More vehicles are crossing a U.S. 50 bridge over Blue Mesa Reservoir and fewer closures are anticipated after Labor Day — a move that transportation officials hope will provide relief to traffic flows across a critical route that connects Montrose, Gunnison and Hinsdale counties.

Single-lane traffic in alternating directions is now allowed over Middle Bridge west of Gunnison for six hours a day, up from four, and after Labor Day, the bridge will open from 6:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., Colorado Department of Transportation officials said during a meeting Tuesday evening. 

School buses are also allowed to cross the bridge, which abruptly shut down April 18 after inspectors discovered a 3-inch-long crack along a steel beam. The first day of school for students at Gunnison Watershed School District is Aug. 26. 

“I still remember the kids trying to take the boat to school earlier this year,” Herman Stockinger, CDOT’s deputy director, said Tuesday. “It took creativity for the community to come together to make that happen and it made for a great story, but that’s just not sustainable for our school kids.” 

If repairs continue as scheduled, officials hope to open the bridge to all legal loads by mid-October.

“We think this updated plan does the best job of balancing immediate community needs with our shared goal of completing the structural repairs this year,” Stockinger said. 

The expanded schedule comes as crews continue to repair the bridge that connects the towns of Gunnison and Montrose. 

The repairs require 410 tons of steel, which include 1,400 individual steel plates and 55,000 individual bolts, said Jason Proskovec, a project director with Kiewit Construction, which CDOT brought in to handle and carry out the bridge repair work. 

Proskovec said the 410 tons of steel were procured from a mill in North Carolina, then was sent to six shops in Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Texas and Colorado to be cut into shapes and drilled with holes, before it was sent to Gunnison.

The majority of the bolts came from a manufacturing company in Portland, Oregon, before they were tested in Ohio, Proskovec said. 

“So a pretty huge national, logistical effort to pull this off,” he said. 

Repairs are also underway on the Lake Fork Bridge, which is west of Middle Bridge. Lake Fork was built with the same high-strength steel that was welded on in the early 1960s using a technique that turned out to be faulty. 

Attention was drawn to both bridges after federal highway officials ordered mandatory inspections. CDOT identified five potentially problematic bridges across the state that used the problematic T-1 steel. Further inspection revealed that there were three that fit the federal criteria for further action — two bridges over Blue Mesa and one in Bent County (that bridge was deemed safe last year). 

After Labor Day, alternating traffic will be allowed across the Lake Fork Bridge between 6 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. At night, there will be more closures as crews conduct repairs, but traffic will still be allowed across, officials said. 

Vehicles of all legal weights are currently allowed across the Lake Fork Bridge.

During Tuesday’s meeting, one resident asked if CDOT could add porta-potties by the road, citing they have seen people go to the bathroom on the road as they wait in the line of traffic before crossing the Middle Bridge. Officials said they are addressing the issue. 

“I want to acknowledge again that this has been more than an inconvenience, it has been a major impact on people’s lives,” Gunnison County Commissioner Laura Puckett Daniels said. 

“We love that we are at the end of the road, we love that we are hard to access so that this place is special for us, but it has been an especially trying time,” Puckett Daniels said. “Gunnison County is open if you want to come visit, if you want to fish on Blue Mesa, it’s a really good time to be here, but you do have to jump through a few hurdles to make that happen.”

County Road 26 remains open as a detour outside of the scheduled openings across the U.S. 50 bridge and for heavier vehicles, including campers, trucks pulling trailers and semitrucks. 

For now, officials are not adjusting the times a piloted car will guide vehicles along the detour route, but are considering opening more times late at night, said Martin Schmidt, assistant county manager for public works for Gunnison County.

“Continually increasing access is what’s occurred throughout this project,” he said, “and we continue to push for that.” 

The U.S. 50 bridge over the Blue Mesa Reservoir will temporarily reopen for the July 4 weekend, restoring a critical route across Colorado for holiday travel while repairs along the middle span continue, officials said Thursday.

Emergency vehicles and those traveling in smaller vehicles can begin crossing Middle Bridge west of Gunnison at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, the Colorado Department of Transportation said, announcing the completion of the first phase of repairs of the bridge that shut down April 18. 

The bridge will be open 12 hours a day through the holiday weekend. But starting July 8, the bridge will open just twice daily as crews to continue to work on repairs.

July 3 through July 7, a pilot car will guide cars in each direction across the bridge from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., CDOT said. After the holiday weekend, pilot cars will lead single-direction traffic across the bridge in alternating directions from 6:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. 

Passenger cars, pickup trucks, vans, motorcycles and emergency vehicles will be allowed over the bridge, CDOT said. Heavier vehicles — including campers and RVs, trucks pulling trailers, semitrucks and buses — will be required to take the County Road 26 detour. 

Crews completed the first of two stages of critical repairs on the horizontal part of an L-shaped beam along the central span of the bridge, where inspectors found a 3-inch crack in structural steel, CDOT said Thursday.

The unexpected shutdown of the bridge — which serves as a critical link for Montrose, Gunnison and Hinsdale counties — left residents scrambling for solutions to get to school, work and doctor appointments. 

Construction teams, working from scaffolding suspended from the side of the bridge, started the process of bolting four plates in four parts of the bridge June 12, CDOT said. The first phase of repairs addressed parts of the bridge that posed “an imminent risk to structural integrity,” the agency said. 

Each steel plate is about 23 feet long, 2½ feet wide and 2½ inches thick and weighs about 9,000 pounds, CDOT said. More than 200 bolts were needed to secure each plate in place.  

The shutdown of the bridge came at the urging of federal highway officials in April after crews found the crack during a mandatory inspection of the high-strength steel bridge. The inspection was required because of known issues with similarly constructed bridges around the country.

CDOT identified five potentially problematic bridges across the state that used T-1 steel. Further inspection revealed there were three that fit the federal criteria for further action — two bridges over Blue Mesa and one in Bent County.

