(gentle music) - [Lisa] Glenwood Canyon is a historic transportation corridor.

- [Floyd] This Canyon was our playground.

To many people it has a wonderful meaning.

- [Ralph] The opposition to the Glenwood project was well founded, and there was a reason to be worried about the way that the highway department was gonna protect Glenwood Canyon.

- [Lisa] Interstate 70 through Glenwood Canyon is probably one of the most spectacular stretches of interstate in the country.

- [Betsy] I-70 interestingly enough is one of those huge trails.

Most major highways in the United States are Indian trails.

- [Lisa] It could be a postcard, you don't even notice that the highway is there, and that's how well built it was.

- [Zebulon] When you look at Glenwood Canyon, it is stunningly beautiful but stunningly harsh.

And so the logistics of traveling through it were elusive forever.

(gentle music) - [Male Announcer] This program was made possible by the History Colorado State Historical Fund.

- [Female Announcer] Supporting projects throughout the state to preserve, protect, and interpret Colorado's architectural and archeological treasures.

History Colorado State Historical Fund, create the future, honor the past.

- [Male Announcer] With additional funding provided in memory of Deanna E la Camera, by Hassel and Marianne Ledbetter, and by members like you, thank you.

With special thanks to the Denver Public Library, History Colorado, the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media, and to these organizations.

(bright upbeat music) (gentle music) - [Betsy] The Ute people have been here for time immemorial.

That's what our creation story tells us.

We don't have a migration story.

We have three sister tribes, the Southern Ute mountain, and the Ute Indian tribe of the Uintah Ouray Indian Reservation.

11 to 13 bands comprised the three Ute tribes.

When the government came out and moved us to reservations, they separated those bands, but we are sister tribes because we are all from those original bands.

And when we all come together, we are referred to as the Ute Nation.

- [Narrator] After the ratification of the Ute removal act in 1880, the US army began forcefully removing the Ute tribes to reservations.

This gave the US government access to the valuable land and resources always held by the Ute people.

In Western Colorado, a significant cultural landscape was appropriated and transformed into an essential transportation corridor.

- [Zebulon] Glenwood Canyon connects Western Colorado and Eastern Colorado together.

Just after you cross the continental divide, you go through a series of mesas and plateaus and valleys, and eventually you reach this massive canyon.

And it forms this barrier, really blocks Western Colorado and Eastern Colorado.

- [Betsy] Glenwood Canyon was significant to native peoples for the hot springs.

There is a medicinal and a ceremonial use of those types of features.

There are many Ute trails that crisscross across the flattops coming down into Glenwood Canyon.

There are also very significant sites within the canyon itself.

Most major highways in the United States are Indian trails.

I-70 is one of those Ute trails.

Why?

Because the Indian people would follow the animals who would take the easiest route to get somewhere.

And so we would walk along those trails because it was the easiest way to get from point A to point B.

The highways in the United States follow those trails for the very same reason.

- In the 1860s, Denver was looking at a way to connect their bustling city to the rest of the country.

So they looked west.

They actually had dreams of creating a wagon system all the way to California, but the mountains are there.

These incredible canyons are there.

It's incredibly difficult to do.

- [Narrator] Mining prospects sparked the creation of makeshift towns across the rocky mountains, but transportation to these sites was both hard and costly.

So much so that in 1874, a federally funded geological survey deemed the Glenwood Canyon impossible to travel.

- [Lisa] When automobiles were first developed, the road system was pretty simple back then, there weren't good transportation corridors that people could move back and forth.

- [Zebulon] At the turn the 20th century, less than 1,000 automobiles had been produced.

Less 200 miles of paved road within the entire United States.

But this paradox was created.

We don't have a lot of roads because we don't have a lot of automobiles, but people aren't interested in automobiles because we don't have a lot of roads so something had to give.

Edward Taylor was a Colorado state senator known as the father of the Good Roads Movement.

And he had this idea of having Glenwood Canyon be part of a national boulevard, connecting Denver all the way to the Utah state line.

