The Colonel Was Seventy-Three

Tell me what you've got planned for age seventy-three, because I'd bet the Colonel's plan beats it. Colonel Colt started out on the Erie Canal in the eighteen seventies. He built the road over Wolf Creek Pass. And in September of nineteen twenty-nine, at seventy-three years old, he took the contract for the east side of this road, seventeen miles from Deer Ridge to Fall River Pass. By the end of the month he had a camp at Hidden Valley and men at work. The line came from a government surveyor his colleagues called the Bull of the Woods, who had a feel for the country. That's fine for the man with the feel. Somebody else has to dig it. So the Colonel dug. His camp was composition board and tar paper, built to move by truck, and it moved to four different places, and still it couldn't keep up with the clearing crews. One worker remembered Colt running three crews, one working, one leaving and one on the way. Then the job got above the trees, and the mountain quit playing fair. Regular drills wouldn't go through the frozen tundra. New gear had to be designed. The stuff had a feel like rubber and couldn't be drilled or blasted, so they stripped it off in shallow layers between thaws. At Rock Cut they wired a hundred and seventy-eight shots together and fired them all at once, a half ton of explosives, when most blasts ran thirty shots. It still wasn't fast enough for the government man. Two years in, the Bureau's engineer called the going exceedingly slow, said Colt's equipment was too light, and laid part of the blame on incompetent powdermen. Winter shut the job down that October, and the Colonel came back and finished it. He brought it in with two percent of his time to spare. In July of nineteen thirty-two the road opened to Fall River Pass. The Estes Park paper had already called it the Eighth Wonder of the Modern World, and said President Hoover might come dedicate it. A formal opening was planned. So far as anybody has found, no ceremony was held. The nearest thing came fifty years on, an anniversary ceremony at Hidden Valley, and the crowd was thin, because the Lawn Lake flood had come through two days earlier. The Colonel did a little better than his road. In February of nineteen fifty-five a Longmont paper ran the headline, Builder of Trail Ridge Road Honored. He was ninety-eight years old. I've known mountains with less patience.