CORONA PASS — Jeremy Straley squints over the dash of his growling snowcat and scans the sea of white.
“Where’s that road?” he says as the Prinoth Bison X churns through several feet of snow near the top of Corona Pass.
Feeling some indecipherable change from the machine’s rolling tracks, he says, “Ah, there it is.”
The snow curls off his blade and car-sized chunks barrel down the slope. To an outsider, clearing up to 15 feet of snow from the 12-mile stretch of rough, historic roadway seems like a monumental task. But Straley predicts that after four days of work, the road will be open to traffic this weekend.
In a stormy spring that has seen snowpacks grow rather than wither, crews across Colorado’s high country have been scrambling to clear over , up Mount Evans and over passes such as Kebler and Independence.
Corona Pass, which terminates at Boulder County’s Needle’s Eye Tunnel, isn’t a vital corridor. But itap important for the Fraser Valley, which counts the rough road up to Rollins Pass as a tourist-drawing jewel.
Dating back thousands of years, the former Ute Trail up the pass — now Corona Pass, but also called Rollins Pass, Moffat Road or the Hill Route — has connected the Fraser Valley with the Front Range. The tunnel connection has been closed to cars since 1990, but even though the pass is no longer a throughway, it still lures travelers.
“Because of the historical significance, it draws people from around the world,” says , whose great-uncle used to walk over the pass in the early 1900s to attend the circus in Boulder, telling his family to come looking for him if he wasn’t back in three weeks. “Itap an economic boost to our economy, there’s no question. It offers the opportunity to travel where people have traveled for more than 10,000 years.”
Grand County, the Town of Winter Park and outfitter Grand Adventures have pitched in to pay Straley’s to clear snow from the 12-mile road from U.S. 40 across from the Winter Park ski area to the 11,660-foot saddle along the Continental Divide. Straley and his team have been captaining their snow-clearing machines up the pass since 2001.
This year has been particularly challenging.
“This year, just a lot of snow. More than I’ve seen in a long, long time,” said Sean Murphy, a 33-year snowcat operator at Winter Park ski area who has been clearing spring snow off Corona Pass since the late 1990s. “It looks a lot different when there’s nothing but snow up here.”
In 1903, trains rumbled over the pass. A railroad station, a hotel and worker housing perched on the blustery summit. Today, all that’s left of that compound is a crumbling foundation, surrounded by the Indian Peaks Wilderness. Old timbers scattered along the summit road are all thatap left of the couple-mile snow shed that protected the alpine rail line from train-stopping drifts. Stumps of telegraph poles and wisps of telegraph wire peek through the snowpack.
That railway was a battle to build and even harder to maintain. Eventually, the 6-mile Moffat Tunnel eclipsed the need for the mountaintop rail line. Rail stopped running in 1928, the same year the tunnel opened.
Today, the pass draws history and railroad buffs, as well as off-road users and skiers who flock to the perennial snowfield atop Mount Epworth, home of , which stages its 52nd annual contest next month. The ghost town of Arrow, once a bustling village, draws visitors who seek railroad relics and trestle bridges spanning the hillsides.
Ryan Barwick rents snowmobiles at his wintertime Grand Adventures and offers rafting at his warm-weather Mad Adventures. This season, he has a battery of side-by-side off-road vehicles and will be offering .
Barwick is following a common tack among Colorado outfitters reliant on snow. , with options like ziplines and adventure parks for times when the river flows aren’t cooperating. Helping to mirror his snowmobile-rental business in winter, he’s now renting out vehicles that seat four people for cruising up the four-wheel-drive Corona Pass road.
“Itap a little bit of a buffer on the weather. It just makes things more predictable. It diversifies and stabilizes the business,” Barwick says. “And I get to offer year-round jobs in the Fraser Valley. I get to keep good mechanics working year-round.”
There’s an undying hope that Grand County can persuade Boulder County to maintain its side of the pass and open Needle’s Eye Tunnel, which injured a man. Boulder County leaders have been reticent to open the tunnel, which would revive the short cut between Winter Park and the Front Range.
“That pass once served as the future of Grand County — and it still is in many ways,” Lively says.
But even as an out-and-back, the road — technically Forest Service Road 149 — can see hundreds of trips on a busy weekend. Thatap what Straley’s crew is working toward, scraping down to dirt and rock so travelers can roll up and down.
While traditional snow removal involves bulldozers, haulers and snow-throwers laboring from the bottom up, Straley’s snowcats easily crawl over snow to work from the top down.
Straley’s company now has operations across the West, clearing access roads in Wyoming, smoothing acre-wide piles of sugar beets in Montana and ski resort work across the Rocky Mountains, but it all began on Corona pass.
“We want to get people out and about in this county,” he says.