The Good Roads Movement established federal funds, private funds, even sometimes state funds to establish road systems.

And then once the car became popular, there's a place to put the car on.

By 1899 they started construction of the Taylor State Road.

And the idea was to connect the Western slope to the Eastern slope.

And the road went right through Glenwood Canyon.

It was an extremely primitive road.

It was one lane and it was extremely harsh to ride on, but it was a connection.

- [Narrator] Completed in 1902, the Taylor State Road was the first route for automobiles through the Colorado Rockies.

Floods, rock slides, and snow constantly threatened the road and its travelers giving it a dangerous reputation.

Later named Highway 6, this road would soon become a major transportation corridor.

- [Zebulon] In 1903 it would take just under five days to travel from New York to San Francisco by train.

The railroad was king.

That same year in 1903 a group went out by automobile to do the same trip.

It ended up taking them about 65 days to travel across the country.

In 1919 a similar expedition was taken.

It still took over 55 days to travel across the country.

Clearly the United States was falling behind on developing a strategic, a unified road system across the country.

One of the people to help with that system was a colonel named Dwight Eisenhower.

- [Lisa] Eisenhower was really impressed with the Autobahn and thought, this is something that we should have in the United States.

It was really considered to be a defense system that would connect the states in the event that there was some sort of attack on our country.

- [Zebulon] And of course Eisenhower is later elected president and the federal interstate system is one of his crowning achievements.

- [Narrator] In the 1940s, states began evaluating where interstate highways would be built.

Colorado settled on a north-south highway, which became the I-25 corridor.

And an east-west corridor starting in Kansas and ending in Denver, which would become Interstate 70.

- Terminating I-70 in Denver was the logical choice because then you don't have to try to traverse over the mountains, the logistics, the cost, the engineering skills that would've been involved and needed to undertake such a project.

It was much simpler just to go around the mountains than through them.

However, this just wouldn't do for Colorado.

Our industries really needed that connection.

Eventually it was decided that Colorado should have I-70 run all the way through it.

Highway 6 was decided the route through Glenwood Springs, this was around 1958.

However, what's incredible is it would be almost another quarter century before construction of that road would actually happen.

- [Floyd] In 1963, the idea that we were really gonna do some big things in the canyon came up.

And that's when I got involved, I wrote a letter to the editor saying, Glenwood had better be concerned about this highway coming through in both directions.

The concern was the highway is gonna take all the space for people and animals.

- The opposition to the Glenwood project was well founded.

I mean, there was a reason to be worried about the way that the highway department was gonna protect Glenwood Canyon.

And you can see what the highway department did back in the 50s when they widened just west of Norad.

For its time it was very state of the art, but it really didn't tread lightly on the canyon, which is what people wanted.

- By the late 1960s, the environmental movement really took hold.

And in 1969 NEPA was passed, the National Environmental Protection Act.

And what this did is it required that alternatives be examined before project is undertaken.

It required review, and it really put some of these decisions into the hands of local residents and concerned groups.

- The terms that were used for setting up a new commission was that they wanted to have the highway design that would meld with the wonders of nature, that really defined where we were to go.

- [Ralph] Dick Prosence was the, what we called back then the district engineer.

Dick was especially interesting because he felt even way back then in the 70s that the citizens needed to be talked to and that we needed to build consensus around these projects.

Which is highly unusual for that period of time because back then highway engineers were just, "Just get out of our way.

We're gonna do what we need to do and build a safe road.

And if it ruins the environment or if it screws up your town, well, that's just part of the game."

- [Narrator] In collaboration with a Citizen's Advisory Council, a new philosophy was adopted that would guide the Glenwood project throughout its construction, known as context sensitive design.

- [Zebulon] Once it was determined that the canyon was going to be the most economic and environmentally friendly route, then the question becomes, well, how are we going to incorporate four lanes of traffic into Glenwood Canyon?

And how are we going to do that by blending both the pristine wilderness and also this master of engineering?

