A Bridge Too Far

One of my many what I thought were irrational fears turns out to be much more rational than I imagined: every time I drive across the longest bridge across Blue Mesa Reservoir to the west of Gunnison, I expect it to collapse and take the vehicle I’m in with it.

Well, I could say, who’s laughing now? Except that it isn’t funny at all, that my fear might have been closer to reality than I thought.

Late afternoon Thursday in what seemed to us laypeople a very abrupt fashion, the middle bridge over Blue Mesa, the one by Dillon Pinnacles (not the Lake Fork bridge of my fears, but we’ll get back to that), was shut down. No traffic allowed. “Structural anomalies” was about the only explanation offered.

My sister Tia’s brother-in-law in Lake City who works for the Colorado Department of Transportation told Tia this was a “hard close,” with not even CDOT vehicles allowed across. Tia, employed by the school district, knew that students in Grand Junction were going to need to come home via Leadville.

My business partner Kara worried that her husband, out of cell service, was trapped on the far side of the closure, fetching his backhoe from Montrose. He turned out to be on this side, although his backhoe is still on the other side. Kara turned to Facebook — the Regional 911 page — but it had little information followed by lots of speculation from the commentariat.

Most of the talk turned to how to get around this closure. There were the annoyed people who thought they should be allowed across — probably the same people who would be the first to sue if they survived a bridge collapse. There was discussion of use of a county road variously called the Lake City Cutoff, a twisty dirt road that winds through habitat utilized by the endangered Gunnison sage grouse, right on the cusp of the birds’ mating season.

Kebler Pass, between Crested Butte and Paonia, was mentioned, and at least one person thought a reasonable approach to the reported 7.5 feet of snow currently sitting on that road would be to use a blowtorch to melt it. Idiotic suggestions aside, there’s the part where a lane of that road crumbled and fell down the mountain a couple years ago. I believe it got repaired, but I’m not sure that’s any more suited for heavy traffic than the cutoff road.

All of which leaves us cut off from Montrose and other points west.

We thought we were already used to it. For what feels like forever but has really been three years we have been enduring closures and lengthy waits between Gunnison and Montrose while the highway is widened through a small canyon. It was annoying, having to plan six hours of round-trip travel for what normally is a bit over an hour one-way, but now the only viable options are I-70 to our north (six hours from Gunnison to Montrose) and Highway 160 to Durango (seven hours).

As the only person in the entirety of Gunnison County who never feels the compulsion to get out of Gunnison, I wasn’t maybe as sympathetic as I could have been, a year or two ago, to the fellow business owner who lamented feeling “trapped” because just picking up and driving to Montrose for the afternoon wasn’t the quick option it had previously been.

But now? This feels “trapped.” This feels cut off. If nothing else, it certainly emphasizes the vulnerability of living in a place like Gunnison during the modern era when we arrogantly assume that anything we want is ours for the asking. But we are only beginning to explore what that means.

Maybe Facebook is offering better information, but all the county website says is that the bridge is out. The Gunnison Country Times has posted an “update” that is now three days old explaining the closure is on the recommendation of the Federal Highways Administration.

Friday evening the Crested Butte News posted an update after talking to the county manager, and Montrose County Emergency Management held a meeting and offered a press release forwarded to me by one of my several friends named Mark.

The bridge, only a couple three years younger than me, was built with T-1 steel, which now turns out to have cracks in it. Inspectors used a grinder to remove paint and found more cracks, then called in a team with ultrasound equipment, and what they found was so alarming that they immediately moved all their own vehicles off the bridge and shut it down.

While Montrose County yesterday said not to use the cutoff road, due to its unsuitability as a high-traffic conduit, the CB News reported that tons of gravel are being dumped on it this weekend with an eye to opening it in very limited fashion by Monday. Kebler Pass, several weeks away from melting out, is not being considered as an option, so the county and/or CDOT — without knowing who might ultimately foot the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars — is pouring gravel and making a plan to offer limited access, probably under the auspices of a pilot car (we’re now all well versed in that, thanks to the canyon work) for light vehicle traffic during limited times of the day.

This will perhaps allow the bookkeeper who works above Pat’s to quit using her office as a bedroom and get back to her ranch on the other side of the bridge, where her husband is collecting 11 dozen eggs daily without any way to get them to their usual market in Gunnison. (“He’s going to need to eat a lot of omelets,” she said.)

The county’s biggest concern is medical, since almost everything beyond our local scope is pushed west. For instance, those undergoing radiation for cancer make daily trips to Montrose, and emergency patients are often sent by ambulance to Montrose or airlifted to Grand Junction.

All the little things are already adding up: Kara and a friend had plans to go to Montrose today; co-worker Vann has a dental appointment scheduled for Tuesday. Geoff has to figure out how to get his backhoe home. Lynn said the Postal Service couldn’t get mail to folks in Cimarron on the other side of the bridge, and at work we didn’t get the FedEx delivery we were expecting.

We probably are just starting to get to bigger picture items, like when does it occur to us that drastically reduced traffic could portend a very weak summer economically? If the Gunnison Valley is the end point we’re fine, but our businesses also rely on a lot of traffic passing through.

Right now, as I understand it, the only cars allowed on Highway 149 to Lake City are those with drivers who can produce proof of residency. (This is to keep people from trying to sneak onto the cutoff, where reportedly at least three people got stuck Thursday night.) What does that do to the economy up there, now on the mend after a forest fire to the south devastated one summer and covid trimmed a couple more?

But here is the biggest picture yet, the one where my irrational-cum-rational fear could yet be realized: there are two other bridges across the reservoir of the exact same vintage and construction as the one now closed. They have not been inspected although they are scheduled to have this done in the next few weeks.

If either, or both, are found to have similar structural deficiencies the detour option of the cutoff road becomes moot. If the Highway 149 bridge is closed, although it sees a lot less traffic than the other two, Lake City will be cut off from Gunnison. The Lake Fork bridge is west of where the cutoff joins with Highway 50, so the only place that detour would then get anyone is trapped between two bad bridges.

There are still ways out of Gunnison, and even Lake Citians could head south to Creede, but I think as the year stretches on — and we recall that we’re in the fourth year of a planned two-year project for 4 miles of Highway 50 — we may really begin to understand just how remote Gunnison County can be, and how tenuous and delicate the infrastructure upon which we base our entire lives really is.