him rich. Abroad, he was a typical 19th century businessman, he did everything selfishly, he was not averse to bribing in any way to get them. Once that was done, what he would do was find something that was necessary, something that people would pay money for, whether it was a toll road or a railroad, then he would line up a bunch of investors and Otto would always invest in his own plans and so on. that once he had the investors, he would go out and hire the best surveyors and the best people to do it.

He would pay them well. He would return all profits to the shareholders so they would make a lot of money. I know Mirrors was one of them. I think one of these people was a natural entrepreneur when he was looking for how to support himself when after the Civil War he had a mill, he was going to sell it to the US Army and he had to deliver it well on one of his delivery excursions Grist his wagon broke down he ran into William Gilpin, first territorial governor and his wagon Horseman overturned in Gilpin stopped talking to him and said you know the future in the West He was in transportation, he said by the way, don't make The roads toll roads are too steep because later on we will probably have railroads and you will already have a right of way to use or a railroad and this is something that the mirrors took seriously because it developed several short line railroads, overall it was largely responsible for the development of southwestern Colorado, but in order for the mirrors to develop roads through the Red Mountains, the US government had to clear the area of ​​its rightful owners, the Ute people, this removal in 1873 was directly out of mere interest own, of course, but he was one of the men who negotiated the deal with the boss Yuray Auto Mirrors bless his soul, who was supposed to be a friend of the Utes, went to see him and convinced them that he would give him two dollars of silver if they signed this tree and that two silver dollars were worth much more than a piece of paper that would be signed for a treaty.

Native Americans absolutely hated car mirrors. They tried to kill a lot of mirrors and they all got so angry with him that they were going to kill him and him. I had to flee in the middle of the night, the Utes are forced to leave their ancestral lands because of the mineral wealth of the San Juans, so that's the 1873 treaty where they are forced to leave the High Country that they wanted. to be able to work the land, so after that agreement or treaty that was pushing young people onto reservations, we're seeing that whole area being taken away and then pushed into this part of southwest Colorado, where it almost looks like a strip in 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 attempted to force the Yampa White River Band of Utes to Westernize the young rebels they were killing. to Maker and 10 other newspapers from across Colorado immediately qualified.

The resistance on the White River Indian Reservation was a massacre that was enough to provoke a demonstration and a statewide cry that the Utes must leave and although they did, most were banished from Colorado to Utah, we returned to the same feeling of that we had to go. the young people must go, so although 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 is now known as Ute Mountain. When we were forced to return, this is a wound that lives there historically, there are so many traumas that have occurred over the years, physically through policies, it has dislocated us and we have disconnections with these places, they don't even say the names of those. places because this place that many of us find that used to be in our vocabulary in our daily presence we would recognize them as family members, but when you are not with family members or a family member stops by, you don't find yourself calling.

We no longer say the names of those places because we are no longer there we no longer sing We Don't Dance out there we have been so disconnected from these places I want to tell you a story about The Sounds I used to carry a long time ago our tongues formed tones notes that they sang through 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 say the voices of the old are rooted in each root and echo through the memory of the Mountain if you know how to listen to a song.

It can hold you like a prayer the same way the roots hold up a tree that sways in the wind and the sky and hold up the Moon while the stars sing a song that we all used to know a melody that we carried in our throats before we heard it. They stole while they ripped us from our homelands. We lost words in each wound that we never let heal and we sought the Earth to root ourselves. We slide into memories like rivers that take us back. for the sacred parts of us, the mines on Red Mountain were developed in the early 1880s, white people discovered gold in the San Juan Mountains, and of course we can't have the Utes there now, so there is many problems, some skirmishes and treaties.

It took the Utes out of that mining territory, the geology of Red Mountain is very unusual because not only does it have the veins that prospectors normally looked for, but it also has what are called chimneys, which are ore deposits that reach up to 2,000 feet. deep. In the ground you are normally following a vein that can extend for several kilometers on the surface and there was no such thing there. If it were necessary to go down, you have to drill, you have to take out the patio and then As soon as you make a hole in the ground, it fills with water and the water is very acidic because of all the iron minerals that are in the mountains, they discovered that the iron from the red mountains was producing sulfuric acid and would eat away at the cables that carried the mine cars to Earth and there were some pretty bad accidents where the cables broke and people fell hundreds and hundreds of feet to the bottom of the shafts and the sulfuric acid would destroy the nails that were in the ladders and sometimes they were going up and the ladders would just give way and they would fall again hundreds of feet, very dangerous, there were about five or six mines that were really very good producers.

