Milner Pass is where Trail Ridge Road crosses the Continental Divide, at about 10,760 feet and well below the road's high point. The lot is on the left going west and on the right going east, with vault toilets, a sign about the Divide and Poudre Lake beside the road. An ancient canyon was cut here and later filled, and the name honors a railroad that was never built. The stop also takes up what the Divide meant to the Arapaho, whose treaty boundary once ran roughly along it. Lake Irene, half a mile west, adds a half-mile loop and a vault toilet. Winds off the west slope drop most of their moisture before they cross, so the two sides of the line feel different.
A raindrop's whole future gets decided about a fifth of a mile from here. Milner Pass is on your right, with vault toilets and a brown sign that explains it all, so ease in. Leaving, it's a right. This is the Continental Divide. Two raindrops landing a step apart here finish a continent apart. All the water east of the pass flows toward the Atlantic, down the Platte and the Missouri to the Gulf of Mexico. All the water west of it heads for the Colorado and the Gulf of California, if nobody diverts it first, and you've just seen who does. You've still got about fourteen hundred feet to climb to the top of this road, and yet this is where you cross the great divide of the continent, at about ten thousand seven hundred and sixty feet, in the trees. The Divide follows the heads of watersheds, wherever they lie, and the top of Trail Ridge lies off it. From here up, the trees quit and the weather gives the orders. Bring a layer from the car to every stop. If you hear thunder or see lightning, get back in your car. If anyone has a headache, nausea or dizziness, don't push on to the top. Go back down. The wind works the Divide too. Prevailing winds drop most of their moisture on the west slope, so the east side stays relatively dry, and you feel the change as you cross. After an uplift about forty million years ago, an ancient stream cut a canyon a thousand feet deep through this spot. Volcanic material later filled it. Then the ice came, and ice on the west side grew so thick that its head spilled east over this pass, a river of Pacific-side ice pouring down the Atlantic side. The pass is named for a railroad promoter named Milner, who surveyed a rail route across this divide. The railroad was never built, so the pass carries the name of a train that never came. To the Arapaho the pass is the mule deer trail. In eighteen fifty-one the Fort Laramie Treaty set the western boundary of Arapaho land roughly along the Continental Divide. Ten years later, after the gold rush, the Treaty of Fort Wise cut that land by more than ninety percent, and the Arapaho Language Project's history says that treaty was never ratified by representatives of the Tribe. The Northern Arapaho asked for a reservation of their own in the Powder River Basin and were ignored. In the spring of eighteen seventy-eight about nine hundred and fifty of them arrived under Army escort at Wind River, on a reservation already made for the Eastern Shoshone, their traditional enemies. They're at Wind River today, Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone, and they're still coming back to these mountains.
Photo: daveynin · CC BY 2.0