The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“Water is the number-one enemy to pavement”
This winter’s heavy snowpack and the melt that followed wreaked havoc on the local pavement and Mt. Crested Butte got hit hard, but work has already started to fix the roads. The town is also adding to an unfinished street resurfacing project from last year to get the town’s roadways in order for the summer.
“We’re hoping to be done with everything by mid-June for the bike races,” Mt. Crested Butte maintenance supervisor Pepe Valian says. “We’re working on the preliminary stuff right now.”
The roadwork was started on May 12, which was earlier than anticipated despite the slow onset of spring, and will focus mostly on several sections of Gothic Road that will require only temporary road closures over the next month.
Town manager Joe Fitzpatrick told the Town Council at a meeting on Monday, May 16 that this year’s contract was going to cost the town about $367,000 before all of the road had melted out.
“[That] bid was on a project that was laid out and defined prior to the spring thaw and the roads are dissolving,” he said, pointing to the plan’s January date. “So we’ll probably add a six-digit amount of work to the contract because of how bad Gothic Road got. Anybody that drives Gothic Road can attest that it has literally fallen apart in the last six weeks.”
Four different sections of Gothic Road will be resurfaced as part of the project, along with the repaving of the entire Goldlink subdivision and a section of Hunter Hill Road.
This year’s contract was awarded to United Companies, one of only two bidders on the project. With work still left on a contract the town had with the company last year, Fitzpatrick says the company was motivated to offer the best deal possible.
“Pretty much all of the subcontractors they hire will be local,” he adds. “They’re not going to go out and hire someone from out of town right now.”
Valian says last year’s contract contained a similar amount of work as the current contract and the company has about one-third of it left to do, in addition to the work slated for this summer.
And up on the mountain Valian doesn’t expect the road work to stop anytime soon. Given the environment, he says, pavement doesn’t stand a chance over time and expects every road to fall apart inside of 15 years. Ten years is average and some last as little as three to five years.
“It’s a combination of a lot of things,” Valian says of the reason roads have a limited life on the mountain. “The altitude is one thing and being on the side of a mountain is another and we have water all year long. There are drainages that drain all year and people have crawlspace drains that pump all year long. We always have water running down the road and water is the number-one enemy to pavement.”
For that reason, Fitzpatrick and Valian agreed that the drainage is one of the first matters the development department in any new paving or building project.
“Hopefully we’ll be high and dry and in fire danger before you know it,” Valian says.