Crews will look at potential repairs for the smaller Lake Fork Bridge, about 2 miles west of the Middle Bridge, and install strain-gauge sensors to monitor the effect of traffic loading on the structure, CDOT said. Traffic will be reduced to a single lane starting Friday through Monday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. as teams install the sensors.

The Bent County bridge is small and low to the ground and was quickly inspected. It was deemed safe in 2023. 

BLUE MESA RESERVOIR — Crews will soon begin bolting four 20-foot-long plates of steel to a U.S. 50 bridge over the Blue Mesa Reservoir with the goal of finishing critical repairs by July 4 to allow emergency vehicles and passenger cars across the bridge on an intermittent basis. 

The first phase of repairs will involve attaching the plates of steel to the central span of the bridge, where inspection crews found a four-inch crack in structural steel, Colorado Department of Transportation officials said Tuesday during the first media tour of the bridge since its sudden shutdown April 18.

If construction goes as planned, traffic will be allowed across the bridge two times a day in each direction, said Jason Smith, a regional transportation director for CDOT. 

“Our goal ultimately from day one was getting emergency services across the structure because we realized that communities, especially in Gunnison, needed emergency services in Montrose,” Smith said. 

To prepare for the critical repairs, teams removed asphalt from the bridge to allow more weight, from equipment and crews, to be allowed on the bridge. The four steel plates arrived Saturday and more are in transit, he said.

On Tuesday, amid gusty winds, construction crews worked inside a bright yellow snooper truck over the side of the bridge to continue removing the paint, by sandblasting, to reach the bare metal. Engineers used ultrasonic testing in 118 areas to determine the integrity of the bridge and identify which parts needed repairs.

Crews will have to carefully lower the plates, which weigh the equivalent of two pickup trucks, over the edge, before lifting them to the bottom of the bridge and bolting them in place.

“These plates are pretty massive and will be very difficult to lift over the edge, bring up underneath and bolt into place,” program engineer Rob Beck said.

Over the course of months, crews will drill hundreds of bolts, each weighing about five pounds, into the bridge, he said. 

“There will be a one-for-one replacement. You pull one out, you put one in, pull one out, put one in,” Beck said. “We can’t pull them all out at once or we lose the structural integrity of the plate.”

Smith said CDOT is still working to calculate how many cars the bridge will be able to allow after critical repairs are complete.

“It is very much a balancing act,” he said. 

Once critical repairs are complete, crews will then address less critical issues found on the bridge, to ensure the longevity of the bridge, Smith said, adding that CDOT hopes to finish by the end of October before weather complicates the work.

About 100 people are on site to repair the bridge 24/7, working in shifts, he said.

Gunnison County Commissioner Laura Puckett Daniels said the anticipated July 4 opening will help alleviate some stress and anxiety for locals and business owners in the area, especially those working in the tourism industry.

“We have such a huge exchange of commerce, medicine and goods between Gunnison and Montrose. So being cut off there, it’s been really stressful,” she said. 

Since the closure, tourism-based businesses, like campgrounds, have taken a hit with fewer people traveling to the area and canceling their reservations.

“It’s been hard to get the word out to folks that these businesses are open and you can access them,” Puckett Daniels said.

Still, she said she is impressed by the grit shown by people impacted by the closure. 

“There’s been an amazing resilience, watching people step into the gap and help each other — whether it was like shuttling construction workers across Blue Mesa or shuttling students across Blue Mesa or a family who got certified by the school district to be able to drive kids to school, or the EMS system pivoting really quickly and finding treatments for folks in a whole other part of the state,” Puckett Daniels said.

“I’ve been really impressed by how everybody’s put their shoulder to the wheel and helped and pushed in the same direction.”

Cattlemen and their horses drive the cattle down the rocky bluffs from the ranch’s winter pastures to the summer grazing lands Monday, south of the Blue Mesa Reservoir in Gunnison County.

GUNNISON – About 1,500 head of cattle, led by dozens of wranglers on horseback, commuted alongside the traffic on Colorado 149 this week before reaching open pastures where they will spend the summer grazing south of Blue Mesa Reservoir.

Ranchers guide their cattle 9 miles each year to get to public land from a private ranch west of Gunnison, said Torrie Blackwell, whose father has managed Moncreif Ranches for 33 years. On Monday, cattle reached a 10,000-acre pasture, owned by the Bureau of Land Management, before they will move to another part of the state to graze, she said. 

“That honestly is short. We consider that a very short drive,” said Blackwell, whose husband  travels by horseback 20 miles a day to guide the cattle across open fields, leased from BLM and the U.S. Forest Service, making sure they have enough water and don’t overgraze.

“We run them over into Saguache County. That’s what we do all summer. We just move them from pasture to pasture,” she said. 

“A lot of extremely beautiful country. It’s very rewarding.”

At least 1,500 head of cattle used the highway for 3 miles.

This year, the cattle drive saw more spectators than usual and may have caught some drivers off guard as they shared 3 miles of Colorado 149, which has been part of the detour to get from Montrose and Gunnison since the sudden shutdown of the Blue Mesa bridge last month. 

About 30 people on horseback, ranging from 5 to 70 years old, helped with this year’s cattle drive, Blackwell said.

“We were trying very, very hard to make it quick on account of the road and the closure and not wanting to screw people up too badly,” Blackwell said. 

From top: Dean Blackwell, 8, left, and Jett Hildreth, 8, replace the bridles on their horses following the cattle drive of 1,500 head of cattle to summer grazing pastures. Law enforcement, cowboys and cowgirls, cattle and travelers share Colorado 149 for a few moments.

“Weather plays a huge role in it. If it’s too hot, they drag on and on and on. They’re slow and they’re tired, and they’re hot,” she said of the cattle. “So it takes longer and it takes much more horsepower to get them moving.”

Saturday’s temperatures were perfect and the cattle moved “effortlessly,” she said. 

