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Taillights are seen heading West in a traffic jam heading down Floyd Hill during MLK weekend Sunday, Jan. 14, 2024 on Interstate 70 in Clear Creek County, Colorado.
(Photo: Daniel Brenner)
Taillights are seen heading West in a traffic jam heading down Floyd Hill during MLK weekend Sunday, Jan. 14, 2024 on Interstate 70 in Clear Creek County, Colorado.
A red snake: Taillights stretch west in a traffic jam heading down Floyd Hill on Sunday, January 14, Martin Luther King weekend, on Interstate 70 in Colorado. (Photo: Daniel Brenner)

Colorado’s I-70 Has America’s Most Notorious Ski Traffic. Is There a Solution?

Published

Cars spin, trucks slide, and what should be an hour’s drive can take all day. How did this scenic mountain corridor get so congested—and can it ever be fixed? I took a wild ride through the traffic jam to find out.

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Originally, I had a vision. It involved getting into a car with strangers.

The idea struck me a few weeks before I left for Colorado, where I was going to report on the state’s notorious Interstate 70 traffic. Each winter, I-70 makes headlines and stymies skiers attempting to drive from Denver and the urban Front Range to the dozen or so resorts that lie west along the scenic and beleaguered 144-mile mountain corridor. The highway has even inspired its own Instagram account, @i70things, which features scenes of Corvettes squirming in the snow, semis jackknifed across the road, and the cherry-red ass ends of countless vehicles, all filmed by frustrated travelers.

I’ve been mired on I-70 myself, having lived on the Front Range until last year, when I moved back to my home state of California, to the mountains around Lake Tahoe. On my upcoming trip, I hoped to answer some of the questions I’d pondered as a Coloradan: What causes I-70 traffic? Could it ever be fixed? And what did traffic on I-70—and other infamous recreational arteries like Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon to Alta and Snowbird ski resorts or the Montauk Highway to Long Island’s beaches—reveal about our relationship with nature?

At the moment, though, I was specifically puzzling over who, exactly, wandered innocently into the I-70 gridlock each weekend. Everyone I knew in Colorado seemed to understand that you could mostly avoid traffic if you left the Front Range early in the morning and the resorts early afternoon. We set grim alarms that began with the numbers five, four, or even three to go skiing. Who were all these snoozers caught in the 8 A.M. swell each week? And wouldn’t it be great, I mulled, if I could somehow get into one of their cars for this story?

That’s when a synapse in my brain either fired or short-circuited. Maybe I could.

The initial plan was rough: I would trawl the popular Dinosaur Park-n-Ride lots outside Denver and talk my way into a vehicle with a group of these hapless pilgrims. We would wade into traffic together, brothers and sisters in arms, and I would bear witness to their arduous journey. Hard lessons would be learned, but good times would still be had, in the Rocky Mountain spirit of adventure.

I briefed my fiancé. He politely lauded my out-of-the-box thinking, but expressed valid concerns, including the offhand chance that I got murdered, or a more likely scenario in which I failed to convince anyone to let some rando into their car. He suggested I arrange a ride in advance.

I took to the keyboard with optimism. “Hi all!” I posted on three Denver-area skiing Facebook groups. “I’m looking for a fun group to hitch a ride with on Saturday January 6. … Looking for folks who were already planning to leave the Front Range at 7 A.M. or later.” I left my phone number, converting a few digits to text (“seven2zero…”) to foil the spam bots, and waited for the invitations to roll in.

The response was swift and derisive.

“That’s literally the worst traffic weekend of the year. Hard pass!”
“Anyone leaving at that time of day, on that particular weekend is clearly a sadistic psychopath and should not be trusted to drive you anywhere.”
“This is literally the first man [note: I’m a woman] that is actively trying to get stuck on i70.”

And the most humiliating:

“You can write your number out this isn’t bumble or match.com.”

For the next several days I cringed at the sight of new Facebook notifications. I questioned my entire plan. Colorado was having an unusually dry season, and for the week preceding my trip, the snowfall forecast looked like a line of binary code: 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1 inches. What if it didn’t snow? What if ski conditions were so bad I didn’t even see traffic?

By Thursday, things were looking up. OpenSnow forecasters were baiting skiers with “soft/powder conditions” for Saturday morning. The mountains were calling, and everyone in Denver would go. I packed my skis and flew to Colorado to get stuck in traffic.

