The Million Dollar Highway: Mesa Verde to Ouray by the Only Road That Exists

United States Highway Five Fifty between Silverton and Ouray covers twenty-three miles of road that has no guardrails on its outer edges for much of its length. The road clings to a cliff face above the Uncompahgre Gorge and the Red Mountain Pass watershed, cut into terrain where the alternative to the road is a vertical drop of several hundred feet.

The name Million Dollar Highway has several contested origin stories. One holds that regrading the road into a modern highway in the nineteen twenties cost roughly one million dollars per mile for the most difficult sections, a prodigious expense for the era. Another holds that a traveler, shown the completed road, said she would not drive it again for a million dollars. A third credits the gold ore in the roadbed fill. The exact derivation is not settled.

The road was built because the mines needed it. The San Juan Mountains above Silverton contained silver and gold deposits that were among the richest in Colorado during the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, and the only way to get ore to the smelters in Durango was through or over the mountains. The wagon road that preceded the current highway was itself an engineering achievement, blasted and graded at a time when dynamite was still relatively new technology and labor came from wherever labor could be recruited.

The San Juan National Forest surrounds the road for much of the corridor. The switchbacks above Ouray, visible from the town below, are known locally as the Million Dollar Highway's most dramatic stretch. Motorcyclists come from several states to drive them.

The road has no guardrails because adding them would require widening the roadbed into the cliff face, which the geology will not permit without significant cost.