And so Citizen Advisory Committees really helped with those designs.

The engineering behind it is just absolutely spectacular.

- [Ralph] I was the project manager on the I-70 project through Glenwood Canyon.

When I came on in 1980, the project was in a very, kind of in interesting point.

There was what I'd call a conceptual or preliminary layout of the project.

What I did was took our conceptual preliminary design and fine tuned it.

And we moved it literally foot by foot to try to prevent a rock cut, to try to prevent river fill, save trees, things like that.

- [Narrator] Devising the highway through the Glenwood Corridor was so complex, two experts were brought onto the project.

Edgardo Contini and Joe Passonneau would each design half of the highway merging their designs in the middle.

- Contini and Passonneau, we called them inspired designers, but they were really renaissance people.

They were engineers, they were architects, they were visual experts.

They could look at things and very quickly visualize a solution.

Those men were very passionate about what they're doing.

Contini came up with the idea of the European style highline viaduct at Hanging Lake, which is just a gem.

Contini could just visualize all that stuff.

And then Joe Passonneau handled the west end of the canyon and developed the terrace alignment that we see around the Shoshone Power Plant, east and west.

And that's really one of the keys to allow us to build through the canyon yet stay within the area disturbed by old Highway 6.

And that was a fundamental of our conceptual design.

- [Floyd] Well, we were meeting monthly in the intensive times and the meetings were just super good.

We got along just very well.

We were a part of viewing the designs that were coming up.

So it worked out so well for all of us.

Joe Passonneau and Edgardo Contini, they did such a wonderful job in the design.

They were doing it in such a heartfelt way, and that's not easy for an engineer that has to produce various products.

But you could just tell it was so special for them that they almost looked at it as beyond building a road.

- With Glenwood Canyon, there was vision about how that highway should fit into the landscape.

And very unique techniques were put into play to ensure the preservation of those natural features.

If the contractor were to hit certain plant types or knock out a tree, they could be fined or fired for doing that.

- [Ralph] The more time everybody spent in the canyon, the more passionate they got.

I'd have bulldozer operators come up to me and say, you know what, I've been working this, I think there's a way we can save a few more trees and I'd be, wow.

He got out in the canyon for a month and worked, he's like, I've gotta do better.

I've gotta protect this canyon.

I remember spending hours out there putting signs on trees, save this tree.

It's context sensitive design.

- [Narrator] The design for Glenwood Canyon would require over six miles of bridges and viaducts, making up roughly half of the highway.

But building these structures within the sensitive terrain required special equipment to be imported from Europe.

- [Ralph] Erection gantry, that's really nothing more than a crane turned like this, and you put a segment on one end, trolley it out and pull it up and put the steel rods through it, just keep on going like that.

So you're not on the ground at all, you're building completely from above.

(gentle music) We spent a lot of time trying to manage the rock mechanics of the formations and things we were in, but we ended up with a couple of very difficult and challenging issues.

Once we started doing the subsurface drilling and started seeing what was really under the ground, it wasn't rock.

At the east end of the canyon we even discovered a layer of compressible gray clay that you would never expect to find in the mountains.

It created a lot of technical challenges.

We invented a new type of retaining wall to respond to that.

Same thing happened at the west end of the canyon.

One of the things that was the most fun for me in Glenwood Canyon was managing the multidisciplinary design team.

We of course had the old line, the old line highway engineers, the rock cut guys, you know.

Then we had the bridge designers.

Then we had the tunnel designers.

Then we had the geo-technical engineers, the rock slope engineers, the geologists.

Then we had the landscape architects.

We had to blend a group of visual experts with a bunch of hardcore construction experts too.

And I really enjoy that.

And these were all smart, type A, best-of-the-best.

You had to build consensus, and sometimes it took a while.

I'm very proud of those guys and gals.

The first tunnel we built in the early 80s was a very difficult formation to build.

The reverse curve tunnel is not a tunnel type.

The name of the curve where we built the tunnel was called reverse curve because when you were driving down you had to do this and then you had to do this to get around the corner.

