Driving the Million Dollar Highway
Jul. 11th, 2022 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerColorado Travelog #18
Ouray, CO - Tuesday, 5 Jul 2022, 1:30pm
Today is shaping up to be a crummy day, weather-wise. Rain is forecast in Telluride most of the day, and it was gloomy where we were staying in Ridgway, too. At lower elevations around the state it was hot and sunny; but up here in the San Juan Mountains it's like an island of suck in the sky. Thus we decided to visit Ouray today. Ouray's weather isn't any nicer; but at least Ouray is something new.
Ouray is one of several Victorian Era mining towns in Colorado. It was founded in the 1870s when silver was discovered in the mountains. Towns such as this grew quickly as miners flocked to the area.
The San Juan Mountains were forbidding, though, making travel— and commerce— in the area hard. A storied engineer, Otto Mears, was able to build roads through the mountains. It's said that his road from Ouray to Silverton, through the Red Mountain Pass at elev. 11,018' (3,358 m), cost $10,000 per mile to build— in the 1870s. It gained the moniker The Million Dollar Highway.
I'm not sure how the math works out on that.... It's only 23 miles from Ouray to Silverton, not 100, so it's not clear the road cost $1MM to build. Maybe it's from the tolls he collected? Or possibly it's from what it cost to fully pave the road later. Present-day US 550 follows basically the same route Mears blazed.
Among the many challenges of building this road 150 years ago was crossing Bear Creek. It flows through a narrow and almost vertical slot from high up in the mountains. Just below the road cut it pluges 200 feet over a rocky lip. The steel girder bridge you see above it in the photo is the modern road. In the 1870s the bridge was wooden planks. And it's where Mears placed his toll booth, as it was the hardest point in the road for anyone to sneak around.
Ouray, CO - Tuesday, 5 Jul 2022, 1:30pm
Today is shaping up to be a crummy day, weather-wise. Rain is forecast in Telluride most of the day, and it was gloomy where we were staying in Ridgway, too. At lower elevations around the state it was hot and sunny; but up here in the San Juan Mountains it's like an island of suck in the sky. Thus we decided to visit Ouray today. Ouray's weather isn't any nicer; but at least Ouray is something new.
Ouray is one of several Victorian Era mining towns in Colorado. It was founded in the 1870s when silver was discovered in the mountains. Towns such as this grew quickly as miners flocked to the area.
The San Juan Mountains were forbidding, though, making travel— and commerce— in the area hard. A storied engineer, Otto Mears, was able to build roads through the mountains. It's said that his road from Ouray to Silverton, through the Red Mountain Pass at elev. 11,018' (3,358 m), cost $10,000 per mile to build— in the 1870s. It gained the moniker The Million Dollar Highway.
I'm not sure how the math works out on that.... It's only 23 miles from Ouray to Silverton, not 100, so it's not clear the road cost $1MM to build. Maybe it's from the tolls he collected? Or possibly it's from what it cost to fully pave the road later. Present-day US 550 follows basically the same route Mears blazed.
Among the many challenges of building this road 150 years ago was crossing Bear Creek. It flows through a narrow and almost vertical slot from high up in the mountains. Just below the road cut it pluges 200 feet over a rocky lip. The steel girder bridge you see above it in the photo is the modern road. In the 1870s the bridge was wooden planks. And it's where Mears placed his toll booth, as it was the hardest point in the road for anyone to sneak around.