The broken bridge left agricultural producers scrambling for solutions to get their cattle to summer pastures. A relief fund, hosted by the Gunnison Ranchland Conservation Legacy and Colorado State University Extension, was set up to support producers facing extra expenses because of the Blue Mesa bridge closure, including travel expenses and increased costs for fertilizer and feed. Producers interested in applying must show their receipts to prove their added expenses and donations will go directly to the affected producers.

“The cattle drive went smooth as butter,” Anne Reid, a public information officer for the incident management team for the Blue Mesa Reservoir closure.

“Of course cattle cannot tell time — we thought they were going to hit the road around 8:30 or 9:30 and they didn’t make it to the road until 10:30,” Reid said. “But they were able to clear the road by 12.”

One lane of U.S. 50 on the Middle Bridge over Blue Mesa Reservoir could be open for intermittent traffic by July 4 if four “critical repairs” can be completed by then, state transportation director Shoshana Lew said Tuesday evening.

The repairs include using 2½-inch thick steel plates that are 30-inches wide and 27-feet long to reinforce defects in welds made when the bridge was assembled starting in April 1961.

Reopening the bridge could coincide with completion of CDOT’s Little Blue Canyon project between Montrose and Blue Mesa Reservoir. Widening, straightening and rock scaling on U.S. 50 in that area has been going on for more than three years and has required multiple closures and delays with single lane traffic

When traffic is allowed on Middle Bridge again, it will flow in one direction for a certain period of time and then flow in the other direction, possibly guided by pilot cars or flaggers. However, travel will be limited because repair work cannot be done while vehicles are driving on the bridge.

Engineers have found a total of 183 defects in welds during an intense assessment that began after the 1,500-foot-long bridge was shut down April 18 when a 3-inch crack and other anomalies were discovered during a safety inspection of high-strength steel bridges required by the Federal Highway Administration. 

Not all of the defects detected using sophisticated ultrasound equipment are considered critical. Older technologies could not identify the problems, CDOT engineers said during a routine update held in Gunnison.

The plan is to have Middle Bridge open to traffic in both directions by Halloween. Keith Stefanik, CDOT’s chief engineer, said the agency will develop a long-term replacement plan for Middle Bridge, though it may not be needed for another 25 years.

CDOT also is preparing to begin inspecting the 900-foot-long West Bridge, about 2 miles to the west, which is made from the same steel. Traffic will be running in one direction on that bridge during the inspection.

Since the abrupt shutdown of the bridge, travel between Montrose and Gunnison has been detoured over County Road 26, a gravel road that crosses federal land. More traffic is being allowed on the primitive road and now there are seven “release” times when drivers cue up on either side of the detour, waiting to follow pilot cars that drive in one direction only. 

The detour is an alternative to long drives around Blue Mesa, which can add six to seven hours of travel to a journey that typically takes just over an hour.

Locals had hoped that Kebler Pass, a short cut between Crested Butte and Delta County, would be open for Memorial Day weekend. However two snowstorms stalled the plan to clear the 30 mile road that is only partly paved and tops out at 10,007 feet.

A rare bird found only in Colorado and Utah could be at risk as the rising rumble of cars disrupts the otherwise quiet sagebrush habitat along a dirt county road now serving as a detour route for the closed U.S. 50 bridge, wildlife biologists say.

A few hundred Gunnison sage grouse, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed as a threatened species a decade ago, depend on the sagebrush along County Road 26 to eat, stay hydrated and nest. The road passes through five leks, or breeding grounds, and increased traffic levels could make females feel less safe and choose not to breed, said Nate Seward, a wildlife conservation biologist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Some birds could abandon their nests. 

Researchers in 2019 estimated that the birds occupied only 10% of their historic range and fewer than 5,000 birds remain. Loss of habitat is the biggest driver of their population decline and if the bridge closure extends several years, the impact on the grouse could be significant, Seward said. 

“My biggest concern is that this may not just be a one-year closure or event. I’m concerned that the bridge may be closed for multiple years so I’m anxiously waiting for an engineering report,” he said. 

Since the county road opened last month as an option for travelers to get between Montrose and Gunnison without taking detours that added six to seven hours of driving, traffic along the road has increased 40 fold, transportation officials said. A pilot car guides cars across the road four times a day in each direction offering locals relief to get to work, medical treatment and other critical travel.

But if the road becomes a long-term detour, and noise and traffic increases for an extended period, Gunnison sage grouse could abandon their leks and surrounding areas, Seward said.

Past monitoring by CPW and the National Parks Service showed that the females nest very close to County Road 26 under normal traffic patterns and they frequently walk across the native gravel road.

“With increased traffic and noise though, it is more likely that the grouse will be displaced and this could cause a loss of reproduction, recruitment and generational learning,” Seward said. 

The ground-dwelling birds don’t adapt well to change and need large undisturbed areas of sagebrush with background noise levels “not much higher than ambient conditions,” he said. 

Since 2006, well before the Gunnison sage grouse were federally listed as threatened, Gunnison County officials voluntarily closed County Road 26 during breeding season, county commissioner Jonathan Houck said. Opening the road as a detour was a difficult but  “balanced decision” the county made while talking to wildlife officials and the Bureau of Land Management, he said.

“When opening the road, sage grouse was right in the forefront of our decision-making on that,” Houck said. 

Gunnison County officials delayed the first time slot for the morning commuters by 30 minutes, giving sage grouse extra time for displaying and breeding before the first line of traffic passes.

The delay ensured that the cars traveling east to west passed through the leks after the sun had already reached them, Houck said, explaining that the birds tend to be in the leks as the sun rises. 

There has been mounting public pressure to add morning times, but the county held off considering any additions until at least May 15, when the breeding period typically comes to an end, he said. 

“This community is almost 20 years deep into sage grouse conservation. It’s heavily behind it and it’s really important and I think that people understand that balancing act,” Houck said.

