The Top of the Road

Twelve thousand one hundred and eighty-three feet. You're about twenty seconds from the top of the highest continuous paved road in the United States. It has no name and no pullout. So let me tell you when you get there. Watch the road. Feel the car stop working. There. That's the roof of this whole drive, and you crossed it without slowing down. Continuous is the word that matters. Dead-end roads climb higher, up Pikes Peak for one, but they stop at the top and come back. This one goes over. In nineteen thirty-one Horace Albright, the Park Service's second director, said of this road, you will have the whole sweep of the Rockies before you in all directions. Go ahead and check. A third of a mile on, to your left, Gore Range Overlook faces the Never Summer Mountains, the Gore Range and the flat top of Longs Peak. Watch for oncoming traffic, mind the sharp drop-offs along the path, and head left out of the lot. About eleven miles of this road run above eleven thousand feet. You've driven into something like the Canadian or Alaskan Arctic, windy and twenty to thirty degrees colder than Estes Park or Grand Lake, and some days the air up here lets you see more than two hundred miles. July is the warmest month on the tundra, and its average high is fifty-two degrees. This was never meant to be a winter road. It has few guard rails and no shoulders. Winter wind up here can top a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and spring drifts have run as high as twenty-one feet. The dark rock back at Lava Cliffs may not be lava at all. The name says lava, and so does the park's page. A government geologist says welded ash, filling a steep-walled valley at least five hundred feet deep. Now listen. You won't hear a sightseeing plane. A federal law passed in two thousand banned commercial air tours over this park at any altitude, and the park says it's the only one in the system with that protection.