Old Fall River Road: The Road the Prisoners Graded

Before Trail Ridge Road opened in nineteen thirty-two as the high, paved, two-lane crossing of Rocky Mountain National Park, there was Old Fall River Road. It opened in nineteen twenty, one-way going west, unpaved, a series of switchbacks steep enough that early automobiles sometimes could not make the grades in forward gear and had to be reversed up the worst sections. It is still drivable in summer. It is still unpaved. It is still one of the more honest encounters with what early automobile mountain travel actually required.

The road was built between nineteen thirteen and nineteen twenty using crews that included, in the final phases from nineteen eighteen to nineteen twenty, German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war from the Fort Logan military facility near Denver. The labor arrangement followed federal wartime policy: POW labor could be applied to civilian infrastructure projects. The specific records of how many men worked the project and under what conditions are in administrative history files that have not been digitized and are not easily accessible to the public. The total is not in the public record in a form I can confirm precisely.

What is documented: the road was built. The prisoners who graded sections of it are not commemorated anywhere along the route. The existing historical markers focus on the road's engineering and its status as the park's first automobile crossing, not on the labor that created it.

The road offers something Trail Ridge Road does not: the experience of driving a mountain road as it was in the early automobile era, without the comfort of guardrails at every turn, without the reassurance of asphalt, with the sense that the road was put here through considerable effort and has not been substantially improved since.