Monarch Pass and the Continental Divide

Head west out of Salida on United States Highway Fifty and the road climbs until it crosses the roof of the continent. This is Monarch Pass, at an elevation of about eleven thousand three hundred feet, where the highway tops the Continental Divide at the southern end of the Sawatch Range. The Continental Divide is the great hydrological backbone of North America.

Rain that falls on the east side of this pass eventually drains toward the Atlantic Ocean. Rain that falls on the west side flows toward the Pacific. The modern pass has a curious naming story.

In the late nineteen thirties, a state engineer named Charles Vail rerouted the highway over a new, gentler alignment, and the new crossing was at first officially named Vail Pass in his honor. Local residents were furious. They had always called it Monarch, and they tore down the new signs, some of them painting over the Vail markers under cover of darkness.

In December of nineteen thirty nine, the governor of Colorado gave in and officially restored the name Monarch Pass. Charles Vail did eventually get a pass named after him, farther north, and by a twist of fate that Vail Pass became far busier and more famous than the one whose name he lost.