From left: Siena Mueller, Lauren Cloward, and Rachel Cloward pack up their car with Santiago burritos and après beverages before carpooling to the mountains on Saturday, January 6, at the Dinosaur carpool lots in Golden, Colorado.
From left: Siena Mueller, Lauren Cloward, and Rachel Cloward pack up their car with Santiago burritos and après beverages before carpooling to the mountains on Saturday, January 6, at the Dinosaur carpool lots. (Daniel Brenner)
Also seen in the Dinosaur lots that same Saturday: Luke Ostrom, loading up his ski rack before driving to the mountains
Also seen in the Dinosaur lots that same Saturday at dawn: Luke Ostrom, loading up his ski rack before driving west to the resorts (Daniel Brenner)

Dinosaur Lots, I-70

14 miles west of Denver

If you’ve never witnessed a line of cars stream into the Dinosaur carpooling lots in Golden, Colorado, on an early Saturday morning in January, you should. It is a phenomenon both fearsome and profound, not unlike the animal migrations one might read about in National Geographic: The wall of headlights bearing down in the frigid darkness. The staggering homogeneity of the vehicles, so many gleaming Toyotas and Subarus. The sheer quantity of people consolidating gear and vehicles with workmanlike efficiency at an hour when God intended us to be unconscious.

The “Dino Lots,” nestled where the plains of the Front Range begin to crease into the foothills of the Continental Divide, are a demarcation point for the drive from Denver to the mountains. The rule: pass them by 6 a.m. or suffer. Between 5:30 a.m. and 6:15 a.m., everyone my friend and photographer Dan Brenner and I speak to is a grizzled I-70 user. Several tell us sorry, they don’t have time to talk, as they toss bags and skis into trunks. The ones who do give us a few minutes include two 30-something friends who got up at 3:30 a.m. and say that the interstate “ruins snowboarding” but are still going snowboarding; a trio of 20-something guys from Colorado who tell me that while they can’t blame others for moving here to do the same activities they love, traffic often deters them from those activities; and two men in their mid-twenties, a couple, who recently moved here from Phoenix and plan to let their Tesla self-drive up to Vail.

If you’ve never witnessed a line of cars stream into the Dinosaur carpooling lots in Golden, Colorado, on an early Saturday morning in January, you should. It is a phenomenon both fearsome and profound, not unlike the animal migrations one might read about in National Geographic.

By 6:53 A.M., it’s time for the Big Show, the drivers Dan and I have been waiting for, the ones rocking up at 7 A.M. like it’s 1997 and you can still drive to Vail on a Saturday in an hour and a half.

I sidle up to two women who are loading a green Jeep. Mollie Slechta, 32, begins to tell me, “I don’t have much to say about I-70 traffic other than it’s annoy–” when her friend Maddie Brown, 33, cuts in, “Other than it’s terrible! And everyone needs to leave Colorado!” How do they feel about their odds of beating traffic now? “Uh, not good,” Brown says.

“This might be the worst idea we’ve ever had,” says Slechta.

The next row over, I meet sisters Lauren and Rachel Cloward, ages 29 and 27, and their friend Siena Mueller, 27, who are stocking a silver SUV with a six-pack of Rainiers, a 12-pack of White Claws, and a bag of breakfast burritos. They don’t think they’ll miss traffic, but “hopefully it’s not awful,” one woman says.

Why didn’t they leave earlier? “I never know what time to leave for skiing,” Siena says, with a nervous chuckle, looking at Lauren.

“Also, she refuses to wake up before six,” says Lauren, pointing at Siena.

“You’re kind of stressing me out,” Siena tells me.

I haven’t given up on my dream of a joyride with strangers. Dan and I sense an opening with a pair of thirtysomething dudes bound for Loveland Ski Area. The driver has his window down and gyrates to his music. He wears a big smile that gets bigger when we tell him we’re reporters from Outside. “Cool!” he says. Would he be willing to let me hop into his car? The smile stays fixed, but the eyes dart side to side.

I add, reluctantly, “You can say no.”

“OK,” he replies, still smiling. “No.”

