By Joe Garner
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

Pioneers heading for Colorado followed dusty, rocky trails.

Decades later, travelers came by train or the first paved highways.

Beginning in 1956, highway travel would change forever with the launching of the interstate highway system.

Coloradans could not realize how these divided, high-speed freeways would transform a state split by mountains and isolated by distance from much of the rest of America.

The dedication of Interstate 70 through Glenwood Canyon in 1992 completed Colorado's interstate highway grid more than 30 years after construction started.

The result is nothing less than modern Colorado itself: booming, high-tech cities, blue-sky small towns celebrated for their quality of life, signature ski and golf resorts stretched over steeps and valleys, and computerized mansions perched on plateaus where cattle once grazed.

"I'm proud of what has happened, but I have second thoughts almost as a daydream," said Floyd Diemoz, a Glenwood Springs building contractor who served on the committee overseeing I-70 construction in Glenwood Canyon.

"I almost would have preferred that an I-70 never had passed through our region, because of the growth it has brought."

Nationally, the interstate system is essentially complete, 43,800 miles of limited-access roads with an estimated cost of $128.9 billion, according to the Federal Highway Administration. In Colorado, the 954 miles of interstate cost an estimated $1.73 billion -- $1.38 billion for I-70 through the mountains, $125 million for Interstate 25 and $225.3 million for Interstate 76, both across the plains.

Construction of the interstates began in 1956, when President Dwight Eisenhower signed legislation for the federal government to pay 90 percent and the states 10 percent of the cost of coordinated national defense highways modeled on the German autobahns.

He said the interstates would "change the face of America."

Few planners realized the extent of the transformation, especially along I-70 through the Colorado mountains.

Early roads in Colorado were chiefly spokes that extended from Denver, Pueblo and Grand Junction to bind Colorado and link it with neighboring states to entice vacationing motorists.

Today, the interstates carry 24 percent of all traffic in the state on a little more than 1 percent of the total road mileage. Coloradans take them for granted, whatever the weather.

"The best compliment people can pay us is that they expect I-70 will be open," said Ed Fink, statewide maintenance superintendent for the Colorado Department of Transportation. "The expectation is that we will recover very quickly after a storm and reopen I-70."

The expectation is the same for I-25, the north-south corridor along the Front Range that developed from a route earlier called the Great North and South Highway, and for I-76, Denver's connection to Interstate 80 in Nebraska.

Extending almost 300 miles from New Mexico to Wyoming, I-25 was pieced together along the Front Range using sections of freeway in Pueblo and Colorado Springs in addition to Denver's Valley Highway.

Opened in 1958 after more than 20 years of planning delayed by World War II, the Valley Highway from 48th Avenue in the north to Colorado Boulevard in the south was Denver's first freeway.

In northeastern Colorado, the interstate was built paralleling trails, roads and railroads along the South Platte River, which pioneers had followed in their exploration of the Rocky Mountain West.

Renamed I-76 in 1976 to mark the centennial of statehood, the interstate to the northeast originally was called Interstate 80-South, a 180-mile spur linking Denver to transcontinental Interstate 80.

Denver initially was not to have an interstate link to the west, because I-70 was to end on the eastern edge of the city.

The highway situation mirrored Denver's isolation in the 19th century when the first transcontinental railroad took a route across the high plains of southern Wyoming because the Rockies initially seemed insurmountable.

Outraged by being denied a transcontinental interstate in the initial planning, Colorado officials protested the impending isolation in Washington, only to find that the Utah Road Commission saw no benefits from an extension of I-70 west from Denver.

After a change of administration in Utah, the road commission reversed itself and lobbied for it, leading to the 450-mile boulevard across Colorado.

The 1960s and 1970s were the decades of building I-70 through the Rockies, as well as completion of other projects in the state.

Completion of the two bores of the Eisenhower Tunnel, in 1973 and 1979, for $261.8 million sent the highway into Summit County, ending the days of packing food and clothing for a treacherous trip over Loveland Pass for a day of skiing.

"U.S. 6 (over Loveland Pass) used to get closed for several days at a time," Fink said. "The tunnel is a thousand feet lower, and you're down in a valley, and we put a lot more resources on keeping I-70 open. It's become our lifeline to the Western Slope, Summit County and the major ski areas. Colorado depends on it."

But the I-70 corridor did not flow freely until the 12.5-mile segment opened through Glenwood Canyon in 1992 at a cost of $480 million. Construction was delayed for a decade because of environmentalists' outrage at the brutal cuts made in canyon walls when construction began in the 1960s.

"It was the epitome of environmental insensitivity," Denver architect D. Blake Chambliss said. He was a member of the third and final watchdog committe that oversaw completion of the canyon with a highway design that respected its natural beauty.

"Most of the people in western Colorado see it as having preserved the canyon," he said. "The design of the highway has preserved it so people can use the canyon. I think pieces of the highway elevate to the standard of public art."

Complementing the aesthetics, the completed interstate bound the Western Slope to the Front Range. The drive between Denver and Grand Junction fell from six or seven hours to an intense, high-speed four-plus, as if the Great Divide were no longer there.

"I loved it when Aspen was smaller," said retired Aspen architect Sam Caudill, who chaired the citizens' advisory committee. "We're an urbanized community now, and we were a rural community. But you can't keep people from traveling here, and not everyone comes by plane, and very few still come by mule."

Colorado Milestones, which appears Tuesdays, is part of a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society. Digital and print copies of historical images are available at the Colorado Historical Society, (303) 866-2305.

On TV: 10 p.m. Sunday -- Colorado History: A Labor Day-weekend tribute to pack burros, early laborers who helped build the state.

August 31, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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