It’s the first day of May. Les Stanton lights a cigarette and peers down a thin curve of eastbound road with story-high walls of snow piled at its sides. A steady stream of sleet pelts him slantwise as windswept pines shiver above. The surrounding snowcapped mountain peaks are barely visible in a freezing haze.
It’s the first day of May . . . on the road to Independence Pass.
A rare situation
An Oregon native who has been plowing snow in the Colorado mountains for 15 years, Stanton is the foreman of a crew from the Colorado Department of Transportation. They have been working four days now on this mountain road of switchbacks and narrows, trying to clear the path from Aspen to Leadville by Memorial Day.
Twenty miles down the road over the Continental Divide, a second crew is doing the same, working westward. If all goes well in the coming weeks, their work will culminate above the tree line, where the road peaks at 12,095 feet.
And then at 2 p.m. on May 22, the gates that have blocked this historic stretch of highway since November will open for the summer. But “summer” is a relative term here, where the men of CDOT are barreling through depths of snow and ice the likes of which they’ve rarely experienced.
Today they’re working a shady stretch near Lincoln Creek, with the winter gate and five miles of cleared road behind them. Ahead are 10 more miles of snow and snowdrift they expect to be as high as 20 feet.
“I haven’t seen it like this in 25 years,” says Mike Bowker, the crew’s heavy equipment manager, as a V-plow plunges forward into the 7-foot wall of snow blocking the road. It’s Bowker’s job to wrangle their convoy of ‘dozers, blowers, loaders, graters and plows that clear the road scoop by scoop.
This section of road just past Lincoln Creek has an inches-thick ice coating. So, the equipment is sliding, their monster truck wheels spinning despite their sheaths of cleated chains.
The crew is putting in some 12-hour days and moving at a slower pace than usual because of this year’s endless winter. Today they couldn’t get started until the afternoon, because of a harsh winter-style storm. They had to plow fresh snowfall just to get to their current spot of progress.
“This kind of weather will slow us down some,” Stanton says, “But we’ll make it to the top in time.”
And the crew expects to clear the road far enough for the annual Ride for the Pass bike race to roll on its normal route from the winter gate to Independence ghost town on May 17.
Pioneering
Fittingly enough, the men refer to this process of breaking through a new section of road as “pioneering.” The tradition of battling the Pass indeed goes back to the area’s 1880s pioneer days.
“The Pass never closed then,” explains Mark Fuller of the Independence Pass Foundation. “They’d put runners on their carts and have oxen pull them over.”
Among the CDOT crew’s forebears also are the hardscrabble prospectors who lived year-round seven miles up the road from where they’re plowing today. Those hearty silver miners cleared the snow essentially by hand, with pickaxes, shovels and horse-drawn plows — bearing the harsh winter while guarding their claims.
That old settlement is a still-standing ghost town, buried Pompeii-like in the snow today. The march to the Pass is still not easy, but it’s gotten easier since those days, with the advent of the motorized snowplow and since the road was paved in 1967.
Needless to say, today’s plow crew isn’t doing much by hand. In fact, along with their fleet of ground equipment, they’re getting help from above.
To keep the plowmen safe from avalanches, they have a helicopter patrolling dangerous sections of the Pass, with a gunner tossing dynamite to induce avalanches before the crew arrives. But other than some surface slides, the area has been free of serious avalanches this year, says Rob Hunker, CDOT avalanche forecaster for the Western Slope.
“The snowpack is still quite strong there right now,” he explains. “Normally by this time we have begun seeing wet avalanches up there, but not yet this year.”
The biggest concern for the plowmen is on the eastern side of the Continental Divide, where a massive cornice of snow has formed and is hanging over the roadway. The helicopter crew plans to blast that well in advance of the crew’s arrival.
No time for scenery
Despite the long hours in the cold, the frustration of digging into endless miles of snow and ice, the sliding and slipping machinery, the flattened tires and broken chains — clearing Independence Pass is a badge of honor for this industrious crew. It’s the ultimate challenge for a snowplow.
“These guys love it,” their foreman says proudly. “It’s kind of a kudos to them to get to plow the Pass.”
As the May afternoon grows late, the snowfall stops, the clouds burn off, and it reveals a breathtaking Colorado postcard landscape of pines and peaks and untouched mounds of snow gently laid on rocky clearings like white satin pillows.
Just a handful of adventurous snowmobilers, skiers and snowshoers have seen this view in the last six months. But the crew trudges on, without taking as much as a pause to take it in. They have a long road ahead and piles of snow to plow before they sleep, after all.
As their heavy equipment manager Mike Bowker puts it with a smirk, “It’s beautiful. But it’s a lot prettier to us once the road is open.”
andrew@aspendailynews.com