Skiers enjoy recent snowfall Friday, January 19, at Colorado’s Winter Park Resort.
Skiers and riders enjoy recent snowfall at Winter Park Resort, a popular target for day-trippers from the Front Range, because it offers the earliest opportunity to get off I-70. (Photo: Daniel Brenner)

Floyd Hill, I-70

26 miles west of Denver

Denver skiers endeavoring to reach the mountains on a Saturday morning run their first gauntlet at Floyd Hill, an eight-mile constriction about ten minutes past the Dino Lots, where three lanes become two. Having failed to secure a ride, I drive Dan’s Toyota Highlander while he shoots photos from the passenger seat. At 7:46 A.M., our car crawls under a sign that reads “HEAVY TRAFFIC TO SILVERTHORNE EXPECT DELAYS.”

If you ask Coloradans what causes I-70 traffic, you’ll get theories about winter weather, curvy mountain roads, and tourists in rental cars. These factors do contribute to backups. But people also seem to intuit the main reason I-70 is congested, which is that it accesses stunning peaks, sprawling public lands, and some of the best ski resorts in the country—and everyone wants to get to them. Experts say it’s simple supply and demand: a highway built in the 1970s now handles traffic from a population that’s nearly tripled and visitorship that keeps growing, fueled in part by Americans’ record participation in outdoor activities. In 1973, when the first bore of what’s now called the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel was completed, 2.4 million cars used it to travel I-70 through the Continental Divide. Last year that number was 13 million.

The traffic on I-70 is primarily recreation-driven, occurring mostly on weekends and holidays. “The times we have traffic on I-70 are correlated to when people are utilizing the great outdoors,” Shoshana Lew, executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation, tells me before my trip. Total volumes are actually higher in the summer, but congestion is exacerbated in the winter, when everyone is coming and going from ski resorts at the same times and often on snowy roads. In recent years, CDOT has also increasingly had to manage summer closures due to wildfires, flash floods, and mudslides.

I lived in Colorado from 2011 to 2014, then moved to the Northeast for work before returning in 2018. Friends told me I-70 traffic got worse while I was gone, but I vowed not to complain. The four years I lived out East I dreamt only of returning to the West. The first time I drove the highway again, I wept with joy to see the snowcapped mountains.

My friends were right, though. The average drive time on a winter Saturday morning from the Dino Lots to the Silverthorne exit, for Keystone Ski Resort, went from 80 minutes in 2012 to two hours in 2019, according to an analysis by CDOT. (The drive should take less than an hour without traffic, but it can be several hours in the worst jams.) A report by Colorado Public Radio found that the winter I returned, Front Range drivers had to leave by 6 A.M. to achieve the same travel time we had at 7 A.M. the year I left.

Here on Floyd Hill the situation is deteriorating. Cars have spilled onto a frontage road in a desperate attempt to shave a few minutes off their fate. Suddenly, Dan sits up. “He’s peeing!” he exclaims. A red RAV4 is pulled over, its puffy-clad driver standing outside the car, watering a pine. Minutes later we spot a hatchback with a rack bearing two ski bikes, those treacherous mutants that sport the torso of a bike and the lower extremity of a ski while offering the steering and braking capabilities of neither. We slide past the hatchback and I kid you not, its passenger turns and looks straight at me wearing a Friday the 13th mask. I yelp. The scene has become literally nightmarish. It’s 8:30 a.m. and we’ve covered 13 miles in the past hour.

Travelers bogged on I-70 are known for amusing antics like skiing on the shoulders, doing pushups, or even playing volleyball next to their vehicles; last winter a bluegrass band performed a little outdoor concert for fellow travelers when the road closed. But for the state, I-70 congestion is a serious concern, and has been since at least the early 2000s. The highway is a major thoroughfare for residents and truck commerce, and it’s also crucial to the state’s tourism economy—travelers spend more money along the I-70 mountain corridor than in any region except Denver. The fear that traffic would deter visitors to Colorado’s tourism-based communities was one of the main reasons the nonprofit I-70 Coalition formed in 2004. But those concerns haven’t come to pass, Margaret Bowes, director of the coalition, tells me. Business along the mountain corridor continues to boom, and Colorado ski resorts broke visitor records the past two winters. “People have just come to accept that I-70 traffic is part of the deal if you want to ski or recreate on our mountain corridor,” Bowes says.