“For us to open one of the 30-some roads that we keep closed was a hard decision but one that had to balance that economic need, the emergency need, the wildlife needs. No easy answers here.”

The pilot car helps reduce the impact on the sage grouse by guiding cars at slower speeds and ensuring cars stay on the county road without driving on adjacent public land. 

Crews have dumped thousands of pounds of gravel along the 15.5 miles of the gravel road to make durable under the increased traffic. 

But improvements to the road could also lead to more cars, higher speeds and greater noise, which would create “a more formidable barrier” for wildlife, like the Gunnison sage grouse, mule deer, elk and bighorn sheep that also use the Spainero Mesa, Seward said.

To reduce the impact to Gunnison sage grouse, Seward suggests using the detour only for emergency or medical treatment.

“Please respect the speed limit, be patient and enjoy the scenery as many of us would not have much reason otherwise to use CR 26.”

Story first appeared in:

Getting bucked off a wild-eyed bronc and tossed into the dirt at the Gunnison County Fairgrounds is one thing. A broken highway bridge is a whole other test of tenacity and toughness.

Gunnison Cattlemen’s Days president Brad Tutor knows the white-knuckle truth of that.

“I am nervous. Yes, I am,” Tutor said. “But I can tell you that we will have a rodeo. That’s a guarantee.”

Gunnison County is digging deep for this kind of grit as it faces a summer with half its main highway access cut off by a cracked bridge over Blue Mesa Reservoir.

Its 124-year-old Cattlemen’s Days and rodeo serves as a high-profile example of how to hang on through tough times. The annual July event has already made it through one seemingly insurmountable crisis with the COVID-19 pandemic. Chutes were wiped down with sanitizer. Bull riders sported masks below their Stetsons. The audience had to be held to a third its normal size. But bucking and barrel racing went on, and the rodeo was televised nationally for excitement-craving fans.

Gunnison County residents, event organizers and businesses vow the same tenacity as they face unprecedented challenges this summer. The county is used to feeling a bit isolated because it sits along a mostly two-lane highway and must rely on larger towns for amenities like Home Depot and Target. 

This story first appeared in
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But when the largest bridge over Blue Mesa Reservoir was deemed too dangerous to drive on and U.S. 50 to the west of Gunnison was choked off on April 18, Gunnison found out just how important that lifeline of a highway is — and how too many aspects of daily life can thud to a stop without it.

The closure necessitated highway detours to the north and south that added six to seven hours for trips to and from Montrose. Normally, the drive is about 75 minutes. 

“This puts us on an island here,” said Andrew Sandstrom, marketing director for the Gunnison and Crested Butte Tourism and Prosperity Partnership. “It’s pretty sobering to think about how isolated we really are.”

That isolation has an upside. The community has bonded in a scramble to solve problems as residents wait for state and federal workers to locate and repair cracks in the bridge, and to wrestle with mountain snow and muck to improve dirt-road detours around the closed highway.

“We’ll all come together to get through like we always do,” said Hannah Cranor Kersting, Gunnison County’s Colorado State University Extension director.

A welcome detour

Cranor Kersting said when news of the bridge defects suddenly and unexpectedly stunned Gunnison County, action quickly followed panic. County and state officials from multiple agencies began sorting out and dealing with priorities. Friends and neighbors used boats to get kids to and from school. Patients were shuttled and rerouted to continue specialty medical care. Crucial supply deliveries were combined for efficiency on the long detours.

With tourist season now bearing down and news that the bridge likely won’t be passable for months at the least, and possibly more than a year, the daily tests of toughness and ingenuity continue. It has helped that a detour on a county road has been improved and expanded, but that detour takes drivers on 15.5 miles of graveled dirt and 22 miles of one-lane paved highway. Neither was designed to handle the 3,100 cars that normally use the Blue Mesa section of U.S. 50 on an average day.

The detour is a relief for locals trying to get to jobs, appointments, family gatherings and all the other events of daily life. But it doesn’t solve many issues swirling around Gunnison County’s all-important commerce connections and visitors.

Will visitors from the west — or heading west — still come if they have to make the long highway detour; line up for a single-lane, intermittently-open drive over County Road 26; or brave winding, high-altitude Kebler Pass with its blind curves and wildlife obstacles when it opens?

How will event organizers get the normal crowds in for the rodeo, the annual wildflower fest, for music and food-focused celebrations, for two-wheeled contests, river events and fishing tournaments?

It’s pretty sobering to think about how isolated we really are.

— Andrew Sandstrom, marketing director for the Gunnison and Crested Butte Tourism and Prosperity Partnership

Will major school expansions and a new Crested Butte fire station project be able to move forward on schedule with supplies and construction specialists facing obstacles, and costs sure to climb?

Will businesses selling gas, fast food, and rooms-to-rent along U.S. 50 in Gunnison be able to survive the loss of pass-through traffic? Will tourist businesses west of the bridge make it in the face of a cascade of cancellations?

“We’ll get through it”

Cattlemen’s Days is one example — the biggest one — of a Gunnison institution counting on visitors’ willingness to face some travel inconveniences to get to the Gunnison Valley and its surrounding mountains.

“Cattlemen’s Days has a huge economic impact,” Tutor said.

The weeklong rural extravaganza includes livestock shows, a carnival, a parade, 4-H shows and sales, a horse show and a rodeo. Hundreds of cowboys and cowgirls from around the West roll into town with their loaded horse trailers in tow. They are drawn by the Western Slope’s only Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association event.

It fills every hotel room and campground. It brings in dozens of Gunnison class reunions. It creates lines outside restaurants and watering holes and causes actual traffic jams downtown in the community of less than 7,000 residents.

The annual celebration is also a way for the local agricultural community to kick up its collective heels and take a breather from the normal worries of cattle prices, irrigation woes and feed costs.

This year, the bridge closure has added to their headaches with concerns about getting livestock to summer grazing areas and getting feed trucked in. Many summer grazing permits spread out on land on the western side of the bridge. Long detours are tough on calves. Lengthy travel adds cost to grain shipments.

