Trail Ridge Road

On Trail Ridge Road in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park, you can drive high into the mountains at elevations above ten thousand feet. The road is only open in the summer, from June to mid-October. During the rest of the year, it’s buried under many feet of snow. Above the tree line, you enter another world. The saw-toothed peaks are windswept and covered by a white blanket. You drive along the edges of soaring vistas, with sweeping views of the sky and mountains in all directions. The snow and ice sparkle in the brilliant high-altitude sunlight. The terrain is a place that seems unreal and unconfined.

At a point on the road called “Rock Cut,” there is a turnoff for a trail head. The trail is a half-mile hike along a lonely, windy path, through high meadows of tundra and frost. Everywhere you hear the howl of the wind. Summer wild flowers struggle to remain rooted in the tundra and not blown to oblivion. Birds fly into the wind and are pushed backward, like salmon trying to swim upstream against a too-strong current. At the trail’s end is a kind of natural rock kiosk, with a panoramic, $360\text{-}\text{degree}$ view of the mountain spectacle. There, in a wind break formed of slabs, is a metal plaque fastened to the rock wall. The plaque is a man-made artifact that seems strangely out of place in this forsaken mountain wilderness. The plaque honors Roger Wolcott Toll, superintendent of Rocky Mountain National Park in the 1930s and the chief engineer of Trail Ridge Road.

The road is an impressive engineering accomplishment. It snakes its way from the valley floor up to the mountain crests, with modest grades and minimal cuts and fills. The achievement is more impressive when you remember that the grading, calculations, and layout were all done manually, without COGO or AUTOCAD. The road was built, in part, to give more people the chance to experience the amazing mountain vistas. It is one of the world’s great alpine highways.

Some historical background from the National Park Service:

Construction on Trail Ridge Road began in September, 1929, and was completed to Fall River Pass July, 1932. Trail Ridge was built to counter deficiencies of Fall River Road. The historic, gravel route was too narrow for the increasing numbers of vehicles. Frequent snowslides, deep snow, and limited scenic views also plagued the route. The maximum grade on Trail Ridge does not exceed 7 percent. Eight miles of the road is above $\mathrm{11,000}\text{feet}$ in elevation. Two different contractors were hired to complete different sections of the road. The first section completed, $17.2\text{miles}$ , was Deer Ridge $\left({\mathrm{8,937}}^{\prime }\right)$ to Fall River Pass $\left({\mathrm{11,794}}^{\prime }\right)$ . The road reached Grand Lake in 1938.

During road construction, workers had only about $4\text{months}$ of the year (mid-June to mid-October) to work. The presence of permafrost required that careful attention be paid to construction to avoid permanent quagmires. Planning efforts sought to reduce scarring on the surrounding landscape. Natural construction debris was removed. Log and rock dikes were constructed to minimize scarring and scattering of rock blasting debris. Extra surface rocks were placed lichen-side up. Tundra sod was salvaged and carefully placed on road banks. Rock projections were kept as scenic “window frames” instead of being blasted away. Rocks matching the surrounding land were used for rock walls. [National Park Service, online: www.nps.gov/romo/visit/weather/history.html (accessed April 2005)]

In the era when the road was built, attitudes about nature and the wilderness were much different than they are today. These attitudes, in turn, colored expectations about civil engineers’ responsibilities. In the 1930s, the frontier was still menacing and inhospitable, something to be developed and conquered for man’s benefit. Civil engineers were the conquerors. The idea was that nature was something to be tamed and reshaped for mankind’s comfort rather than an environment to coexist with. That the process of taming could result in the end of the frontier was not a widely understood consideration, although ideas like preservation and establishment of national parks had started to be discussed. The dominant theme was that engineers presided over the process of creating civilization out of the wilderness, and it was good.

In the twenty-first century, Trail Ridge Road is, in a sense, an anachronism. The idea of the land as wilderness to be conquered is a dated concept. Today, there is more widespread understanding that we are part of the natural environment and not separate from it, even if this understanding does not yet greatly impact land use. Not far from the spectacle of Rocky Mountain Park is the Front Range. This is the edge of the Rocky Mountains, where the Great Plains abruptly end at a startling and surreal wall of mountains. The Front Range today is not much like the way Native Americans and the first European settlers would have seen it. The city of Denver has exploded north along the range, in an exurban sprawl that has enveloped Boulder and continues north eighty miles to Fort Collins and beyond. The sprawl features the usual hodgepodge of unrelated office parks, shopping centers, and housing developments, threaded together by overstuffed freeways and arterial highways. The sprawl isn’t much different than the glopscapes found elsewhere in the United States. It is notable perhaps only by the backdrop of the wall of mountains, at least on those days when you can see the range through the auto exhaust smog. Not too far north is the Wyoming border. Wyoming is one of the wildest U.S. states, and now it is about to be suburbanized. There are no obvious barriers to the upcoming paving and Walmarting of the Wild West. Instead of lassoing the dogies, you would catch a burger at McDonald’s.

What is called for to tame this new version of the Not-So-Wild West is a new set of skills and attitudes much different than the approach used for building Trail Ridge Road. This is a new and difficult debate that has just begun, and it is one that we civil engineers must participate in. It was easy for the public at large to understand the concept of the taming of the wilderness, and our heroic engineering role in doing so. The new job of taming land-use planning, and of designing a built environment where the pieces fit together, involves more ambiguity and conflict than the simple black and white of the old job of the subjugation of nature. To an extent, it is up to us whether we engineers will be seen as heroes or villains in this new drama.