The biggest one, of course, was the one hero that the isolated Yankee girl was actually a little closer to you, Ray, than Silverton and it was the main mind that produced an avalanche towards the Red Mountain mining district. The Yankee Girl Mine made millions and millions of dollars in the first few years. 1880s and mid 1890s and they were silver they only had silver and they had lots and lots of silver once you have that strike wealth it's only valuable if you can ship the order so now you need roads so the competition really is between companies.

Silverton Murray communities as to who will be able to connect to the mines first, the businessmen in both communities want the same thing but they want it at the same time, which is why both you, Ray and Silverton, wanted to get to the Red Mountain mining district. but in 1875 he had a wheel inspection party that came to San Juan and one of their members proclaimed that this country is impassable, a road will never be built through there, the very reason the minds are there is because The hard-to-build gold and silver deposits in San Juan came up in vents directly from the bottom of the earth, so the rock is as hard as possible and that's why all the mines are at 12,000 feet. , 11,000 feet because they are following the course of gold and silver minerals in these mountains formed at the top of volcanic vents, so that is where a path would have to go, but despite the challenges, the town of Uray was Determined to open a road and out of the Red Mountain mining district, the obvious but expensive choice was to hire Auto Mirrors due to their uncanny ability to discover buildable routes.

Muir's reputation was to transform the impassable into the possible, no matter the cost in dollars or lives. The original highway came about in 1882. It was started by the parent county the county just gave up they realized they couldn't do it they didn't have the money they didn't have the skills they just couldn't do it but they showed up out of wedlock The sand and the bears They came in and said, "I can do it." Their price was very high and, in fact, both towns went to other suppliers, other merchants, to build the roads and neither of them could do that and they had to go back to Adam Mears, who was.

Being able to do so, the city fathers may have been very irritated at having to pay such a high price, but I think they also realized that they could be counted on to deliver the goods. Meanwhile, Silverton was very upset that they were going to lose. all his business to his raid, so Silverton spoke through the mirrors and asked him if he would build them a road to the Red Mountain area and within a year there was a road from Schillerton there too and finally, in 1884, the two roads joined. they united. together to form a continuous 24 or 25 mile highway between the two communities, so now you come out with one highway and control all the trade, no doubt, the day of an automir whenYou're building the million dollar highway, really the 12 miles through the Uncompadre Gorge there are no safety concerns you take your own risks as a highway builder and as a construction worker and those were real men who died and I'm sure that there were explosions.

I'm sure there were injuries. The foreign southern highway outside its beam is probably the most spectacular. Part of the road hugs the side of the mountain and when Auto Mirrors built that they had not let the miners down who were going to drill the holes to put the black powder and they would plug the hole with black powder. turn it on and then they'll rise up and explode, so it's a very, very dangerous job when Auto Mirrors is making trails that turn into roads. The dynamite is about to be used, it doesn't even have the name timeline, it's called giant dust and it's highly explosive and you have to blow up the shelves, so if you have a steep mountain and you're trying to make a path, 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 like Canyon Creek, it went up an 18 degree until you get to the level of the Shelf route and then where the little tunnel is that is right next to it.

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 claps are so pronounced that no one, unless they were walking, could take their horse. or his car around the tollbooth, so how to put the tugs where everyone had to stop, he charged five dollars. the cart cost a dollar per person and this at that time was expensive and people complained about it but their response was Sure if you don't want to use the toll roads, you know, find your own way, there was no other way.

Ida Mares was also very forward-thinking and wanted the grades of all her toll roads to be easy enough that a railroad could Later, that road from Silverton eventually became the Silverton Railroad in the 1880s. The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad did a survey from Silverton to the top of Red Mountain Pass because they knew it would be really great if they could get a railroad. Up there the dnrg concluded that such a railway could not be built, so in 1888 Auto Mirrors took that survey and built the railway. It is called the Silverton Railway, not to be confused with Durango and Silverton.

It started in Silverton and went over the top of Red Mountain. Pass in the early 1890s was the highest paying railroad mile for mile in the entire United States. It had some really wonderful architectural features, like a covered turntable on the main railway. The corkscrew-shaped rotating platform was placed in a place where it was absolutely impossible. Making the turn and a turntable on a railroad's main line was unheard of at the time, but that's one of the three miracles the mirrors came up with when making the Silverton railroad. The other two were putting a warehouse inside the Y at Red Mountain.