One local rancher, Lonny Boyd of LB Ranch, told the Gunnison Country Times last week that he has already had to sell off most of his cattle herd. The cattle were on one side of the bridge and their feed was on the other. With the detour, it was too expensive to bring them together.

Until the detour was expanded  to allow more open times and larger vehicles, the bridge impacts even sifted down to the 4-H level. Kids couldn’t get their feed from the Montrose area as usual, and fattened animals are important for winning ribbons. The 4-Hers are still worried about getting their animals to Montrose and Delta for processing.

Cranor Kersting said farmers and ranchers have been sharing advice about workarounds. The extension office has set up a ride-share program on Facebook and is planning some local fundraisers for the ag community.

“Ag is a really good example of how people are coming together,” she said. “People are hopeful. We’ll get through it. “

The best of a bad situation

Katie Lewinger, the president of the Rotary Club of Gunnison, echoes that sentiment even though her organization had to cancel a recent fishing tournament that raises money for local scholarships. The bridge outage made it impossible for some of the 60 registered teams to get to Blue Mesa and spread out along the lake.

Lewinger said the Rotarians will make up the shortfall by finding other ways to raise money and to be of service to the community. Last weekend, they took part in cleanups along the Gunnison River and the Hartman Rocks Recreation Area.

Lewinger tempers her dismay at the sudden closure of the bridge. She is not attributing the closure to a government conspiracy, as a few Gunnison County residents have on social media.

“We are trying not to bitch and moan too much. This is better than that bridge collapsing with 20 guys on it,” Lewinger said.

The new allowance last week of trailers and semis on the dirt-road detour has tamped down some of the griping and opened a welcome gap in the feeling of isolation. Around 500 to 600 vehicles are now using that detour daily. Officials have emphasized that the detour is prioritized for locals, but that doesn’t mean visitors to the Gunnison area can’t use it, said CDOT communication director Matt Inzeo.

Workers on the scaffolding beneath the U.S. 50 bridge continue the inspections May 4 over the Blue Mesa Reservoir. The 1,500-foot-long bridge could take anywhere from four weeks to several months after crews finish inspecting for additional cracks, Colorado Department of Transportation officials said on Tuesday. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)(Dean Krakel, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Inzeo said officials from multiple state agencies will be partnering with Gunnison County locals to get the message out that potential visitors to Gunnison County can get there. He said the state will be highlighting “all the cool stuff” to do in the area affected by the bridge closures.

That is heartening to Celeste Helminski, director of the Gunnison County Chamber of Commerce. She has spent the past three weeks trying mightily to ease fears among chamber members — while not having answers for them.

“I am glad to hear that others are thinking about it,” she said. “That has been one of my questions, how to share about how cool we are?”

It is also uplifting news to businesses that are seeing a drop in their normal pass-through customers.

Gene Taylor’s Sporting Goods has been selling recreation-related merchandise for over 60 years. Its shelves are fully stocked with scads of rods, reels, tackle boxes and flies because the store orders its seasonal merchandise a year ahead. There was no clue then that a bridge disaster would cut the number of anglers traveling through Gunnison to reach a lake famous for kokanee salmon and trout.

We are trying not to bitch and moan too much. This is better than that bridge collapsing with 20 guys on it.

— Katie Lewinger, President of the Rotary Club of Gunnison

Assistant store manager Cody Rowe is looking for the silver lining.

“We get lots of folks from Oklahoma and Texas. They can still make it in,” he said. “And a lot of locals shop here.”

Tim Kugler, director of Gunnison Trails, has the same eastern-focused promise on his radar. Kugler is preparing for the annual Gunnison Growler mountain bike race at the end of the month and said it is sold out in spite of the bridge.

He said his online map of entries shows, “the Front Range is lit up like a Christmas tree. That is a blessing in disguise.”

Many business owners are waiting to feel the full weight of the bridge impact when “mud season” is over. This current late spring period is perennially a time when the Gunnison Valley, particularly Crested Butte, feels a little empty. Many up-valley businesses close during the slow spell.

On social media, Gunnison County residents are encouraging each other to shop and eat to support local businesses during mud season while pass-through traffic slows to a trickle.

Sandstrom pointed out that the bridge-effect burden is not being felt equally in Gunnison County.

He said Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte are a little less concerned because so many destination visitors come from the Front Range. There is more angst in Gunnison because motels are often booked for a single night, indicating that most visitors are passing through.

Far-reaching impacts

The lives and businesses worst hit by the bridge closure are those based on the west side of the closed bridge — Sapinero, Arrowhead Village and the Blue Mesa subdivision.

The residents and business owners in those communities were some of the first to run into serious problems — and to jump in with aid. They used their fishing boats to ferry kids to and from school, and to help with various other trips that couldn’t wait.

Kendal Rota, who owns Sapinero Village Campground with her husband, Joe, said she was sucked into the bridge maelstrom immediately and is still looking for a way out. She had driven the mini school bus that delivers kids from the west end of the lake to Gunnison schools that day. The bus was one of the last vehicles to pass over the bridge before barriers went up.

She rode a boat home across the choppy, cold lake that afternoon thinking the bridge closure would be a couple-hour inconvenience and she could pick up her daughter the next day after she had stayed in town for a sleepover. Her husband and a son had driven to the Front Range earlier that day. Suddenly Kendal was sitting in their cabin, separated from her family, with no idea how and when any of them would get home.

She still tears up thinking about it.

Now, she has something else that adds to her tears. Their business is tanking with daily cancellations for the cabins, trailers, and camping sites they rent out. She hasn’t yet figured out a way to stop the bleeding.

Her neighbor Jeremiah Proffitt has been making many repeat trips in his fishing boat as he gets his wife to prenatal medical visits and to her job in Gunnison. He has ferried graduates to their ceremony, cross-country cyclists to the east end of the lake and people who needed to catch flights to the west end.

