Trail Ridge Road: The Road That Crosses the Sky

Eleven miles of Trail Ridge Road run above eleven thousand five hundred feet. Not above treeline. Above the zone where trees grow even if they wanted to, above the krummholz, those twisted stunted spruce that crouch below ridge lines at high altitude looking like they are trying to hide from the wind. Up here is tundra, technically alpine tundra, which means it shares more ecological characteristics with the Arctic and Antarctica than with the forested valley five miles back.

The road opened in the summer of nineteen thirty-two, on July fifteenth, as the highest continuous paved highway in the United States. The summit area reaches twelve thousand one hundred eighty-three feet. On a clear August afternoon the wind at the Alpine Visitor Center is cold enough to require a jacket most people left in the car.

The route follows, roughly, a trail the Ute people used for centuries to cross the mountains. Not the same alignment, not the same surface, but the same corridor, the same gap through the same range. When the road was being planned in the nineteen-twenties, surveyors found traces of the old trail and used it as a guide. This is not incidental. The Ute knew where the crossing was; they had used it since before the Spanish arrived.

From the Forest Canyon Overlook, on a clear day, you can see two hundred miles. In a summer afternoon storm, which can arrive inside twenty minutes with lightning and hail, you cannot see much past the road edge. The tundra here takes two hundred years to recover from a boot print on the wrong plant. The permit system and the boardwalk sections on the Tundra Communities Trail exist for this reason. The landscape is older than the country and more fragile than it looks.