The West Will Swallow You

by Leath Tonino

  The threats are numerous and diverse: precipitous cliffs, towers of brittle ice, 8 percent grades, unexpected doglegs. Speaking with Klein over the phone before my visit, he explained that the lower portion of the road is literally chiseled into the vertical rock of the Uncompahgre Gorge—a narrow geologic throat a thousand feet deep in places—and that the upper portion, beyond Ironton Park, traverses subalpine slopes largely scoured of their trees. We talked for twenty minutes and he used the word “respect” often enough that I lost count. He also exuded a pure, childlike enthusiasm for the elemental power of the range, the clarity of purpose plowing engenders, and what he called his “Tonka Truck.”

  By the end of the conversation, a paradoxical invitation was on the table, repellant and enticing: Come ride.

  So here we are at the center of Klein’s world, a shiny orange 4×4 Mack, newest addition to a fleet that includes a grader, a blower, a pair of loaders, and two other plows. The holidays have passed—a three-day storm kept the Ouray patrol pushing straight through Christmas—and a fresh storm is on the rise. Our twelve-foot rubber-coated carbide blade is lowered, our ten-foot wing jutting from behind the passenger-side door on its hydraulic arms, forcing snow farther off the road. The rig costs $200,000, gets two and a half miles to the gallon, and fills the lane like a linebacker in a too-small suit. Three hundred twenty-five horses snort beneath the broad hood. The cab is richly perfumed with diesel fuel, warm and snug.

  “Less spacious than your Toyota Tercel,” Klein says with a grin after I mention the make and model of my car. “Little for comfort but a blast to drive.”

  Spacewise, the cab is indeed reminiscent of a compact—and thus concludes the list of vehicular similarities. We’re seven feet off the deck, dwarfing F-350s, a sand-salt mix spraying from a massive hopper mounted to the Mack’s rear. Electronics abound: ground thermometers, GPS tracking systems, so many screens and gauges I’m reminded of an airplane cockpit. A toolbox at my feet contains emergency supplies—MREs, rope, a space blanket, a Maglite, a wrench—and at my elbow Klein has wedged in an additional backpack loaded with food, water, and clothing to last two days. Avalanche beacons strapped to our chests blink, their batteries fresh.

  Having tagged the top of the pass, 3,200 feet above Ouray, and pulled a U-turn, Klein and I are now descending Upper Switchbacks, a set of precarious zigzags balanced on the mountain’s steep face. Pressing my nose to the window, what I notice is an absence: Despite the pathetically narrow shoulder and stomach-tightening exposure, there are no guardrails in sight. The reason, I’m told, is simple. Plow drivers don’t only remove snow, they put it somewhere. On Highway 550, that somewhere is over the edge.

  “We’ve got nicknames for everything,” Klein says. “Paul’s Plunge. Scary Larry’s Rock. This is Upper Switchbacks, but it’s also Dack’s Dilemma.”

  The dilemma occurred in 2007 on a typical Red Mountain night: temperatures in the single digits, bad gusts, omnidirectional snow. Visibility was a few notches below poor, and a terrified kid in a sedan was hogging both lanes, approaching head-on. Given the conditions, this member of the “traveling public,” as Klein affectionately terms such drivers, probably should have been at home on the couch, playing video games or making out with his girlfriend. Klein decelerated—he was doing about ten miles per hour to begin with—and eased to the side of the road.

  “It was this slow-motion tilting,” he says, recalling what happened next. “I kind of reached for my seatbelt, reached for the door, thinking maybe I could jump out, but there wasn’t enough time.” Picturing his wife asleep in their house at the base of the pass, her belly round and pregnant, he gripped the wheel and “went for the ride.”

  That ride dropped Klein sixty feet before the truck’s cab crumpled around his body with a metallic crunch. A lower switchback had caught him, nearly killed him, and saved his life, all at once. He was inverted, half-stuck, bruised but otherwise uninjured, trying to kick through the windshield. Ten long minutes later, when a car parked and some “kind of loud, kind of funny” people got out, he was still kicking. His rescuers were absolutely hammered—aimlessly touring the storm, draining beers—but their drunken hearts were in the right place. They bashed the glass, extracted Klein, and lodged him among the empties in their back seat.

