Thousands of stranded travelers spent much of Monday in their cars and in shelters, waiting for crews to make Interstate 70 between Vail and Floyd Hill safe.
Portions of the interstate started opening about 2 p.m. Monday, and traffic was moving in both directions by evening.
The mountains were pounded by high winds for more than 24 hours, making driving conditions treacherous and the danger of avalanches high.
Winds were blowing at 50 mph, with gusts to 70 mph at the Eisenhower Tunnel much of the day, said Rod Mead, operations director for the Colorado Traffic Management Center.
Mead said the big concern throughout the day was avalanches.
He said the Colorado Department of Transportation usually drops avalanche-control charges from helicopters, but the high winds made it dangerous to fly.
Crews can use snowmobiles and snowshoes to get into the backcountry, but with winds so high, they weren’t sure where the charges fired from “avalaunchers” would land.
“You don’t want to send them to Utah,” Mead said, chuckling.
He said high winds load up the avalanche chutes and make the surfaces extremely slick, which could cause tons of snow to cascade down onto highways.
Mindy Crane, spokesperson for CDOT, said late Monday that the department was never able to launch the helicopters, but two avalanche crews on the ground were able to do a lot of avalanche mitigation, especially on Berthoud Pass.
“We were able to successfully complete mitigation,” Crane said. “We brought down a great deal of snow, which at one point covered the road on Berthoud.”
Mead said that many people ignored traffic warnings about highway closures early Monday.
“People don’t believe that the signs that say ‘I-70 is closed’ apply to them,” he said of a massive traffic backup.
Couldn’t make it home
Almost 2,900 people took refuge in 12 high-country shelters Sunday night because of the high winds and blowing snow.
Two of the busiest shelters were Summit County Middle School in Frisco, where 550 people stayed, and the Silverthorne Recreation Center, where 950 were housed, said Robert Thompson, director of communications for the Red Cross, Mile High Chapter.
“This was the perfect storm,” he said. “There were thousands of people coming down after a busy ski weekend.”
Roy Perl, who was stranded at the recreation center when he couldn’t get to Denver International Airport for a flight home to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., described the scene: “There were people on the floors, people on the steps, people in the locker room — on the benches in the locker room,” he said. “I saw someone sleeping on a treadmill.”
Friends Patty Moreno, 18, and Leticia Oxley, 16, lamented taking one more run on their snowboards at Breckenridge on Sunday night before heading down to Aurora.
That five-minute detour, coupled with the wind-mandated shutdown of the gondola to the ski-area parking lot, meant they had to stand in an hour-long line for a bus and were trapped when Interstate 70 closed.
“That extra hour really killed us,” Oxley said Monday, as she dealt cards next to cots where she had slept. “Last night was the most boring thing ever.”
Kai Bernstein, 28, of Boulder was invited into a local resident’s home Sunday night, along with his 6-month-old Lab rador puppy, Rosa.
“They had dogs, so it was really great for us,” he said.
But in the hubbub, he lost his ride home and ended up back at the shelter Monday, holding a cardboard sign asking for a trip to Boulder.
“Here I am in kind of an odd situation,” he said. “At least I’m safe. Life goes on.”
Danger zones remain
Ann Mellick, an avalanche forecaster for the Colorado Avalanche Center, said the possibility of numerous avalanches in Colorado’s northern and central mountains is high because the winds have packed snow into hard slabs that can roar down the mountains.
“What we experienced was a major wind event that propels snow from one side of a mountain and redistributes it on the other side,” Mellick said. “So what happens is that it deposits snow many, many times faster than during an ordinary snowfall. You get a very hard, dense slab” that can break loose.
Meteorologist Chad Gim me stad of the National Weather Service said the high mountains would still see winds gusting up to 50 mph overnight.
“The fact is that it is going to stay windy on the ridges,” he said, “and the snow is going to be moving.”
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
