Brief by Central Staff
Transportation – May 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Central Colorado has yet to participate much in a national event: the “Great U.S. 50 Yard Sale,” also promoted as “the nation’s yard sale.”
It started in Indiana four years ago, and the organizers hope it will continue to spread. It’s on the weekend before Memorial Day Weekend, which is May 21-23 this year.
In Colorado, there are co-ordinators for Montrose County (Marge Keehfuss, the chamber director, marge@montrosechamber.com) and Frémont County (Ione Stroup at ioneand larrystroup@netzero.net or 719-275-3482), and for Bent County (Kathryn S. Finaue in Las Animas, bcdf@bentcounty.org). But as of press time, no one was listed for Chaffee or Gunnison, or Mesa, Delta, Pueblo, Otero, or Prowers County. For more information about the event check: www.route50.com/ yardsale.html
The organization’s website, however, missed one quirk of Colorado geography: U.S. 50 also passes through Saguache County for a few miles on the west side of Monarch Pass, the highest spot on U.S. 50.
Anyway, if you’re interested in arranging something hereabouts, you need to contact national co-ordinator Tom Taylor of North Vernon, Ind., totaylor@ seidata.com.
Highway 50 runs coast-to-coast, almost, from Ocean City, Md. to Sacramento, Calif. Reading about it made us wonder about our other federal highways. None is as famous as the old Lincoln Highway across Wyomng, or the Route 66 that ran “from Chicago to L.A.” They’re not even as famous as 50, “America’s Loneliest Highway.”
But they must start and end somewhere.
U.S. 160, sometimes known as “the Navajo Trail,” certainly ends in Navajo country; it passes the Four Corners and the Grand Canyon en route to its western terminus at Flagstaff. The eastern end was at Springfield, Mo., until the 1950s, when it was extended to Poplar Bluff, which sits just above the Missouri Bootheel.
U.S. 24, once touted as the “Pike’s Peak Ocean-to-Ocean Highway,” does run right past Pike’s Peak. Its eastern terminus has always been in Michigan, moving over the years from Pontiac to Birmingham to Clarkston, all in the same general area north of Detroit.
In 1936, it ended at Kansas City, Mo., but was extended that year to Grand Junction, Colo. (It crosses the Divide at Tennessee Pass, the first highway Divide crossing in Colorado to be kept open in the winter.)
In 1975, Highway 24’s west end was scaled back to Dowd Junction near Minturn, where it joins Interstate 70. At the time, the state highway department said there was no point in spending the money to maintain the U.S. 24 signs that served no real purpose.
East-west routes have even numbers, north-south are odd, as with U.S. 285, in earlier years known as “the Tenderfoot Trail.” Before 1936, it ran from Laramie, Wyo., to Denver — essentially the same route as modern 287. Numbers were shuffled that year.
Denver remained a terminus, but it became the north end. The south end was at Sanderson, Texas, then and now; it’s about 20 miles north of the Rio Grande in a rather unpopulated area.
Federal highway numbers are not carved in stone; the most recent change that comes to mind happened on July 31, 2003, when U.S. 666, “the Devil’s Highway” from Monticello, Utah, through Cortez, Colo., to near Gallup, N.M., became the prosaic U.S. 491. Ttry as we might, we can’t conjure up anything interesting about that number.
