The Million Dollar Highway: Cliffs, No Guardrails, and a Theory About Fill

There is a stretch of United States Route Five-Fifty between Ouray and Silverton that has no guardrails on some of its most dramatic drops. The road is carved into cliff faces above valleys several thousand feet below. The curves are tight. The grades are steep. The name for this section of highway is the Million Dollar Highway, and nobody agrees on what the name means.

One theory holds that it cost a million dollars to build in nineteen twenty-four, which was an enormous sum for twenty-five miles of road. Another theory holds that the gravel used as fill was gold-bearing ore from the nearby mining districts, which would make it literally paved with wealth, though geologists have questioned whether the ore content was sufficient to justify the math. A third theory is simply that no sensible person would drive it for less than a million dollars, and the name is a kind of dare.

The no-guardrail question has its own competing explanations. The most persistent involves a former highway director's wife who reportedly declared she did not need guardrails because she refused to look at the drop. This story cannot be verified, but it has outlasted every competing explanation.

What is documented: Otto Mears, the road builder and toll-road entrepreneur who carved dozens of routes through the San Juan Mountains in the eighteen eighties, ran a toll road along this corridor before any paved surface existed. He charged miners by the wagon to use the route. The road existed before it had a name, before it had pavement, before anyone thought to argue about the guardrails.

From Red Mountain Pass at eleven thousand and eighteen feet, the iron-oxide red soil gives the mountain its color and explains why the mines are called Red Mountain. The scenery here was not designed to be scenic. It was built to move silver.