The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Travel times to be minimally impacted
by Olivia Lueckemeyer
In an effort to further inform the public about plans to close the west side of Cottonwood Pass for construction during the summer of 2017, public works director Marlene Crosby and foreman of special projects Jim Kint have continued their development of a comprehensive communication plan.
“We will continue to update the Federal Highway Administration’s scoping notice, available on the county’s website,” Crosby said. “We will put some red lines on it and other attention-getters as the summer progresses.”
In a presentation to the Gunnison County Board of Commissioners on March 22, Crosby and Kint imparted the results of an environmental analysis that showed the differences in travel time and distance via Monarch Pass versus Cottonwood Pass from various points of origin.
The route that will experience the biggest impact of the closure originates in Buena Vista and ends in Taylor Park, which is currently a 35.2-mile trip lasting approximately an hour and 14 minutes. With traffic diverted to Monarch Pass, the trip will lengthen to 116 miles, lasting approximately two hours and 26 minutes.
From Buena Vista to Crested Butte, the trip distance via Cottonwood Pass is 68.4 miles and lasts approximately two hours and 12 minutes. While the closure will extend the distance to 111 miles, the time will remain the same.
From Buena Vista to Almont, via Cottonwood Pass the trip distance is 58 miles, lasting one hour and 54 minutes. The Monarch Pass detour will extend the distance to 93 miles, but travel time will actually be reduced by 10 minutes.
Crosby noted that if the county had stuck with its alternate plan of breaking the roadwork into portions, traffic would have been stopped in three or four locations for up to 20 minutes at each stop, which commissioner Paula Swenson agreed would have been frustrating to drivers.
“It would definitely take you, during construction time, a lot longer,” Paula said. “While it may add an extra half hour to your trip, it’s a lot less hassle.”
In addition to inconvenient traffic stops, Crosby pointed out that road conditions would not have been favorable.
“It’s not just the stop time that would have been impactful,” Crosby said. “Travelers would be driving over rough surfaces, materials that had been placed by a dozer, like rocks and bumps. “
Kint and Crosby also introduced plans to leave brochures at various high-traffic locations, such as the Taylor Park Trading Post and the Marina, in order to inform the public about Cottonwood conditions, as well as the different uses of the areas surrounding the pass. In particular, Crosby and Kint hope to better educate the public about the neighboring cattle pools.
“Many people see the signs and think ‘cow in the road,’ but they don’t know why the cows are there and the good that they do,” Crosby said. “They don’t know that it’s part of a multi-use forest, that they allow for production on the home place and bigger herds, and that it manages fire danger.”
Crosby says a contractor should be hired by early next year, and she hopes some sub-contracting will be done locally. Commissioner Phil Chamberland expressed his desire to hire a contractor as soon as possible and hopefully fast track the entire process.
“To the extent that we can get the closure done in one year, that would be nice,” Chamberland said.
Kint countered that truck traffic alone would constitute a lengthy closure. Approximately 40 tons of asphalt and 70 tons of base will be required to complete the project.
The cost to the county between 2016 and 2019 is approximately $1.5 million. Crosby said shifts in alignment were made to minimize the amount of wall that has to be built, which saved a significant amount of money.
“The county has done work in recent site visits to do adjustments on alignments that eliminated rockery walls for guardrails,” Crosby explained. “We’ve worked hard to make it as cost efficient as possible for all of us.”