We looked at several different options there.

So we started doing some surface geology studies at reverse curve, and we actually saw that a tunnel option might be a good one.

But as always, we got overexcited and decided, let's build a double-decker tunnel.

And we finally decided we could squeeze the eastbound lane around on the outside, but we would just put up one westbound tunnel up high.

That all worked out very well at reverse curve.

- [Narrator] Tunnels were an essential design element for the Glenwood Canyon highway.

The two Hanging Lake Tunnels, each 4,000 feet long and lined with over 2 million tiles, were not only an engineering feat, but also achieved the goal of having Hanging Lake be an entirely auto free zone.

- [Lisa] People didn't want the canyon to be affected by a traditional road building technique such as just blasting through.

There was an interest in conforming the interstate to the canyon and allowing the canyon's natural features to remain versus the other way around.

- Let's say that there was a cliff you had to bring down, they'd go to the top of the cliff and drill it and blow it away.

And as you looked at it, wow, here's this beautiful rock wall with all these vertical lines in it of half of the drilling holes.

- [Ralph] Citizens committee did not want to see those holes.

Those holes are actually safety features because you blow back to that hole and you end up with a nice, safe, sturdy face.

So we did develop other techniques where we'd blast back to a joint, which would break out, and that would leave that face.

It was very hard to do.

It's actually easier to do what I call a butter knife cut that's just a nice slope and it's all even.

It's really hard to do some of the things we did in Glenwood Canyon.

But now that it's been done, those techniques, they're used all over the world now.

- [Narrator] Blasting even to a natural fault left a new rock face that didn't match the weathered aesthetic of the canyon.

To solve this, the landscape architects and geologists turned to a unique solution that had only been used once before.

- You'd have rocks that would be cut and they looked fresh.

They didn't have the aging look of those that were next to them that were natural.

And so they stained it.

After that you just couldn't even tell that there had been a part of the canyon cut down.

- [Ralph] That's context sensitive design.

If you've got a beautiful canyon, you wanna put a beautiful highway through it.

You wanna make sure that your design honors the natural context of the environment you're going through.

And that's what drove Glenwood Canyon.

- [Narrator] With over 40 bridges, 15 miles of retaining walls, 300,000 tons of structural and reinforcing steel, and 810,000 pounds of concrete, the Glenwood Canyon highway is an engineering marvel with as many as 500 highway workers employed in the canyon each day.

And a final cost of over $490 million, construction of this magnificent highway was complete, but there was still one more commitment to fulfill.

- [Ralph] Re-vegetation of Glenwood Canyon like many other things was very unique.

We actually collected native seeds in Glenwood Canyon and stored them, and then used those to do the re-vegetation.

Those were state-of-the-art techniques.

The ability to have your own nursery stock was important because we were afraid of actually not being able to get enough planning materials to be able to re-vegetate because it was a commitment to re-vegetate each project.

There was a complete re-vegetation system that was very successful.

It's just an inspirational place.

(gentle music) After 12 years of construction in Glenwood Canyon, we cut the ribbon in October of 1992.

The project was substantially finished.

In rough numbers, I would say it was about 40 million a mile.

- [Lisa] Interstate 70 through Glenwood Canyon is probably one of the most spectacular stretches of interstate in the country.

And interestingly, it's one of the final stretches of interstate to be built.

They call it the final link.

It's almost like they save the best for last.

It could be a postcard.

You don't even notice that the highway is there, and that's how well built it was.

- I think we got an award for having the most orange barrels on any highway in America for a period of time.

I've received many personal awards.

The award that was most compelling for me was the Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

It's a tough place to put a highway.

- I-70 through the canyon is the lifeblood of this area for transportation.

We are able to modify nature.

We are able to adapt to nature.

We are able to put a four-lane highway in this extremely narrow canyon, but at of the day, nature still wins.

We still have rock slides that'll close down I-70 for long stretches.

(gentle music) Fires have gone through and closed down the canyon for weeks at a time.

