West of Idaho Springs – Demolition crews blasted boulders on Interstate 70 on Sunday to help clear away rock that fell overnight, closing the westbound lanes and backing up traffic for 15 miles.
One boulder was estimated at 200 tons and measured 30 feet by 20 feet by 10 feet, and another was about 100 tons and the size of a Chevrolet Blazer.
A trio of rock slides Saturday night and Sunday morning dropped 1,500 tons of the Rocky Mountains on the road just west of Idaho Springs.
The westbound lanes remain closed between the west side of Idaho Springs and the tiny town of Dumont, with traffic moving on the service road, although officials hope to open the lanes sometime today.
All day Sunday traffic limped around the slide.
Jim King and his wife, Joan, were trying to get home to Grand Junction from Dakota Ridge campground in Golden. They had been in the stop-and- go traffic for four hours Sunday afternoon and were still a mile away from being diverted onto the frontage road at mile marker 239.
“Thank God we have a trailer with a bathroom,” Jim King said.
Dee McAdow, traveling with 8-year-old Tennessee Anderson, was trying to get home to Kremmling. She read a book while Tennessee played on a Game Boy.
“Thank goodness we stopped at Target,” McAdow said. “We’ve got cheese and crackers.”
But she neglected to bring water, and she was giving the two dogs in the back of her pickup Diet Pepsi to drink.
The first of the three slides covered the interstate between 8 and 9 p.m. Saturday, the second occurred about 11 p.m. and the third one about 4 a.m. Sunday, said Tony DeVito, Colorado Department of Transportation engineer.
Each successive slide started higher on the mountain than the one before it.
Two vehicles were damaged when they ran into the rocks and one air bag deployed, but nobody was injured, he said.
Ty Ortiz, a rock-fall specialist with CDOT, had climbed the mountainside with a spotlight after the second slide to look for cracks indicating further weaknesses.
The third slide wiped out the area where he had been climbing, Ortiz said Sunday.
“This rock is highly weathered granite,” he said. “Two days of rain probably … lubricated it,” and the bottom fell out.
Crews had to blast some of the larger boulders on I-70 to break them into manageable sizes, DeVito said. The eastbound lanes of I-70 and the frontage road detour also were closed for about 20 minutes during the blasting.
The concussion from those blasts opened a V-shaped fissure on the mountainside, making further blasting necessary to bring down more rock to make the highway safe for traffic, DeVito said. Holes for the dynamite will be drilled in the mountain, and the blasting will happen about first light today.
CDOT spokeswoman Stacey Stegman said the location of the rock slides hasn’t been a problem area, but it’s a reminder that rock slides can happen anywhere in the high country.
DeVito agreed.
“You can’t predict rock,” he said, adding that this is the third major slide east of the Eisenhower Tunnel this year. There was one at Georgetown, and one on U.S. 6 in Clear Creek Canyon closed that road until at least September.
The slide near Idaho Springs is about a third the size of the one on U.S. 6, DeVito said.
The delays associated with the detour can be avoided by taking U.S. 285 west from Denver to Fairplay, then taking Colorado 9 over Hoosier Pass, through Breckenridge and joining I-70 at Frisco, Stegman said.
“None of the detour routes are very convenient,” she said, “but when you’re looking at a couple of hours of delay, that’s not good, either.”
Staff writer Jim Kirksey can be reached at 303-820-1448 or jkirksey@denverpost.com.
