Marshall Pass and the Railroad to Gunnison
Near Salida, Colorado
From the railroad yards in Salida, one of the great narrow gauge lines of the American West set off to climb the Rockies. This was the route over Marshall Pass, a high crossing of the Continental Divide at roughly ten thousand eight hundred feet, southwest of town. In the year eighteen eighty one, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad pushed its three foot narrow gauge track up and over Marshall Pass, and on the sixth of August that year the line reached Gunnison, on the far side of the divide.
That crossing became the railroad's original main line through the central Rockies, the way west toward Grand Junction and, in time, all the way to Salt Lake City. Salida sat at the eastern foot of the climb, which is part of why the town mattered so much to the railroad. Trains gathered here, took on helper engines to fight the grade, and pushed up toward the divide.
The rails over Marshall Pass are long gone now, pulled up when the narrow gauge era ended, but the old railroad grade survives as a scenic backcountry road. Drive it today and you are following, switchback by switchback, the path that steam locomotives once ground up out of Salida on their way over the top of the continent.