Yet what about all the people I know who refuse to drive I-70 on weekends anymore, who gave up skiing or even left Colorado altogether because they couldn’t deal with traffic? Bowes has talked to many of those people too. “But,” she says, with dry amusement, “it sure seems like for every one of those folks, another person or two was willing to take their spot.”

A Bustang driving west on Saturday, January 6, on I-70 in Colorado
A Bustang heads west on I-70 into the mountains. Run by CDOT, Bustang (launched in 2015 for the I-70 and I-25 corridors) and Snowstang (launched in 2019 specifically for reaching resorts) coaches have been exceptionally popular. (Daniel Brenner)
Two passengers, one of them wearing a costume mask, drive west Saturday, January 6, on I-70 in Colorado.
Yes, the traffic scene has become literally nightmarish. Two passengers, one of them wearing a Friday the 13th costume mask, head west on the interstate. (Daniel Brenner)

Eisenhower Tunnel, I-70

57 miles west of Denver

At 9:45 A.M., Dan and I pull off the highway and park in a small lot at the entrance to the Eisenhower Tunnel. It’s snowing, and it’s been 2 hours and 15 minutes since we left the Dino Lots, a drive that should take less than an hour without traffic.

We walk into the cavernous building above the tunnel and up the stairs into a dimly lit control room. Monitors line the walls. A lone figure sits in a wheeled swivel chair. Before we can introduce ourselves, he speaks, still facing the screens. “I gotta pay attention,” he says, “and if the radio goes off, I gotta listen.”

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Video by Daniel Brenner

This is Mark Kerklo, 58, and as a control-room operator, he serves as CDOT’s all-seeing eye at the 1.7-mile tunnel. (“Why didn’t you take the elevator?” he asks.) In a past life he worked a client-facing job in high-end construction management. Now he’s grown his gray beard and silver-blond hair long. “I don’t see anyone anymore,” he says. “I’m just up here at the tunnel, behind the scenes.” When the radio crackles or the phone rings, Kerklo moves like an octopus, pushing himself off in his chair from one end of his workstation to the other, one hand reaching for a phone, the other for his mouse. He’s here to intervene in various scenarios, from halting semis that are too tall to enter the tunnel, to sending CDOT tow trucks in for Teslas stopped dead in the middle (drivers often underestimate the juice required to climb to either entrance). Right before we arrived, he says, a pair of “teenage ding-dongs” were trying to push their car up to the westbound portal. He had to turn on a light to stop traffic for them. Another time, he radioed a colleague to stop a GoPro-adorned motorcyclist and tell him he’d better not be planning to pop a wheelie in the tunnel. When the rider did exactly that anyway, Kerklo tossed a message up on the digital sign midway that read, “NO WHEELIES.” 

Most of the drivers in the tunnel are unaware that they’re traversing not just the physical lynchpin of the east-west halves of the state, but a historical one that clinched Colorado’s fate and fortune. In the late 19th century, people didn’t travel to the mining town of Breckenridge or what’s now Vail for fun. These high-elevation areas were difficult or near impossible to get to. Colorado’s most-visited destinations were instead places like Manitou Springs and Glenwood Springs, which were accessible by rail and allowed wealthy Victorians to soak in hot pools and gaze upon scenery passively “almost as if it were a painting,” Bill Philpott, associate professor of history at Denver University, tells me.

This was due to infrastructure but also culture, Philpott says. The idea of exerting oneself voluntarily in the outdoors only gained popularity at the turn of the century, as the nation urbanized and leaders like Teddy Roosevelt began to worry that city-dwelling Americans would lose touch with their hardy frontier virtues. Roosevelt extolled the practice of reinvigorating one’s character through strenuous activity in nature, and though his ideals were rooted in traditional masculinity and racial hierarchy, they echo in outdoor culture today.

After World War II, the middle class swelled, and some Coloradans began to see outdoor recreation as a major economic opportunity. Business owners, chambers of commerce, and other tourism boosters promoted their access to activities like hunting, fishing, hiking, and skiing. But the high peaks remained relatively remote. The main roads that traveled from east to west across Colorado were State Highways 6 and 40; both were often hair-raising in the winter.

Travelers bogged on I-70 are known for amusing antics like skiing on the shoulders, doing pushups, or even playing volleyball next to their vehicles; last winter a bluegrass band performed a little outdoor concert for fellow travelers when the road closed.

