VAIL PASS — One moment I’m white-knuckling down Vail Pass, driving west on I-70 in full-squint white-out conditions. The next, my 4WD Jeep Cherokee is sliding out of my lane and I cannot bring it back. Everything. Slows. Down.
There is time to reach over and turn off the radio. Time to wonder what to do. Then the scene is silent as I enter a slow-motion spin.
This happened in October 2007, a few days after the birth of my daughter. I was driving to Aspen, hoping to complete a job and return home to the Front Range the same evening. It was a little ambitious, but I was determined and happy to be waking in the dark of morning to travel with a purpose. I didn’t encounter snow until Golden, just as the day was dawning and, through a curtain of sudden white dumpage, the on-ramp at Morrison invited me to try my luck.
“Friends don’t let friends drive I-70” is the tongue-in-cheek slogan of Eldora Mountain Resort, a ski area west of Boulder, miles and miles from the Interstate 70 corridor that serves as Colorado’s (and the country’s) main east-west artery.
“You play, you pay!” is another local saying we tell ourselves while sitting in the Eisenhower Tunnel, as if we expect to have to earn our turns with a “five hours to get to Keystone!” story.
But I have another reason to respect I-70. It is, after all, one of the most complex marvels of mountain highway engineering in the country, and it handles hundreds of millions of vehicles a year. We can get in our cars and pop up and through the Continental Divide in a couple of hours. Still, we complain about the traffic we create — and we stupidly push into a high-altitude snowstorm, expecting to glide down a snow-packed Vail Pass without problem.
As my spin continues, I watch the snow come down through the windshield — big, wet flakes — and as I swing around, the guardrail to my right is about to run out, leaving a bare bank down to some icy creek below. My newborn daughter’s face flashes into my mind, and I try to take action.
Should I keep turning into the spin? Do something different? As I’m deciding, my Jeep slows even more, and then comes to a stop, noisily scrunching the packed snow beneath the tires. I am pointed uphill across two lanes of traffic. There are no other cars, but I passed several trucks not too far back, and they could be seconds away from crushing me.
Hands shaking, I step on the gas, easily, so the tires catch, then loop back onto the shoulder. No descending vehicles plow into me. I pick up speed and limp into town to take a breather.
Seven years later, though I avoid it if I can, I still travel on I-70 to play, play, play. But when passing into the valley, I always look for that spot in the westbound lane where the guardrail ends but I didn’t.
Joshua Berman is the author of five books about travel. Find him online at and on Twitter @tranquilotravel.