(gentle music) - [Lisa] When Glenwood Canyon is closed due to rock fall or fire, it affects the detour routes.

It affects commerce, it's a big deal.

(gentle music) In the summer of 2020 Grizzly Creek Fire shut down the interstate and damaged some of the feature of the interstate.

Obviously there were effects to the natural environment as well.

- [Narrator] The Grizzly Creek Fire started in August of 2020 and was not 100% contained until four months later in December.

The highway was closed for 14 days as the fire burned over 30,000 acres.

The fire cleared the way for substantial mud and rocks slides.

The most consequential one not only damaged the highway, it even altered the flow of the Colorado River.

- In 2019, CDOT completed historic context study of I-70 through Glenwood Canyon.

And as part of that, we identified the stretch of highway through the canyon from like mile post 116 to 133 as a historic district.

And it's significant 'cause of its association with the development of transportation in Colorado, but also it's significant for its design and that's a really good example of context sensitive design of an interstate through a really important natural feature.

But what's interesting about it is it's also a functional transportation facility that is supposed to be dynamic.

It's going to have to be improved and maintained over time.

So it's an interesting balance between wanting to preserve it as a historic district, but knowing that it's also a functional transportation feature.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Beyond its contribution to Western development and commerce, Glenwood Canyon remains a significant cultural landscape to the Ute people.

- [Betsy] The Glenwood Springs is a very important component of the Ute ancestral lands.

There are still many things that have happened with tribes being placed on the reservation that has significantly affected how we live.

(gentle music) Some tribes have lost their language.

Why?

Because we're out of that environment that language was born within.

We're out of those elements.

And so the loss was huge, it's still being felt today, but despite all of that loss, all of that trauma, we are thriving today.

We are adapting and thriving so that future generations will be able to live within our culture and our traditional values.

Sense of place is important, has an important place in the culture and the lifestyles of Indian people.

And to be removed from the places that you knew, the places that you sustained yourself, the places that your kids may have been born in, the places that maybe your grandparents or your mother or your father may have been buried in that area, that is a very huge sense of loss.

And I do believe that all tribes have felt that loss and have felt it tremendously.

The forest service has set up kiosks to tell the history of the Ute people.

And that is done through the National Historic Preservation Act as a part of their management plan for the forest service.

So they do work with the tribes closely to ensure that accurate information is put on those kiosk.

Those stories are important so that we have a full and robust knowledge of the land base that we're utilizing in, and being respectful to that.

(gentle music) - [Zebulon] What I love about Glenwood Canyon is one, its masterful blending of pristine environment and engineering.

It's the best of nature, and it's the best of human technology and innovation coming together.

What I also love about Glenwood Canyon is it really sets this precedence of we can have citizens help us determine this.

Yes you're going to impact nature when you put in a four-lane highway.

There's no denying that the canyon underwent massive changes, but we can do it in a way that is well thought out.

But it also shows a beauty of this process that we're going to have to rewind on more and more.

- [Lisa] It's a great example of context sensitive design.

It's how highways should be built through sensitive areas.

Glenwood Canyon is the crown jewel of the interstate system nationally.

We should be proud that we can build things like that.

And we should apply that sort of thinking to other projects and other transportation corridors of the state.

- Glenwood Canyon brought a lot of innovation into the highway industry from the perspective of environmental protection, tunnel engineering, rock slope engineering, foundation engineering.

- [Floyd] The highway to commission said we were gonna blend the wonders of nature with the wonders of human engineering.

And they've done that.

- There's a story that during the opening of the canyon that one highway official said it would've been cheaper just to pave this with silver dollars.

Yes the highway was expensive.

Yes it took 12 years to build 12 miles.

The fact that we can merge nature and engineering together, the fact that we can support our industries and our economies through transportation, but at the same time listen to the voice of the communities nearby, the stakeholders, makes it worth that expense and it makes it worth every silver dollar that it took to create that highway.

(gentle music) (bright upbeat music)