Initial plans for the interstate highway system in the 1940s and 50s had I-70 begin in Washington, D.C., and terminate in Denver, avoiding an expensive connection through the mountains. But Colorado leaders saw the interstate as crucial to their state’s economic future and refused to be bypassed by the newly minted throngs of middle-class tourists in their automobiles. Testifying before Congress in 1955, Senator Eugene Milliken said, “We do not want to be seen as a second-class state. We are entitled to a straight chute through Colorado, through the mountains.”

As Philpott tells it in his 2013 book Vacationland, once the interstate was approved across Colorado in the late 1950s, communities along the potential routes—U.S. 6 and 40—vied for the highway, already hearing the cha-ching of cash registers. The founders of Vail Mountain printed business cards to entice investors, showing the ski resort’s site on the future interstate. Indeed, once the Eisenhower Tunnel was completed in 1973, Colorado’s ski and tourism industries exploded.

The version of the outdoors that Colorado sold to flatlanders was nonintimidating and car-friendly. “Much of the tourist literature bragged about the all-weather roads, the paved boulevards that sweep you through the mountains without difficulty,” Philpott says. Over Zoom, he shows me a Vail tourist brochure, circa 1965, in which rows of parked cars peek into a scene of snowy lodges. “The business model was, bring people in by I-70,” he says, “but then transition them away from it.” Visitors would park their cars, walk through a covered bridge, and into the Swiss-inspired village.

As more visitors came, many also moved permanently, not so much for jobs as quality of life. Migration toward sunny, leisure-oriented locales like Colorado, California, and Florida began in the fifties, and Colorado’s population surged from that decade through the seventies. Denver-area developers bragged that every day residents “could soak in Colorado’s sunshine and crisp air and find inspiration in its celebrated mountain views,” Philpott writes. Every weekend, “they could take paved highways up to the high country for some fishing, hiking, or skiing.”

The promise of Colorado was always this: that you could live in civilization yet readily escape into the wilds. It was how the state was billed to me 15 years ago, when I was living in San Francisco and a friend from Boulder told me about this land of hoppy beer and rugged men, where you could pedal a bike from town into the foothills in minutes. When I moved to the Rocky Mountains at 27, I understood what John Denver meant by coming home to a place he’d never been before. I thought I’d live there for the rest of my life.

But here and there, Colorado began to break its promise. It’s not exactly true to say that I moved away because of I-70, but the mountains began to feel less accessible. Summer camping trips were cut short on Sunday mornings to beat traffic, powder days missed when weighed against the chaos of travel. My partner and I talked of moving to the mountains. When the opportunity arose, they were mountains in a different state, but it wasn’t as hard to leave as it once would have been.

A paradise so readily accessible by highway was destined to draw so many adventure seekers that they overwhelmed the highway itself. Locals in mountain communities along the interstate today bemoan traffic and overcrowding. Most have forgotten the days when their predecessors clamored for the road. “People were coming to associate with the outdoors in ways that were automobile-dependent,” Philpott says, “but they couldn’t always predict the outcome. They didn’t anticipate how it would come back to haunt them.”

A vehicle is seen on its side, off the road, while emergency services arrive on Sunday, January 14, on Interstate 70 in Summit County, Colorado.
Emergency services to the rescue on a stretch of I-70 in Summit County, Colorado, in January (Daniel Brenner)
CDOT control-room operator Mark Kerklo is the “all-seeing eye” of the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel in Colorado. Kerklo monitors traffic, dispatches tow trucks for stalled vehicles, and updates digital signage with weather conditions.
A CDOT control-room operator, Mark Kerklo is an "all-seeing eye" at the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel. He monitors traffic, dispatches tow trucks for stalled and stuck vehicles, and updates digital signage with weather conditions. (Daniel Brenner)

Copper Mountain, I-70

77 miles west of Denver

I have a short memory, too, which explains why, when Dan and I leave the Eisenhower Tunnel at 11 A.M., I suggest we get in a couple of hours of skiing, having forgotten that there’s no such thing as a quick weekend ski day in Colorado. After waiting in lines for a few runs at Copper Mountain, we take two buses back to our car at the aptly named Far East lot. By 3 P.M., when we pull up our route back to the Front Range on Google Maps, it looks like a red and yellow coral snake. I’d hoped to return in time to relax before dinner. Instead, stopping and slowing in the car, we run out of daylight and conversation.