Proffitt predicted as the summer moves into high gear the problems will compound even with County Road 26 improvements and with Kebler Pass eventually opening. County and state road crews hit Kebler early to try to clear its more than 6-foot-deep blanket of snow and its mud bogs to create another way in and out of Gunnison County.

“We are just a handful of citizens and business owners up here in unique circumstances, Proffitt said. “I certainly empathize with everyone trying to work out all the logistics of this.”

The tentacles of impacts stretch into other parts of Gunnison country.

Dan Zadra, a wildlife technician for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, has had his hands full trying to work through many ramifications of the bridge closure.

He said mussel testers who would usually be out on Blue Mesa at this time looking for the invasive crustaceans can’t get around the lake to do all their crucial work.

Zadra also couldn’t get fertilizer from Olathe for the hay CPW grows near Gunnison to settle game damage claims. He said the delay will affect the yield.

Antler collections were also a bit stymied by the bridge closure. Collectors of “shed” elk and deer antlers typically line up on county roads before first light on the opening day for antler harvesting. This year, Zadra said he heard there were only three cars waiting instead of dozens.

It’s an inconvenience you always have for living where we do, at the end of the road.

— David Eggebraten, Crested Butte Visitor Center manager

The 3,400-student Western Colorado University has also felt multiple impacts from the bridge closure. It has struggled to arrange visits for potential students. The university’s food and facilities vendors have had a hard time getting supplies from the west.

The school is anticipating declines in attendance at its summer athletic and academic camps. Western’s track team had to spend twice its travel budget to get to the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Outdoor Track & Field Championships in Grand Junction last month.

“But the traffic on the river and trails has been nonstop since COVID, so it might be a nice respite,” said Seth Mensing, a spokesman for the university who works summer weekends as a fly-fishing guide.

Taking it in stride

When Mensing and other Gunnison County residents talk about the bridge closure, few use the term “taking it one day at a time.” They now talk of viewing survival weeks or months at a time.

Highway officials are lately saying the best-case scenario is that one bridge lane could be opened in about six weeks if they can fortify a portion of the bridge with heavy steel plates.

But they aren’t even finished with the testing yet. Less than half of potential problem areas have been examined with ultrasound equipment. Any repairs on the 1,500-foot-long bridge are complicated by the fact that the water beneath the bridge is about 300 feet deep.

Residents have been putting a lot of stock in getting Kebler Pass open early so that the normal link to Colorado 133 in the North Fork Valley will provide another way in and out. Spring snowstorms have been quashing that prospect. Another foot or two is forecast for that pass this weekend.

Martin Schmidt, assistant Gunnison County manager for public works, said they have the equipment, the manpower and the supplies to get Kebler open, but it really has turned into “a constant conversation with Mother Nature.”

Weekend snow could also blanket the County Road 26 detour again. The storm could also stop or hinder testing on the bridge.

“Yeah, it’s all a big inconvenience,” Crested Butte Visitor Center manager David Eggebraten said with a big sigh. “But it’s an inconvenience you always have for living where we do, at the end of the road.”

Tutor, the Cattlemen’s Days president, said the setbacks, the inconveniences, and the unknowns are all being taken in stride by people steeped in the tough historic cultures of mining and cowboying. He said one word rises to the top when he thinks of Gunnison County: tenacious.

Staff writer Jason Blevins contributed to this report.

Repairs to the U.S. 50 bridge over the Blue Mesa reservoir could take anywhere from four weeks to several months after crews finish inspecting for additional cracks, state transportation leaders said Tuesday.

The Colorado Department of Transportation is considering four repair options, all of which depend on the extent of damage to Middle Bridge, a 1,500-foot-long bridge carrying U.S. 50 traffic over the lake, officials said during a community meeting in Gunnison. 

Since the sudden April 18 shutdown of the bridge, which has complicated critical travel between Montrose and Gunnison, crews have identified 118 areas where ultrasonic testing needs to be conducted to determine the integrity of the steel bridge, said Jason Smith, a regional transportation director for CDOT.

Crews are about 40% complete with its inspection, officials said, calling it a “slow process” that involves scraping off the paint, grinding down or sandblasting the area and conducting ultrasonic testing on each location. Inspectors did not find any “visual issues” with the shorter bridge 2 miles to the west, made of the same type of steel, but will conduct further inspection in the future. 

The ultrasonic testing results are then sent to experts to review and look for “anomalies,” Smith said. So far, 40 locations have been scanned and 25 anomalies have been found, he said. 

Officials said they hope to get enough repairs completed before Halloween, when inclement weather would likely complicate or stop the work. The bridge is made of type T-1 steel, which is three times the strength of normal steel and makes repairs more challenging, Smith said.  

The best repair option for the bridge will depend where and on how severe the anomalies are, Smith said.

The best-case scenario — and quickest option — for repairs involves attaching 12-foot plates in areas along the bridge where anomalies are found, said Jason Proskovec, a project manager with Kiewit Engineering Co., a company that has completed major infrastructure projects in Colorado, including the rebuilding of U.S. 34 in Big Thompson Canyon after the 2013 floods.

The worst-case scenario would be a complete replacement of the bridge’s three spans, which could require construction crews and engineers to work from man lifts and cranes in the water to make the repairs.

“I think right now it’s low probability, but it is still a possibility,” Proskovec said. Kiewit has already obtained the first 88 tons of steel needed for repairs, he said.

Keith Stefanik, a CDOT engineer, said he did not have an exact date as to when a single lane of traffic may be allowed over the bridge.

“Our short-term goal is to make enough repairs to get this open to some type of interval traffic. We’re not sure on that perspective yet, but we will weigh all the options on how we can repair it with traffic intermittently closed or how we can repair it with traffic closed at all times of the night,” Stefanik said. 

