The Million Dollar Highway

Ouray sits in the dark pocket of the Uncompahgre Gorge, ringed on three sides by cliffs that hold the morning light late. The town’s main street points a traveler straight at the San Juan Mountains, and that is where the road goes—not through them, but on them. Past the last timbered house, past the hot springs that pool in the open air, the pavement leaves the valley floor and begins to climb in earnest. This is the Million Dollar Highway.

The road is only two lanes, and some of those lanes are carved into walls of rock so sheer that the mountain seems to have been sliced with a blade. The drop on the outside edge is not a shoulder but an absence, a sudden fall into the tree line and down toward the Uncompahgre River, which disappears in the green dark of the gorge. Guardrails appear now and then, low and silver, but for long stretches there is nothing between a tire and the air but the painted edge line.

The Spine of the San Juans

This stretch of highway is part of a longer route, U.S. 550, that curves north to Montrose and south past Silverton to Durango. But the name Million Dollar Highway belongs to the twenty-odd miles between Ouray and Silverton, a distance that takes a good hour to drive because the road does not allow hurry. Switchbacks stack one above another, the sharper ones signed for fifteen miles an hour. A heavy truck in front of a car becomes a parade. The view changes with every turn: a chasm opens, then closes; a waterfall threads down a cliff; the road runs for a moment along a narrow ridge and the valley appears on both sides at once.

The high point is Red Mountain Pass, more than eleven thousand feet above sea level, named for the iron-stained peaks that surround it. Here the scraggly spruce of the lower slopes give way to tundra and frost-shattered rock, and the red mountains have the look of rusted machinery, their flanks scored by old talus slides. The air thins and cools even in summer. Snow can fall in any month, and the souvenir shops in Ouray sell caution as much as postcards.

These mountains were not always empty. On the lower flanks, scattered as far as the eye can see, stand the skeletons of mines: a collapsed headframe, a rusted water tank, a hole in the hillside that leads nowhere now. Some are so high that they blend into the talus until the light catches a plank or a cable and gives the secret away. The old workings hang onto the cliffs the way nests do, and they make the highway itself look like the greatest mine of them all—a cut made not for ore but for passage.

A Road Paid in Gold

Why the highway is called the Million Dollar Highway, no one entirely agrees. The stories are as many as the curves. Some say the name comes from the cost of building the road, which ran to a million dollars in the early twentieth century, a staggering sum for a mountain pass. Others claim the gravel used in one stretch was rich in ore and that the road surface was literally worth a million dollars in gold. More cautious versions say the fill was taken from a dump of tailings, and that a man could pan the road itself for pay dirt.

What is certain is that this was silver country, Booming beginning in the late 1870s, when prospectors climbed out of the valleys and found the San Juan Mountains stitched with veins of silver, gold, lead, and zinc. Ouray and Silverton grew on that metal, and for a time they were connected only by trails that mules could barely manage. Crossing Engineer Pass or other high saddles meant a day or more of steep work, and a town that needed the railroad but could not get it needed a road.

The man who finally scrawled his signature across the cliffs was Otto Mears, a Russian immigrant who had built flour mills and railroad spurs across Colorado. In the early 1880s he pushed a toll road up from Ouray to the pass, then down into Silverton. It was a wagon road, blasted out of side walls and corkscrewed up talus, and it made Mears wealthy. Later engineers widened and straightened it for automobiles, but the basic geometry stayed Mears’s geometry: the road does not avoid the mountain, it argues with it.

A historical marker somewhere along the route attempts to set the record straight, pointing out that a million dollars is a figure from an unexplained ledger, not a proven expense. But the name endures, perhaps because it tells a true story about the country. The San Juans are made of ore and ice and human stubbornness, and the road that crosses them had to be paid for in one kind of metal or another.

The Edge of the Map

Driving this road is not a matter of seeing the sights; it is a matter of negotiating them. The pullouts are few, marked by small brown signs, and when traffic reaches them the vehicles crowd in like bighorn sheep at a salt lick. Photographers stand at the rail, if there is one, and hold their cameras low to include the drop. Truck drivers downshift into gear whines that echo off the rocks. The road has no patience for a passenger who wants to lean out the window at a corner; the corner is already there, waiting.

In autumn, the aspen set the mountainsides on fire in patches of yellow and orange, the gold clashing with the rust of the red peaks. In winter, the highway whiteouts, and the Colorado Department of Transportation has a running war with the avalanches, firing howitzers from the cliffs to knock down loads of snow before they reach the asphalt. Even on a clear day in July, a traveler over Red Mountain Pass may cross three weather systems and feel the temperature fall by twenty degrees in the space of a mile.

Silverton, at the far end, remains what it was in every essential way: a mining town that outlived the mines. Its main street is unpaved in the old manner, broad alleys of dust between false-front buildings, and the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad sends a steam train into the valley daily, a mechanical shriek that carries miles up the canyons. The railroad, the highway, the mine tunnels—all of them converge on the same fact: these mountains gave up their treasure only to those who could hold on.

Perhaps the real million dollars is the drive itself, lying in wait with every turn, promising nothing but a horizon that keeps receding. The road gives and gives, and then it takes the traveler into Silverton and sets them down, blinking, on the dusty main street of a place that looks like the end of the nineteenth century. The highway made the towns possible and still exacts its toll in attention, nerve, and time. Nobody crosses Red Mountain Pass and forgets the crossing.

Photos: Mike McBey (CC BY 2.0); Reinhard Schön (CC BY-SA 3.0); Alan Stark (CC BY-SA 2.0)