Coloradans have long dreamed of a train along the I-70 mountain corridor. Some form of mass transit is in fact part of the Record of Decision, the plan that governs how the state must meet its forecasted 2050 traffic demands on I-70. Also part of the ROD is an additional bore of the Eisenhower Tunnel and expansion of the highway to six-lane capacity. Note the emphasis on capacity rather than six actual lanes, as geography, politics, and finances all limit the potential to widen I-70. Increasing capacity, then, includes projects that aim to move more people on existing infrastructure, such as by converting some wider shoulders into peak-hour traffic lanes.

According to ROD analyses, I-70 will need both six-lane capacity and mass transit to meet demand by 2050. But the state doesn’t have the money to complete either fantastically expensive project, and the technology for a rail-based transit solution through the mountain corridor is not yet proven. Colorado is particularly hamstrung by a state law that requires voters to approve any increase in taxes. For all their grousing about traffic, residents have nixed ballot measures in recent years that aimed to raise funds for infrastructure.

A new lane or train is also unlikely to reduce traffic on I-70 in the long-term, thanks to a phenomenon called induced demand. Induced demand says that adding capacity to a road—whether through infrastructure like a lane or public transit—will only temporarily relieve congestion. That short-term relief will then induce pent-up demand—for example, when all those people who haven’t been skiing in ages hear that traffic isn’t too bad anymore decide to try again—and eventually the road is just as congested as it was. The ROD doesn’t even claim that a train would reduce the number of cars on the road; mass transit is just expected to bring more people up to the mountains. According to induced demand, every driver who decides to take transit will eventually be replaced by another in their car.

In most places in the U.S. except dense cities, no other form of transit can currently compete with the automobile. “You hear the phrase ‘love affair with the automobile’ like we have some irrational attachment to cars,” Patricia Mokhtarian, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech, tells me. “It’s less an emotional attachment than a very practical evaluation of costs and benefits.” Car trips are typically the fastest and most flexible, not to mention the easiest for transporting gear and small children. For getting to most outdoor destinations, they’re the only feasible solution.

But cars also rule because we haven’t priced driving accordingly. In the U.S., we don’t pay for the full costs of our driving, particularly those we inflict on others, like congestion and emissions, Mokhtarian says. In Europe, for example, fuel is taxed heavily; in places like Singapore and London, drivers are charged to enter busy districts. Raising the cost of driving does change behavior—Singapore saw a 45 percent drop in traffic after introducing congestion pricing—but it can also be politically unpopular. For example, gas taxes, which are a major source of funding for public transit and infrastructure, haven’t risen in Colorado for more than 30 years. Gas in Denver was $2.71 a gallon when I visited. Why not drive?

Is there anything else, I ask Mokhtarian, that fixes congestion? “Yes,” she says, and I perk up, until she continues, “In places where the population is shrinking, congestion is fixing itself.” She adds, “A lot depends on the attractiveness of the region as a whole. If demand is increasing, it’s pretty challenging to stay ahead of it.”

Westbound traffic crawls to a stop on the Sunday of Martin Luther King weekend on I-70 in Clear Creek County, Colorado.
Westbound I-70 traffic crawls and stops on the Sunday of Martin Luther King weekend in Clear Creek County, Colorado. (Daniel Brenner)
A driver makes a dash the hillside to relieve himself while stop-and-go traffic gives him a reprieve during Martin Luther King weekend.
A driver dashes to the hillside for relief while his vehicle is stuck in traffic. (Daniel Brenner)

Dinosaur Lots, I-70

14 miles west of Denver

I return to the Dino Lots alone at 6:45 the next morning. At first the lots appear quiet compared to yesterday. But when a bus bearing the Copper Mountain logo lumbers in, a queue of skiers materializes.

CDOT isn’t waiting for the funds to manifest themselves for a train. In 2015, the agency launched Bustang, a daily line along the I-70 corridor, followed by Snowstang, the weekend bus service I’m trying today, which takes skiers directly to Arapahoe Basin, Copper Mountain, and three other resorts for $25 round trip. In 2022, it added Pegasus, a line of shuttle vans with bike and ski racks. The lines have been wildly popular: Pegasus at times has filled 70 percent of seats, and Bustang averages 58 percent, CDOT communications director Matt Inzeo tells me.