“We need to know exactly what’s failing, what’s good, where the defects are, so that we can shore up this bridge and make the proper design decisions,” he said. “We will hit the ground running and make sure that we try to reduce the closure period of this bridge to the shortest range possible.”

State officials have discussed temporary options to get travelers from one side of the reservoir to another in the meantime — from ferries to floating bridges — but said their attention is focused on repairing the bridge. 

The bridge closure has complicated critical commutes along the vital route that connects Gunnison to Montrose. Some students took a 30-minute ferry ride across the choppy waters to get to school. Gunnison Valley Hospital shifted to disaster management mode to figure out how to deliver critical care to kidney and cancer patients.

“The group’s consensus has been that focusing our immediate efforts on doing everything we can to fortify local groups is the best bang for our buck in getting more people to and from,” CDOT Director Shoshanna Lew said. 

Starting Thursday, trailers and commercial vehicles under the Colorado legal maximum weight (85,000 GWR) will be allowed to join other travelers along the County Road 26 detour route. A pilot car will continue to guide traffic along the rugged, dirt road four times a day to local travel. 

CDOT crews have spread thousands of pounds of gravel along the high mountain road that typically has between 100 to 125 cars during its peak traffic periods. Since opening the 87-mile detour route, traffic along the road has increased 40 fold, officials said. 

Crews continue to work 10- to 12-hour days to clear Kebler Pass when weather permits, officials said. On Tuesday, the pass got 6 inches of snow and strong wind downed 16 trees across the road. 

A date for reopening the pass is still unknown. 

No oversize loads or hazardous materials will be allowed on County Road 26, also known as the Lake City cutoff. Transportation officials are advising prohibited vehicles to use two alternative routes — Interstate 70 to the north or U.S. 160 to the south. 

Additional times will be added to a local detour around the bridge closure on U.S. 50 over Blue Mesa Reservoir to allow local traffic to reach work, school and medical care four times a day, transportation officials announced Wednesday.

Starting Friday, County Road 26 will be open four times a day between Montrose and Gunnison. 

A  pilot car will guide traffic at the following times:

• 6:30 to 7 a.m. for westbound travel beginning at CO 149 and CR 26
• 7:30 to 8 a.m. for eastbound travel beginning at US 50 and CR 26
• Noon to 12:30 p.m. for westbound travel beginning at CO 149 and CR 26
• 1 to 1:30 p.m. for eastbound travel beginning at US 50 and CR 26
• 6:30 to 7 p.m. for westbound travel beginning at CO 149 and CR 26
• 7:30 to 8 p.m. for eastbound travel beginning at US 50 and CR 26
• 8:30 to 9 p.m. for westbound travel beginning at CO 149 and CR 26
• 9:30 to 10 p.m. for eastbound travel beginning at US 50 and CR 26

The added times will allow residents in Montrose, Gunnison and Hinsdale counties to travel between Montrose and Gunnison after the sudden and indefinite shutdown of U.S. 50 bridge on April 18. The closure came at the urging of federal highway officials after crews found a 3-inch crack in structural steel on the bridge at Dillon Pinnacles.

The journey from Montrose to Gunnison over the bridge typically takes about an hour. The unexpected shutdown has left people stranded on either side of the closure, forcing them to take detours between six to seven hours to reach home, work or school, and likely will significantly impact the upcoming summer tourism season and the area’s agricultural industry.

The County Road 26 detour adds about an hour of driving time between Gunnison and Montrose. The detour is 87 miles. 

CDOT opened County Road 26, also known as the Lake City cutoff route, days after the bridge was closed, but the rugged dirt road was not designed to handle heavy traffic. To accommodate the increased use due to the bridge closure, crews with Kiewit Infrastructure Co. will continue to improve the road when pilot cars are not guiding traffic across it, including patching up “hotspots” or softer areas of the road that need addressing, Inzeo said Wednesday. 

In the past week and a half since the detour opened, crews have dumped more than 13,300 cubic yards of gravel along 10 miles of road, Inzeo said. (A cubic yard is roughly the size of a washing machine.)

“What it’s designed to do is make sure that what is normally, basically a seasonal Jeep road, can handle much greater traffic loads than it normally needs to,” Inzeo said. “This obviously isn’t going to get it to U.S. 50 standards, nor should we, but we do need to have much more regular travel across the road at a time of year when it’s normally still snow covered.”

No other public travel will be allowed on the county road outside of the designated times, and trailers and large trucks are not allowed to use the detour. 

CDOT engineers are still assessing damage to the bridge and considering a variety of options to repair it. A timeline for reopening is still unclear.

Crews have cleared a path through Kebler Pass, a mostly dirt road that connects Crested Butte with Delta County, but “significant melting” still needs to happen before it’s safe for traffic to safely pass, Inzeo said. The road is about 30 miles and tops out at 10,007 feet.

“We should be able to have time frames coming relatively soon,” he said.

In the meantime, CDOT is still recommending that all other drivers take alternative routes — Interstate 70 and U.S. 160. Both routes add hours in travel time. The northern route is 354 miles and requires about six hours. The southern route is 331 miles and requires nearly seven hours.

As chief of the Gunnison Valley Hospital paramedics, C. J. Malcolm deals with emergencies daily. But when his phone pinged with an alert that U.S. 50 west of Gunnison was being shut down immediately due to a cracking bridge, Malcolm had an instant of heart-stopping alarm.

“I knew it was a huge, immediate 911 deal,” said Malcolm. “My first thought was, ‘this is a disaster.’”

He wasn’t overreacting.

Closing down one of two highway accesses to an isolated town of 7,000 in a county of about 3,200 rugged square miles posed all kinds of potential life-threatening problems.

The closure on April 18 cut off regular ambulance transports to larger towns to the west as well as threatening the overall operation of a small, county-owned hospital that provides everything from deliveries to orthopedic surgeries and handles an average of 20 emergency room visits in a day.

