Brief by Allen Best
Transportation – July 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
The debate continues about how to best defy Colorado’s mountainous geography between Denver and the mountain resorts. Last winter has brought a spate of new ideas — including some old ideas filched from the discard bin.
One of those ideas is to build a new highway directly west from Boulder across 11,775-foot Devil’s Thumb Pass and down to Tabernash, located between Winter Park and Granby. “I would be glad to pay a small toll for an alternative to waiting on I-70,” wrote Glenn Glass in a letter published in the Rocky Mountain News.
This and other ideas for traversing Colorado’s Front Range have been around since at least the middle of the 20th century. Instead, highway engineers bored the range with the Eisenhower and Johnson tunnels — which is probably why Summit County is now a virtual city, while Middle Park, where Granby and Winter Park lie, is sometimes called “Colorado as it used to be.”