Experts say that flexible transit options like buses and vans are the way forward in much of the U.S., where low population density and long-held commitment to automobile infrastructure make fixed forms of mass transit, like high-speed rail, impractical. In that sense the ROD, Shoshana Lew of CDOT says, is somewhat outdated. “It’s so focused on putting a train on I-70,” she says, “it undersold some more feasible transit options.” CDOT is now prioritizing what Lew calls this “lower hanging fruit,” such as Bustang and Pegasus, and the possibility of repurposing an existing Union Pacific line for a passenger train from Denver to the Winter Park and Steamboat Springs ski areas.

Transportation is the number one source of emissions in this country, with passenger vehicles contributing the greatest share. CDOT’s efforts are taking place in the broader context of an ambitious transportation bill, signed by Governor Jared Polis in 2021, that aims to shift billions of dollars away from emissions-boosting projects like road widening and toward emissions-reducing projects like public transportation, in order to meet Colorado’s goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Lew, who wears square-rimmed glasses and favors the frankness of an engineer over the gloss of a bureaucrat, manages to make the Polis administration’s long-term vision for I-70 sound practical rather than pie-in-the-sky. “Ideally, we’d have a hybridized system where it’s pretty normal not to take a car to the mountains,” she says. “We want transit to be a viable, attractive, fun option for people.”

On the bus, I meet Justin Shaffer, 27, who studied sustainable energy in college and tells me that Snowstang is the only way he visits the resorts. Though he grew up in Colorado, he doesn’t own a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and, “I just don’t feel like dealing with this,” he says, gesturing at the line of slow-moving cars outside the window. Doesn’t the bus sit in traffic, too? “Yeah, but I don’t really notice it when I’m not the one driving.”

Traffic is not a Colorado phenomenon, or a Western individualist one, or even an American one. It follows beauty, choking the roads from Lake Tahoe to Cape Cod.

Riding Snowstang is a glimpse into a lifestyle described to me weeks ago by Martin Ritter, U.S.-division CEO for the Swiss rail company Stadler. Over Zoom, Ritter enchanted me with tales of growing up in Switzerland and recreating in the Alps by rail. As a child, he and his parents played cards and board games on the train. As an adult, he designed his own point-to-point ski, run, or bike adventures because he didn’t need to return somewhere to pick up his car. On the ride home, he could fall asleep or prepare an Instagram post.

This kind of system feels like a fantasy for the U.S., but Ritter tells me that during the Biden administration, many states have been exploring rail and other forms of transit. He thinks that some American ski towns, like Park City, Utah, with its dense Main Street, would be vastly improved by going car-free like Zermatt, Switzerland. Driving into a crowded ski town is stressful, he says. Parking lots are also a poor use of limited space. Ski towns have long pushed public transportation, but a few are now piloting more innovative solutions. Breckenridge, for example, has been encouraging visitors to leave cars at home by offering e-bike shares, EV shares, and free buses that run to popular trailheads. An outdoor lifestyle that’s less reliant on cars, Ritter believes, “absolutely has a future here.”

Some are concerned that bringing more visitors up by public transportation would only exacerbate the overcrowding that Colorado mountain communities have seen in recent years. But others say that parking and road infrastructure are often the limiting factor for capacity in ski towns and outdoor destinations. Arapahoe Basin’s sustainability manager Mike Nathan tells me, for example, that the ski area could handle many more visitors if they didn’t come in their cars. (This may not be the case for all I-70 resorts, judging by the length of some lift lines.) A-Basin thus incentivizes carpoolers by allocating them its coveted slopeside “beach” parking lot on weekends, and it rewards Snowstang riders with $89 lift tickets. Overcrowding at the most popular trailheads around Breckenridge also usually comes down to parking, says Katherine King, Summit County Open Space and Trails director. In surveys, visitors tell King and her colleagues that even if parking was hard to find, the trails felt uncrowded.

