Kebler and Cottonwood are open for summer business

County working on Kebler, Cottonwood and New Deli trail

A trip to Denver or Paonia from Crested Butte got a lot easier this week, with the two main mountain passes cleared for traffic. Kebler and Cottonwood are now open for business.

The snowpack is shrinking in the backcountry, trail crews are taking up their picks and shovels all over the valley and the rest of us are finding muscles we’d forgotten about. It all means better access to some of the places isolated in winter and if you’re headed over the Slate River south of Crested Butte it means your trip might be safer, too.
Spring has made working on the Slate River pedestrian bridge a whole lot easier and now it’s almost ready for foot and bike traffic traveling between the Riverbend and Skyland communities. Skyland Metropolitan District Manager Mike Billingsley thinks the path could be open by Memorial Day.
The steel bridge is the final piece of a joint project between the Skyland Metropolitan District, Gunnison County and the Riverbend Home Owners Association to link the two communities and to keep people from venturing onto Highway 135 to get across the river.
Billingsley said the concrete has been setting up all week and the dirt work will be finished by the holiday weekend, with the remaining loose ends getting tied up through the summer. The path on the Skyland side is also going to be paved, but not until next year.
“By the end of the month we hope to be totally finished except the paving. There are railings that will need to be installed on the retaining walls on either end of the bridge. That will happen sometime this summer,” he said. “The [Gunnison County] Trails Commission is looking to do a ribbon cutting in July and that’s also when most of our homeowners are in town.”
The 85-foot-long, 14-foot-wide bridge connects Brush Creek Road and Skyland’s paved trail system to the New Deli trail on the north side of the Slate River.
Gunnison County Trails Commission chairman Joellen Fonken is thrilled to have the bridge in place, and thinks it will be an important part of a trail system that could reach some of the best hiking and biking in the valley.
“This is an awesome amenity for the trails component of recreation in the area,” Fonken said.
Fonken said that Brush Creek Road, and all that is accessible from it, is the destination on the south side of Slate River, since the trail system the county envisions running from the mountain to Crested Butte South is still a work in progress.
On the north side of the river, some work still needs to be done by the county, which is helping finish the project, to connect the trail to the bridge. But that might have to wait until some other springtime chores are finished.
County Director of Public Works Marlene Crosby said she has people spread around the valley, from Kebler to Cottonwood Pass, trying to open the roads in time for the heavy traffic of summer.
For the past couple of weeks, road crews have been replacing two aging culverts east of the Irwin ‘Y’ on Kebler Pass Road with a 19-foot span and repaired a section of the road that had a persistent pothole problem.
“We knew we were going to replace the culverts, but couldn’t find a way to do that without having a negative impact to wetlands, which was a concern,” Crosby said. “So we built a structure that would cover that distance.”
At the top of Kebler Pass, there were only about three to four feet of snow, which is less than in year’s past, but this year there was a thick layer of ice underneath. So Crosby is letting the sun do its work on the road and she will be scheduling a magnesium-chloride treatment on the other side of the pass soon to keep the dust down.
“We’ve got some clean-up to do and once we get Kebler open and ready for business and we aren’t waiting for crews to get freed up and then they will be able to spend some more time [on the trail leading to the Slate River bridge],” Crosby said.
She also said Cottonwood was getting some work, mostly on the Chaffee County side, but that both passes, Cottonwood and Kebler, would be open to traffic by the time you read this paper.