The main highway into my town has just reopened after it was closed by a rockslide for most of last week, but I didn’t notice much disruption. Salida, Colo., was about as busy as it ever is during February.
The rocks slid down a cliff at about 5 p.m. on Feb. 14, about a mile west of Cotopaxi, which sits along U.S. 50 about midway between Salida and Canon City. It had boulders so big that they had to be drilled and dynamited before they could be hauled off, and the highway did not re-open until Feb. 20.
The slide was apparently caused by a phenomenon related to frost-heaving. During the day, snow melts and the water seeps into rock cracks. At night, the water freezes and expands with enough force to break the rocks loose. Gravity takes over from there. Something similar happened about a year ago on Interstate 70 in western Colorado.
Not only did this slide block the highway for the better part of a week, it also took down some power poles, leaving area residents without electricity for a few hours.
Cotopaxi schools closed, since a detour of at least 100 miles was required for buses to get from the school to the other side of the slide. And some area residents who need to go to Canon City for dialysis and similar medical procedures were greatly inconvenienced.
But otherwise, well, things seemed pretty normal. I suspect that’s because most of our supplies and tourists don’t come in from Canon City and Pueblo on U.S. 50, but from Colorado Springs via U.S. 24, or Denver on U.S. 285.
U.S. 50 along the Arkansas River between Salida and Canon is not the most reliable of routes, since it’s often closed for a few hours on account of cleaning up after an accident or a small rockslide.
And sometimes I speculate that we’d prosper more here if the place were a little harder to get to anyway. Consider three of Colorado’s richest mountain towns: Aspen, Telluride and Crested Butte. Each sits on a dead-end road in the winter, and they all seem to be doing fairly well even in these tough times.
Essays in the Range blog are not written by High Country News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.
Ed Quillen is a freelance writer in Salida, Colo.
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