  “I didn’t think the roll messed with me,” Klein says. “But ever since, I’ve had trouble getting over toward the lip in this spot.”

  The memory residing in his hands takes the wheel and tugs gently left, inching us away from the shoulder and the blankness—ghost white, white smoke, old lace, bone—seething beyond.

  “I’m fine everywhere else, but at this spot it’s like my body won’t allow it. I just can’t get over as far.”

  Klein and his colleagues refer to this behavior—cheating the double yellow a bit, erring on the side of caution—as “favoring the mountain.” They refer to snow falling at a rate of a quarter-inch per hour or less as “nuisance snow” and to scraping compressed snow from the pavement as “peeling pack.” They refer to a job well done as “safe enough for your mother” and to themselves as “a family.” Neighboring patrols out of Silverton, Ridgeway, Cascade, and Norwood (the in-laws?) are the target of good-natured trash talk regarding who’s “keeping it pretty” and who’s “falling behind.”

  The Ouray shop, a seven-bay garage brimming with bull plows, rotary blades, Pewag chains, chin-high tires, and chummy bullshitting galore, perches at the south end of town where Highway 550 begins its ascent. It’s a place to guzzle coffee and listen, left ear tuned to plowspeak, right ear to a possible call on the ever-crackly radio. But avid discussion of all things Red is by no means limited to the CDOT gang.

  Ouray is a tiny town—eight hundred residents snuggling on a seven-block grid that appears lifted from a snow globe—and it is made tinier by its surroundings. Brute origami comes to mind, as though a trillion postcards of sublime scenery have been folded and refolded into an orogenic Frankenstein. The topography is unavoidable, the range young and sharp and ubiquitous, rocketing five thousand feet from the sidewalks. On slushy corners, in restaurants, at the post office, and in motel lobbies, the community’s allotment of daily chitchat is neatly divided: 50 percent Broncos football, 50 percent Red.

  “I was up there once in the middle of the night, returning from Arizona in my Mazda 626,” says Robert Stoufer, who has lived in Ouray for forty years and owns Buckskin Booksellers. “A slide ran in front, then another behind. I got trapped for three hours.”

  The 1998 book Living (and Dying) in Avalanche Country, which sits beside The Snowy Torrents and Colorado Avalanche Disasters on the local interest shelf at Buckskin, attests to the 550 corridor’s dynamism with countless photos and anecdotes: a mangled D-6 Caterpillar, a buried driver tunneling toward freedom with a flashlight. Many roads around the American West routinely unnerve the traveling public—Colorado alone boasts Lizard Head Pass (forty-eight avalanche paths), Berthoud Pass (twenty-five), Monarch Pass (nineteen)—but none compare to the “Million Dollar Highway.” In addition to Red, this segment of 550 includes Molas Pass (fifty paths) and Coal Bank Pass (twenty), both south of Silverton. It’s the most avy-prone road in the lower forty-eight.

  In 1993, after the third plow driver died at East Riverside, CDOT got extra serious about managing road-threatening slides and began a collaboration with the Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC) that continues to this day. No one has been killed by an avalanche since, thanks to a mixed strategy involving teams of forecasters nerding out on the snowpack, gates that can lock the road shut when necessary, and explosives.

  Take the recent Christmas blizzard. The sky collapses and keeps collapsing. A CDOT driver, eyes burning and brain aching, gets on the radio. Hey, boss, he says, I think it might be time to close her. Meanwhile two CAIC forecasters stationed in Silverton, and one stationed in Ouray, have been eyeing the Doppler radar, monitoring the slopes, cruising the road at ungodly hours, worrying themselves ragged over “what’s getti
ng loaded” and “what wants to run.” More calls, more conversation, and more snow lead to a decision: Okay, lock the gate.

  Ambulances, commercial truckers, and stoked snow-boarders in need of a pow fix rely on the road being open, which means that the locked gate represents a ticking clock. Mitigation usually starts by six in the morning, weather permitting. According to CDOT’s Avalanche Fact Sheet, gun crews can employ any of the following to trigger slides: “5-pound charges set by hand; a truck-mounted ‘avalauncher’ that uses pneumatic pressure to fire 2.2-pound rounds; a 105 Howitzer leased from the Army that can fire 40-pound missiles up to seven miles; a helicopter that drops 30- to 50-pound bombs.” The debris doesn’t move itself, and so pushing recommences, the clock still ticking. Klein has occasionally found himself operating the Mack, the guns, and the front-end loader all in one slog of a shift.