There was no room to have a depot when the train was built, so they had to put the train station in the middle and the third was what was called the Chattanooga Curve, which is part C of a highway that the engineers at Denver Rio Grande they thought was impossible but they didn't bear and it was a very, very well paying railroad until the silver crisis of 1893. 1893 brought a huge economic depression to the United States, while there were many causes of decline in Colorado. was about silver, the Sherman Silver Act of 1890 had required the U.S. government to purchase millions of ounces of silver each month, making the silver-rich Red Mountain mining district very lucrative.

At the time, the country followed a bimedical standard that used silver and gold to back the dollar, but President Grover Cleveland was not. He was a fan of silver and thought that mandatory government purchasing 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 a fight in the 19th century over whether we would have a gold. standard or a silver standard and the politicians who decided in the 1890s let's now switch to a gold standard immediately devaluing all lines of silver and when that happened the price of silver fell from 1.50 an ounce to 50 cents an ounce almost overnight, well Red Mountain was a silver camp and overnight the camps are abandoned the plates are left on the tables people just leave because the value of their ore has really fallen overseas There was a chance this time the prophets would come on a tourist race in 1894 the Circle began the Stagecoach Company using their clay wagons to take travelers down the Mir dirt road, but then when Henry Ford's new invention appeared, there was a different challenge to attract tourist dollars.

The highway might have been good enough for wagons and stagecoaches, but not for the Model A. After the advent of the automobile and when people used them for pleasure, vacation transportation, Colorado was far behind in the development of highways. If you were in your ray in 1910 and you had a car, you couldn't go anywhere because the roads were horrible. It was just a nightmare trying to get from your Ray to Ridgeway, which would have been a problem, let alone trying to get over Red Mountain Pass, but of course people will always try when the Lefty Ray rodeo in 1883 had had a rating of 20 and that's a huge, impossible grade, no car could do that and then around 1910 1911 they seriously improved the road and put in some curves.

The first automobile to successfully summit Red Mountain Pass from Ouray occurred in 1910. It was a publicity stunt. Part of the first car to pass Red Mountain abroad had a problem. I think, as the story goes, he had to have a little bit of horse health at the top of the pass, but he made it over and down the other side. It had floors, it broke down but they fixed it. Automobile changes are the old west because you don't need a railroad, you don't need railroad inverters, you don't need steel belts, you don't need wooden sleepers, you just need. something that is relatively flat and gravel and unobstructed, well the million dollar highway was nothing like that and as it becomes a highway for automobiles it is quite a feat so the idea of ​​creating The million dollar highway is a dream of the Department of Colorado.

Transportation in the 1920s permanently connected Silverton and Yuray, running the western slope from north to south, so to level a portion of a mountain and turn it into a flat surface, required an enormous amount of drilling and removal of rocks, and in the 1920s there were some machines that will do that, but nothing like what we have today, so you're dealing with very dangerous explosions using dynamite. The current curves coming out of your Ray are those that were built in the early 1920s when that road was built. These beautiful sandstone railings on the road we had railings.

Large blocks of stone that were placed along the entire exterior, but they found that they could not remove the snow from the road during the winter when doing so about two or three years later. after opening it with all those blocks, they were pushed around and the plows were easily overtaken by the guardrails, as the million dollar highway receives about 350 inches of snow each year. Snow removal was and remains essential, their first snow blowers were very rudimentary, they had a small crank inside to lift the snow blower. Sir, they didn't have windshield wipers. I mean, it was rude and they were pretty ineffective.

Snowplow drivers are definitely heroes of the old west. I think those drivers are very heroic. I would not do it. do it, they go up there when the rest of us are at home in bed and they're there cleaning up the highway. The 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 big snow that we had in 2018-2019, when we had more snow than we ever had, the highway was closed for weeks, well the danger is the fact that you can get hurt or killed in a road avalanche in countless places where you can get out of the car and walk right into a danger zone and die just because you're on a paved road and someone maintains that doesn't necessarily mean there's no risk literally right outside of you. the door when an avalanche is triggered if you run on a large confined path that will drop two or three thousand feet if it is a loose avalanche, not the dust cloud in front of the falling snow can reach speeds of over 200 miles per hour the speed of a hurricane The East Riverside slide is the most destructive and deadly avalanche in an area where there are more in North America passing through a major highway.

Riverside is where they generally do the most mitigation because it's a big slide, there's an east and a west. side and it will cover the canyon and carry snow onto the road before the snow cover is complete, the avalanche would come down and cover the road and we have had quite a few deaths, there were seven people who died under the east The first one from Riverside was a minor at the turn of the century his dog and his horse were killed and then a minister and his two daughters were killed in 1963, they were going to Silverton so he could preach.

