In the early hours of June 8, a half-acre section of Wyoming Highway 22 cracked open and slid down the mountainside, leaving a yawning gap in the road. Every morning and evening, thousands of people cross Teton Pass on this highway, commuting between their jobs in Jackson — one of the wealthiest towns in the country — and their homes in Idaho, where housing is less expensive. In an instant, this already-challenging daily commute became nearly impossible.
The commuters must now spend more than four hours a day on a winding 200-mile detour. With the extra time and fuel costs disrupting their lives, many have turned to their neighbors for help: Through a Facebook page started by Victor, Idaho, resident Melissa Thomasma, locals have taken commuters’ dogs to veterinary appointments, picked up their kids from summer camps, offered spare rooms and rides to the airport, and bought baby formula for those in need.
It’s a beautiful response at a desperate time, but Thomasma, whose own partner commutes to Jackson every day, said it isn’t a permanent solution.
“This is a massive wake-up call for Teton County, and how much they rely on these other communities and the people,” Thomasma says. “They’re not just numbers. They’re people with lives and families, and they need to treat them as such.”
And Teton Pass is far from the only mountain highway that Western working families depend on. As infrastructure ages and the climate changes, many of these essential routes are more vulnerable than ever.
“When you think about when most of these were built — the ’60s and ’70s — that was a time when we believed we could pretty much engineer anything,” said Paul Chinowsky, a professor emeritus of civil engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “There was this thought that our engineering was smarter than the elements it had to deal with. So we kept building in more and more risky locations.”
COLORADO STATE HIGHWAY 145, which runs through a narrow canyon west of Telluride, is part of the 60-mile route between the upscale ski town and Montrose, home to many of Telluride’s workers. It’s a stretch that keeps Julie Constan, the area’s Colorado Department of Transportation director, up at night.
“We see rock falls and mudslides,” she says. “It tends to happen in the summer when it’s raining.”
Because housing in Telluride has become unaffordable for most, the highway sees almost 7,000 vehicles a day, most of them commuters from Montrose on their daily round trip. Even Constan’s employees — the highway maintenance workers who clear avalanches, rocks and mud from the roads — can’t afford to live in Telluride. When there’s a blockage, they can only attack it from one side.
Many mountain roads, said Chinowsky, were intended for leisurely travel, built to connect rural communities and marketed as scenic routes. And for decades, they served their purpose well.
But about 7,500 cars now travel over Teton Pass every day, according to a traffic counter east of Victor, Idaho, compared to slightly more than 4,000 vehicles 20 years ago. Highways that were once relatively quiet except during tourism surges in summer and winter are now jammed with commuters struggling to reach jobs in communities where they can’t afford to live. Record tourism in the Mountain West has only increased the traffic burden.
Climate change has only increased the wear and tear, by bringing more severe weather and frequent freeze-thaw cycles. Historically, highways like Teton Pass could count on solidly frozen ground from December through March, but in recent years, more ground has been thawing earlier, then refreezing and thawing again.
“Every time you get a freeze-thaw, it expands the soil and rock,” Chinowsky said. “Over time, that keeps happening and happening, until you get a situation where there’s enough fracture and cracks that intense rainfall causes that mountainside to shear off.”
UNFORTUNATELY, there’s no easy solution.
Highway engineers can drill deep into the underlying rock and install steel rods or cables — a technique called “soil nailing” — to strengthen fragile hillsides, or else use drainage systems to direct water away from eroding slopes. But both techniques are expensive and time-consuming. The simpler strategy — planting trees and shrubs to hold the ground together — “works to a point and works in places that are more soil than rock,” Chinowsky said. “But even then, you’re creating fuel for wildfires.”
The Colorado Department of Transportation brings in geotechnical engineers to survey precarious roads every couple of years, and the department’s maintenance staff also looks for subsidence and other signs of wear in the course of their work. But in Colorado and other Western states, surveying all the highways all the time simply isn’t possible.
Spending millions of dollars to prevent a road collapse is also a tough sell with county and state officials, said Daniel Aldrich, director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University in Boston. To officials focused on managing tight budgets and pleasing constituents, preventative projects just aren’t sexy. “We don’t spend money until the bad thing happens,” he said.
And when states receive federal money for highway improvements — as many did under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — the logistics of spending it can be challenging. Not many contractors are qualified to tackle complicated highway engineering projects, and in the mountains, construction is only possible for a few months each year.
Another solution is to build redundancies, as in more roads. But that has problems of its own, including the ecological costs of carving roads through undeveloped land.
Ultimately, Aldrich said, we need to help communities become more resilient: Given sufficient affordable housing, people could return to living where they work, making mountain road closures an inconvenience instead of a crisis. In the meantime, high country commuting families like Melissa Thomasma’s are doing their part to help their communities recover from this crisis and prepare for the next, knowing that Teton Pass will not be the last highway to crumble.
Christine Peterson lives in Laramie, Wyoming, and has covered science, the environment and outdoor recreation in Wyoming for more than a decade. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Outdoor Life and the Casper Star-Tribune, among others. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