  “Every run’s different,” says Elwood Gregory, who plowed the road from 1979 to 1986. A mustached seventy-seven-year-old with a bald pate, he misses “the thrill of battling Red”—those jolts of adrenaline when a baby avalanche clipped the fender or thumped the roof of his truck. “You come around a corner and there’s an ermine in the road, or a ptarmigan, or a crippled elk that got swept by a slide. Or you come around and headlights are shooting out of the gorge, straight into the air. One time I saw a car burning down there, flames and everything. Turned out a guy had murdered his wife and sent her over.”

  What about family? What did they think about this treacherous work?

  “My wife understood how much I enjoyed it, so she was fine,” he says. “It bothered my mother, though. Her house was there at the bottom of the hill. At midnight I’d drive by and she would flicker the lights in her window and I’d flicker my headlights back. It was a way to say, ‘You can go to sleep now, Mother. I survived another night.’”

  Another night. It should be a bumper sticker slapped onto every CDOT truck, a tattoo inked onto every bicep.

  During my afternoon ride with Klein, he emphasized that Red Mountain Pass morphs into a “different creature” with the fading of dusk’s alpenglow. The guys rotate shifts—two months of days, two months of swings, two months of graves—to share the burden. However, that order fails under heavy weather, everybody pushing together to render the road safe. And even when the snow quits, there are rocks to clear, vehicles to fix, a whole series of tasks to prepare for the next dump.

  “The storms usually come after dark,” Klein said. “Clifford’s on graves, but he’s been puking with some kind of flu, so I don’t think you want to seal yourself into a truck with him for eight hours. We’ve got to make sure you ride with Michael on swing.”

  Michael is Michael Harrison, a fifty-two-year-old from Chicago’s South Side who moved to the San Juans after college and still retains the accent of his childhood. Compared with the ebullient Klein, he is a monk of the road, focused and intense. His blue eyes look into, through, and beyond me when I meet him outside the CDOT shop on my third evening in Ouray.

  “It’s fucking spooky up there,” he says. “Really fucking spooky. You sure you want to do this?”

  The weather that’s been growing on the pass is peaking, snow falling at three inches per hour. Harrison just finished his first run, and already his efforts are close to erased. There’s no time to waste: clean gunk-ice from the lights, load the hopper with sand, go. Rule number one of plowing is push with the storm.

  Buckled into the cab, grinding uphill, it’s a matter of seconds before town falls away. The temperature dives to 2 degrees in the gorge, visibility tightens to twenty-five feet, and the wind makes a menagerie’s worth of animal sounds. Harrison says nothing, his right hand working the three joysticks that command the angle of the plow and wing, his left hand steady on the wheel. We’re low-beaming it, squinting, billions of snowflakes flashing in our yellow and blue strobes.

  Star Wars, I’m thinking. What by day felt like an airplane cockpit presently feels like a spaceship. Town is gone for good, a distant planet, a false memory of security and laughter and cheery neon lights in tavern windows. The edge is near, that dreaded, cosmic, one-thousand-foot drop yawning.

  Milepost 90, passing Ruby Walls: “In sideways weather, I’ve got to be able to get out of the truck, take three steps, and touch the mountain. If I can touch the mountain, I’m safe. If I can’t, that means the mountain might drop out from under my tires.”

  Milepost 87, entering Ironton Park: “Sometimes I catch myself saying, ‘Where’s the road?’ I’ll be humming to myself: ‘Where’s the road? Where’s the road?’”

  Milepost 81, beneath Blue Point: “This is definitely the let’s-get-the-fuck-out-of-here section. You see these sloughs spilling across our lane? They came down in the last hour. That’s bad. We call those indicator slides. They mean trouble.”

  Milepost 80.28, at the summit: “It’s life and death up here, no doubt. People think you can drop a plow and go for it, but you can’t. That’s why so many CDOT drivers don’t want anything to do with Red Mountain Pass. If you make a mistake, it will probably be your last. You’ve got to be on it. You’ve got to be in tune. You’ve got to be in the game, totally in the game.”