Induced demand is often used as an environmental argument against road widening, and the transportation experts that I spoke with all agreed it’s a legitimate phenomenon. But they also agreed that if a population is growing, doing nothing about traffic congestion is “certainly not productive,” as Steven Polzin, research professor at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment puts it. A free-flowing road is safer; it generates less emissions; it facilitates business, essential services, and daily life. “The benefits of mobility are real,” Polzin says. The question is how we decide to enable that mobility: Do we build more lanes and roads? Or can we envision a different way of life?

On our bus, Shaffer and I talk for a while longer, then fall into a mutually agreed-upon silence, gazing out our respective windows. The bus is quiet but for the rhythmic rumble of tires and the creaking of overhead bins. I lean back in my seat and relax at last.

Skiers enjoy a bluebird Sunday in February at Colorado’s Copper Mountain resort.
Why we do it: skiers enjoy a bluebird day at Copper Mountain ski resort. (Photo: Daniel Brenner)

Lake Tahoe, State Route 28

1,082 miles west of Denver

I came home to California satisfied. But what happened on I-70 the following weekend made the traffic I saw on my trip look about as harrowing as a game of mini golf.

Over Martin Luther King weekend, storms battered Colorado. CDOT warned that travel would be “difficult to impossible,” but the holiday-goers and powder seekers went anyway. The combination of humanity and snowfall broke I-70. Multiple passes closed. Hundreds of vehicles spun out. Skiers reported eight-hour drives home. Stranded travelers overwhelmed Silverthorne, swarming gas stations and driving onto sidewalks in a scene one resident described as “apocalyptic.”

Why did these people go? I wondered, as I scrolled through the endless reel of chaos on @i70things. But I already knew, because I, too, had once passed beers to strangers in cars crawling alongside mine on I-70 after a ski day, had squatted peeing between a friend’s idling car and a guardrail mid-snowstorm. We’re all here for such a short time, and so little of that time is ours. How could we ask anyone not to spend their precious turn on this planet chasing whatever taps the dopamine dispensers in their brain?

Traffic is not a Colorado phenomenon, or a Western individualist one, or even an American one. It follows beauty, choking the roads from Lake Tahoe to Cape Cod. It springs from affluence, overwhelming Beijing, where a newly burgeoned middle class rushed to purchase cars as soon as they could afford them. It resists regulation, plaguing Mexico City, where some have bought two cars to thwart a law that allows only those with certain plates to drive certain days. Perhaps no observable phenomenon defines us more as a species than traffic: every one of us acting in our own self-interest, getting in one another’s way while we pursue the same things.

I’ll tell you my prediction for what happens to I-70 by way of Nikita Pyatt, 34, another passenger I met on the Snowstang that morning. Pyatt grew up in South Carolina, moved to Colorado from Chicago, and lives south of Denver. He told me he’s working toward a 100-day snowboarding season powered mostly by public transit—he doesn’t own a car. He appreciates Snowstang and the other resources in this state, like the free skate parks. They make him feel valued as a person. When he moved to Colorado, he said, he felt like he finally could be who he wanted to be.

I knew what he meant. For every hour that I’d spent languishing in Colorado’s traffic, I’d spent many more flourishing on its well-worn trails, testing myself in its stark alpine, and forging bonds among its warm and easy-going people. I hope those like Shoshana Lew and Margaret Bowes succeed in making the interstate better managed and more sustainable. But I believe there will continue to be traffic on I-70, because there will continue to be people like Pyatt and myself, who visit this great state and feel like they came home.

The Sunday I rode Snowstang, a friend met me at Copper Mountain for a day of skiing, then gave me a lift back to the Front Range in the afternoon. We emerged from the tunnel, eastbound, and passed a sooty-looking minivan with a bumper sticker that read “I ❤️ LOVELAND.” A child stared at me through the window. I waved. He lifted his palm.

We slowed. We rolled. We slowed. I peered into the windows of the cars alongside us. Two bored-looking women wearing sunglasses. A young man in a ball cap. Cars flowed freely on the opposite side of the road. Many more were heading our direction, back toward Denver. Back to the nest, where we had jobs, schools, essential services, and creature comforts. The majority of us live not in the wilderness but in suburbs and cities, where we huddle for survival and company. This is why traffic to wild and beautiful places occurs: because even as we are compelled to escape one another to feel alive, we need one another to live.

Our brake lights flickered down the hill. We formed a blinking trail of red. We traveled our own journeys, marching home together.

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Lead Photo: Daniel Brenner