I Am the Glenwood Canyon Highway

One of these things is just like the other: The Glenwood Canyon Highway and One Happy Heart Dancing.

In the 1970s the Colorado highway department decided to rebuild the highway through Glenwood Canyon.

The river that cut the canyon still runs along its floor. It is narrow as rivers go, and happy-go-lucky. After miles and miles of majestic, barren sky and landscapes, relentless sun, the canyon is an oasis. Trees and grasses grow all along the banks, and there is shade. It is cozy down here by the water.

A two-lane highway runs along the edge of the river. It is impossible to drive it slowly enough. You don’t drive this canyon, you loll about in it.

Unless you are a trucker or a traveling salesmen or a parent with a carful of kids, all of whom have only one goal: Make good time.

These are the people the highway department had in mind when they decided to widen the road. They called it improving the highway. The environmentalists disagreed.

For decades, the environmentalists blocked the highway department’s every move. No plan was good enough. Real estate developers and trucking companies and everyone else who stood to make a penny off increasing the volume and speed of traffic through the canyon railed against the environmentalists. The greenies stood firm.

There was much screaming. Road-building costs skyrocketed while the environmentalists obstructed the developers’ plans. The developers took the case to the public: Look what this will do to your taxes! The environmentalists took their case public, too: Look what this will do to your pretty, beloved canyon!

Nothing good can come of this! both camps cried.

Eventually, the highway department scrapped its patchwork plans and proposed something brand new: an elevated highway. Now there would be no need to blast away the canyon walls, channel the river through enormous buried pipes, remove the tops of peaks, or move mountains.

They had everything they needed to make it happen: Lots of pillars and a brand-new technology that would allow the pillars to be set—and continue to stand—on mountain cliff walls for 100 years.

Voila!

Glenwood Canyon is not what it used to be, but to focus on that is to miss the miracle.

The miracle of the Glenwood Canyon highway is this: All that tussling, all those delays—inconvenient, messy, seemingly hopeless—created a space of time in which new capabilities could emerge, techniques could advance to such a degree that when builders and environmentalists finally came together, the resolution far surpassed what could have been accomplished had the project proceeded as planned.

Patience is a virtue. Persistence pays off.

Lovely, lovely, lovely.