  Minutes later, creeping back toward Ouray, again absorbed in silent concentration, Harrison surprises me with an abrupt comment. We’re approaching milepost 88, perhaps the most important landmark on the road, one I’ve yet to visit. “I’m going to pull over for a second,” he says. “I want you to see The Monument.”

  We adjust safety helmets atop our wool hats, open the doors, and exit into knee-deep powder. The storm rages, but suddenly there is no aggression to it, no threat. Inside the truck, the weather is something to fear and respect. Outside, it simply is—equal parts motion and stillness, chaos and calm, violence and peace.

  Harrison trudges into a drift, slips a Maglite from his pocket, and illuminates a polished slab of granite that is fast on its way to being buried. Below the engraved image of a plow truck almost identical to the one idling behind us, I read three names and three dates: ROBERT MILLER (MARCH 2, 1970), TERRY KISHBAUGH (FEBRUARY 10, 1978), EDDIE IMEL (MARCH 5, 1992).

  “These dudes gave their lives to keep the road open,” Harrison says. “East Riverside took them all—different events but the same slide.”

  We stand there for a while, the names on the stone disappearing beneath delicate flakes. Soon enough the engraved plow will be resting on its own white road.

  “The mountain’s got a lot of different moods,” Harrison says finally, without turning. “In its own sick little way, it can be kind of magical.”

  He switches off the Maglite, tilts his face to the sky.

  “I guess we’d better get back to pushing. It’s really coming down now, isn’t it?”

  Dead or Alive

  Fred Penasa, the proprietor of Southwest Taxidermy in Montrose, Colorado, rubs his whitening beard with a hand scarred from countless scalpel nicks and sewing needle punctures. We’re standing in his showroom on a Friday afternoon, gazing into the glass pupils of a ram he shot in the San Juan Mountains. Winner of the 2006 Colorado State Taxidermy Championship in the Professional Division, this particular specimen will be descending a “rocky ridge” dusted with “snow” for the foreseeable future.

  “Doing bighorns is a mixture of things—it’s the animal, sure, but it’s also knowing where it lived, the wilderness it called home, how hard those winters can get,” Penasa says. “I’m thinking about the story, about how it all went down, and I’m trying to re-create that story for my client. Maybe it was early morning. Maybe a raven had just flown by and the ram was turning, glancing backwards.”

  Over the past hour Penasa has toured me around his almost two-thousand-square-foot shop and, simultaneously, the quasi-magical process by which he earns a living. Quasi-magical? How else to describe the transformation of, say, an inside-out bobcat hide—stiff and pink like stale chewing gum—to a fierce feline that seemingly might leap from its mount at any moment? Or consider the grizzly I�
��ve walked past a dozen times, each encounter shivering my spine; the bear is deader than dead, but its careful preparation expresses an intimate biological knowledge and brings startling life to the freeze-framed roar.

  Penasa claims no godly powers of regeneration, no access to the Greek pneuma and Latin spiritus, ancient terms for the animating breath that literally inflates capital-B Being. In fact, he insists that decades of meticulous labor have made it difficult for him to see the animals he takes apart and reassembles as “wholes” rather than as “pieces.” This isn’t to imply that he fails to appreciate them—the bighorn is “majestic, plain majestic”—but that his default setting is hyperfocus, what he calls “looking and looking again.”

  In the early 1990s, channeling his childhood love of hunting and, more generally, staring at moose and prong-horn antelope through binoculars, Penasa left his job as a carpenter and signed up for a nine-week course at the Montana School of Taxidermy and Tanning. With all the steps from skinning and fleshing to “building your form” and “designing your habitat” under his belt, he returned to Montrose and established his business. He estimates that it’s one of approximately two hundred full-time taxidermy outfits in Colorado.

  “There’s a high turnover rate with these backyard shops,” he explains. “A lot of guys get into taxidermy thinking it’s all glory, all trophy bucks, but you’ve got to really work hard to establish your reputation. My first five years, I was still a carpenter, doing taxidermy at night and on the weekends. I was going nonstop, trying to get things right.”