The Builder
Phil McOllough worked for years digging through the Continental Divide. The Eisenhower Tunnel was his life -- and will likely shorten it, too.

As darkness falls, cars at the Eisenhower Tunnel set the belly of the Continental Divide ablaze in light. Building the tunnel's twin bores was a monumental engineering feat. As many as 1,140 people worked 24 hours a day, six days a week. "Most of them were hard drinkers, rough-and-tumble types," chief engineer Phil McOllough recalls.

When they began to tunnel under the Continental Divide, Phil McOllough knew the job would take years of dirty, dangerous, nerve-racking work. He didn't know that they were going to be the best years of his life.

Another Colorado builder: Otto Mears

"I went up on the mountain in July 1968 and I came down off the mountain in January 1981," says McOllough, the engineer who directed construction of the twin bores of the Eisenhower Tunnel. "I really didn't think it was going to last that long."

Building the highest automobile tunnel in the world was an epic undertaking. It was the most expensive highway project in U.S. history at the time. It profoundly changed the Western Slope, setting off a wildfire of development that continues to burn. At its peak, 1,140 people worked 24 hours a day, six days a week.

When they began, no one -- McOllough included -- knew what they'd find inside the mountain, underneath the billions of tons of decomposing, shifting granite that constantly tried to seal the hole.

"How the rock will behave when you drill into it is the big mystery," says McOllough, 65 and retired from the state highway department. "You learn to really respect it. The rock treats you like you treat it. If you ever fouled up on anything, you paid a price."

Seven men paid with their lives. Two were crushed by trucks in the dark, noisy, crowded, claustrophobic workplace. One fell from a platform. Another was crushed between a rail car and the tunnel's side. One was cutting through rock when a tooth from his saw flew through his head. McOllough can't remember what happened to the other two.

When someone died, it was usually chalked up to carelessness. "It might stop one shift," he says.

They were tough, these "tunnel people," many of whom had been recruited from across the nation.

"It paid well and that's why they were here," McOllough says. "Most of them were hard drinkers, rough-and-tumble types. Hard workers. Nothing bothered them. Hell, they'd be working in two foot of mud and it didn't bother them at all. They loved it."

The history of roads in Colorado parallels that of the state's settlement. Crude wagon roads to the mines carved along the paths of Indian hunting trails. Treacherous, winding paths over mountain passes. Smooth, asphalt veins pumping life into the rugged, secluded landscape.

A tunnel through the divide that would cut miles off the journey over Loveland Pass had long been imagined.

The first attempt came in the 1890s. An entrepreneur raised $4 million and drove one-fifth of the way under Grays Peak south of Georgetown before the silver panic of 1893 scuttled his plan -- and left investors steaming.

Other attempts would follow, and over the decades numerous locations would be studied. In the 1950s, engineers decided that the mountain between Clear and Straight creeks was the spot that offered the best potential for success, the least potential for disaster.

"There was no doubt in my mind that it could be done," McOllough says. "The only question was whether there was enough money to do it."

The first tunnel, which opened in 1973, needed to be redesigned halfway through construction. It was finished two years late and cost more than twice what was budgeted. It was hailed as a huge success.

When drivers glide through the white-tiled tubes in the earth, they see a mere fraction of the whole, the belly of the beast. Each tunnel is, in fact, a complex superstructure 42 feet square built to withstand pressures that could flatten a foot-long piece of steel weighing 217 pounds.

"We used them to hold the mountain at bay," McOllough says. "And the mountain would just crush them."

In 1968, when McOllough was tapped for the job, he was 34 and full of ambition. When he came off the mountain, he was 47 and tired.

"I ran on stomach acid and nerves," he says. He often worked seven days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day, commuting from Evergreen. When McOllough had a day off, he slept.

He developed ulcers, became a two-pack-a-day guy. "I had a good doctor and he said, 'You know, you're going to have to change your ways."

But he didn't, and when the job was done, McOllough found himself bored by the work that came next. Nothing could ever live up to the challenge that had once been his.

He's built like a whiskey barrel, a 1950s football lineman moving in ultra-slow motion. When he laughs, the sound disappears into a wheeze. He was diagnosed with emphysema in 1992 and suffers from a host of related problems, including gout and a painful disorder that attacks his bone marrow.

He takes responsibility for it all.

The day McOllough quit working on the mountain, he put down his two packs of Merits and his lighter and never picked them up again.

"Isn't that something?" he says and laughs that wheezy laugh.

Seven years ago, the portable oxygen tank he's tethered to was set at three liters per minute. Today, it's set at five. Six is the maximum -- not enough to keep him alive at 11,059 feet, his former workplace under the Continental Divide.

In its first year, 2.5 million vehicles passed through the thin air of the Eisenhower Tunnel, far more than anyone anticipated. In 1998, 9.5 million did.

Phil McOllough's pickup wasn't among them.

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