Gunnison Valley Health Hospital functions independently. Its mission as a Level IV critical care hospital is to stabilize patients in one of Colorado’s largest counties — a county that is accident-prone due to a surfeit of remote and mountainous public lands, and residents and visitors who like to challenge themselves in that terrain.

But the hospital doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It has many tentacles of reliance on other hospitals and health care providers and suppliers outside the Gunnison Valley. Many of those tentacles reach to the west, beyond the impassible bridge.

Just how many was quickly evident to a critical incident command team led by Malcolm and assembled with the help of the hospital’s CEO Jason Amrich. They essentially set up a dual operating structure within the hospital. One system would deal with the bridge-related problems while the hospital’s usual chain-of-command organization would keep the everyday operations running smoothly.

“You can’t address an emergency situation from a normal business approach,” Malcolm explained.

Basement room converted to a command center

 By the morning after the largest bridge over Blue Mesa Reservoir was shut down with no opening in sight, the hospital’s new critical incident system was up and running. A room in the basement of the 24-bed hospital became an official command center. Teams had formed for operations, logistics, finances and planning.

Whiteboards listing priorities and objectives bristled with colorful sticky notes. A large screen on one wall beamed in those who had to attend the twice-a-day — or more — emergency meetings virtually.

Gunnison Valley Chief Nursing Officer Nicole Huff is one of those who has been trekking to the basement several times a day for command-center meetings that she calls “brain dumps.”

“Lots of out-of-the-box thinking goes on there,” she said.

Problems quickly crowded the whiteboards: Ambulances wouldn’t be able to transport patients to hospitals in Montrose or Grand Junction for higher-level care. Such transports to outside hospitals, including some in Denver and Colorado Springs, happen around 300 times per year. Gunnison has just three ambulances, and the longer transports to the east could stretch their availability. Physicians and nurses who travel to Gunnison from the west wouldn’t be able to get to the hospital for their shifts.

Supplies of everything from linens and sample vials and filtered water to blood and oxygen and chemotherapy drugs could no longer be delivered from the normal western suppliers. Dialysis and radiation patients wouldn’t be able to get to Montrose for their daily life-sustaining treatments. Methadone patients couldn’t travel west for their normal care. The drugs for the hospital system’s senior care center would need to be rerouted from another supplier.

Solutions went up on a board next to problems: Dialysis patients could be sent east to Salida. Radiation patients could be given priority to get over a county road detour to Montrose. Chemotherapy drugs from an out-of-state supplier could be brought in by FedEx from the east rather than the west.

Blood products and oxygen could come from the east during the shutdown. Lab specimens, including biopsies, could be prioritized to get over the dirt-road detour to labs in Montrose. The county could possibly allow medical personnel to get through the rugged detour outside the allowed early morning and late evening pilot car-led openings for local citizens.

Montrose emergency services could handle ambulance cases on the east end of Gunnison County. That happened on the first day of the shutdown when a critically ill person was picked up by a care flight at the west end of Blue Mesa.

One whiteboard shows all the hospital’s important links to services to the west. Another diagrams tentacles to the east that would be able to continue with trips on U.S. 50 over Monarch Pass. Arrows showed what could be shifted directionally.

“We are super connected. This shows impacts all over the Western Slope,” Malcolm said.

June 1 of summer tourism season looms large

Within a week of the Colorado Department of Transportation indefinitely closing the Middle Bridge over Blue Mesa for serious safety reasons, hospital officials say they feel like they have stabilized their 88-year-old hospital just as they might a patient rushed into the ER. Their triage efforts are working.

“We are stable, and we are looking at how we are going to be resilient for the long term,” said Gunnison Valley Health public information officer Joelle Ashley.

Ashley is one of those meeting daily in the incident command center that was last put into use regularly during the COVID pandemic.

Ashley said talk in the command center has focused at times on how lucky the hospital is that the bridge outage occurred when it did. It is off-season in the Gunnison Valley. Ski season at Crested Butte Mountain Resort 30 miles to the north just ended. The summer tourist season won’t gear up until the beginning of June.

Ashley said that means the hospital has time to work out all the contingencies while there are only about eight patients a day in the hospital. 

“June 1” is written on one of the whiteboards as a reminder of what’s to come. That’s when the influx of tourism normally hits.

“It’s scary,” Malcolm said about that date.

The hospital isn’t going it alone

The hospital is not carrying the whole burden of being cut off from half of its normal world alone.

Gunnison County is on board with insuring its hospital is fully functional. The Gunnison County Commissioners last week declared a local disaster emergency  that includes health care as a service under threat. The county has also been doing all it can to open a backcountry road that cuts the detour time from six or seven hours to just under an extra hour.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the Gunnison County Public Health Department are stepping in to help solve problems. The West Region Health Care Coalition, a collaboration of health and medical partners on the Western Slope, has been a resource with its network of hospitals, clinics, emergency flight providers, the American Red Cross and the Colorado Hospital Association.

Katherine Smith, the readiness and response coordinator for the coalition, released an emailed statement that her organization is helping to mitigate impacts to patient care due to the bridge closure. One of those is helping to coordinate dialysis clinics for Gunnison patients and “maintaining awareness of other regional health care facilities existing or foreseeable needs to avoid what may become medical emergencies.”

Smith pointed out that Hinsdale and Montrose counties are also being impacted by the bridge closure.

“During any type of emergency event, it is vital to maintain situational awareness and support to and between health care facilities, EMS, and hospitals to ensure the continuity of patient care, even if potential impacts may not be obvious at first,” she wrote.

Gunnison is also aided by its normal independent attitude, Malcolm noted. The remoteness of the area has prepared it for a disaster like this. A years-long major highway project that has required periodic shutdowns and delays on a section of U.S. 50 in a canyon west of Blue Mesa has served as a sort of practice for a complete highway shutdown — one that health care officials have been told could last for months — at the least.

“We have a thick skin about being cut off from the world here,” Malcolm said. “Normally we’re like an island up here anyway. Now, we’re even more so. We can deal with that.”