If you, like me, are hell-bent on skiing weekends and live in the Denver metro area, you have probably spent some time sitting in “mountain traffic” on Interstate 70.
As a Colorado transplant hailing from New York City, I’m used to traffic. I’ve spent my fair share of hours sitting bleary-eyed on the FDR and an assortment of other urban, arterial roadways.
Sitting in mountain traffic, though, is different. There’s something surreal about being stuck in traffic and surrounded by the soaring peaks and valleys of the Front Range. Forced to visually confront the thousands of vehicles surging into (and, on occasion, out of) the mountains, there’s a back-of-mind feeling that slips its way into consciousness -- when hurtling along I-70 at 80 mph, one among just several other vehicles in view, your journey has an assumed heroism to it, whether off to a hike or the slopes or anywhere in between. It’s different when you’re just another member of a metal caravan slowly progressing into the mountains.
What I mean is that the civilized and settled aspects of the journey that would otherwise go unnoticed and unremarked, suddenly loom into view: the climate-controlled car cabin, the mind-boggling variety of audio entertainment, and, more than anything else, the miracle of the highway itself as part of larger transportation infrastructure, enabling this mass movement of souls into and out the mountains, part of a massive regional economy that thrives off of the movement that I-70 makes possible, the thousands of people who show up on the streets of Breckenridge on an autumn Saturday or on the slopes of A-Basin on a frigid February morning.
~
Ruminating on the power of transit infrastructure, I might venture, is a natural side of effect of sitting in traffic, whether you’re bumper-to-bumper on the FDR or the Denver-to-Vail stretch of I-70.
Whenever I sat in traffic on the FDR Drive, my thoughts turned to its idiocy, how the parkway cut off the city from access to the water, an idea born out of reading Jane Jacobs and subsequently nurtured by habitual early-morning runs along the East River Esplanade, where my resentment against the prioritization of automobiles over people darkened my view of the Drive. For all its utility in getting me in and out of the city, I resented the hierarchy of needs it implicitly represented, where the movement of people by automobile exceeded the importance of walkable neighborhoods, of access to the water.
The reveries of sitting in traffic on I-70 have a very different flavor. The Denver-to-Vail stretch of I-70 presents one of the country’s most striking infrastructural achievements. This highway, at least two lanes in each direction over this entire stretch (which clump together and separate as might two long strands of spaghetti), bores through mountains, curls around the sides of escarpments, and sails over mountain passes as high as 11,000 feet.
So any reverie must open with some awe, induced by the eye-opening white peaks in the distance and the jagged, exposed geology of cliff faces. But the reverie extends likewise to the highway’s easy mundanity, especially towards its Denver end. Part of this is to do with the interstate system itself, with its unmistakable signage and sense of space. But it’s also to do with the creeping surburbanity that has lapped over the rim of the Dakota Hogback and spilled into the foothills of the Front Range, with subdivisions appearing all over the thinly wooded folds around I-70.
~
It’s also in this stretch that a curious exit sign appears: “Chief Hosa.” Nothing about the sign offers clarification. Is it the name of a town? A natural monument? A historical site? The looming question, of course: who is Chief Hosa?
The quickest of Wikipedia searches offers an answer:
Little Raven, also known as Hosa (Young Crow), (born ca. 1810 — died 1889) was from about 1855 until his death in 1889 a principal chief of the Southern Arapaho Indians. He negotiated peace between the Southern Arapaho and Cheyenne and the Comanche, Kiowa, and Plains Apache. He also secured rights to the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation in Indian Territory.
Further research, though, turns up that the exit isn’t named after him after all: it’s named after a “mountain lodge” owned by the City and County of Denver, which is frequently used for weddings and other events. The original architect of the lodge named it after him, though.