I found him the next day, his daughter. a week later, the second daughter, three months later, was down the river about 300 feet and then Eddie emo was murdered in 1992. I was involved with that, but he slipped the chain on the north side of the snow shed and they were under trying to put it on and to the east. Riverside buried his truck. Danny Harmeo came out 10 hours later and went to the phone that was in that snow shed and called and said, "Hey, come get me, bring a pack of cigarettes, but Eddie died there, who can force natural disasters and they do." Snow plows look like toy tacos that have just been run over by a truck.

It's horrible what it does, but it's nature. I've heard of a couple of avalanches and fortunately I didn't get hurt. You feel completely out of control, you can't hold on to things because you're flying through the trees at 25 or 30 miles per hour, the snow if the avalanche debris can form like concrete, so even if your head It's out of the snow and if you're underneath there's nothing you can do, there's a lot of people dying. who have just been, you know, literally inches under the snowpack, but since they can't do anything, they're just stuck, it's not like you can just take your hand and pull it out of the snow like you can't water.

They are in the snow the day I got caught in an avalanche. I was out with some people that people have died skiing 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 activated it, the snow beneath me fractured and there was no way you could ski out of it because the snow was breaking into pieces. They pushed me down probably 500 feet, it wasn't that big, but it was big enough? and they buried me two feet under the ground. I only need to be buried a couple of inches to die because you can't breathe when they first buried me.

I just knew I was screwed. I had my hands here. I had a pocket around my face, so I could breathe a little, but I knew that unless my friends got there quickly, I wasn't going to last after 15 minutes. You're probably broke. My heli-ski friends saw what had happened, skied over the side, got out and got me out in seven. half a minute, so yeah, it was blue, but I came back right away, but because it had a small air pocket, there's probably some kind of damage, but no, it's not serious, maybe that's debatable. The interaction between people in nature always has its dangers. avalanche danger will always be there as long as there is snow to improve safety up there they do a lot of avalanche mitigation avalanche mitigation programs have changed over the years due to technology back in the 1880s it really wasn't technology which they tried to explode avalanches by sticking dynamite in a layer of snow and it just made a hole.

There are over a hundred avalanche paths that have the ability to hit the road, but only 63 are truly concerned about a force as strong and unpredictable as a military avalanche. Weapons are deployed to activate them, but the idea is for humans to choose the time and place, not nature. The World War II 105 Howitzer gun can move them quite quickly. Configure them very effectively. Avalanche was developed in the early 70's. It looks like an Appalachia. like a big canyon12-foot jet with compressed nitrogen, launches a two-pound payload up to three-quarters of a mile per mile and helicopters, a helicopter really opened up a new ball game for the Avalanche petition, but there's a limit to what those Helicopters can do and the elevations they can reach, but every 12 year old's dream is to fly around in a helicopter and drop high explosives and trigger avalanches.

Most road deaths are due to distracted drivers. Drivers try to go too fast. of people are distracted by a landscape. In fact, I took people to Red Mountain, where the first wave that comes out of his mouth is guilty, according to the defendant, he says that I looked at the beauty of the mountains and was not paying attention to what I was abroad, we have a lot of major highways in Colorado, we have a lot of high passes, the million dollar highway is unique in terms of scenery, in terms of mining history, in terms of danger and the fact that it's used year round, that's what ago It's special, it's one of the most beautiful scenic drives in North America and any time of year this road is worth taking, starting in the spring when there's a lot of snow there and Aspen is just starting to come out and green up. melting snow is filling the streams, there may be a summer storm, clouds may swirl between the peaks, you reach autumn, the aspens begin to change their golden colors and then you will enter winter, everything is white and It's just wonderful, one of the things that the million dollar highway has done is allow people to visit an incredibly beautiful area of ​​the country and experience it almost as if it were the 1880s and all that mining industry that you can watch while driving.

Throughout it is our living history, so to speak, because those sites can be visited. It always amazed me how much energy and how much engineering went into carving that path into the side of the mountain and how dangerous it was then and still is today. and the amount of work it takes to repair and maintain those roads is quite phenomenal. I would describe Red Mountain Pass Highway 550 as a living highway in the winter there are avalanches in the summer there is rain and rockfalls there are too many people on the road it is a very dangerous road but it is one of the most beautiful dynamic highways in North America North is a place of exploration it is a place of serenity it is a place where nature appears and sometimes you feel small in its presence we sit by the fire holding a sacred language in our mouths, words in which our ancestors breathe blessings and we feel their strength every time we inhale, breathe and sit by the fire singing songs until they become a part of us.