Galena House Publishing.Boreas Pass, Where the Railroad Became a Road
The grade is gentle because trains could not climb steeply. Walk it, or drive it slowly, and you are moving at the pace of another century.
The road to Boreas Pass climbs out of Breckenridge so gently that you hardly notice you are climbing. That gentleness is the first thing it tells you about itself. Roads built for cars go straight up a mountain and argue with it the whole way. This one curves along the hillsides at an easy, patient grade, because it was not built for cars. It was built for a railroad.
In the late nineteenth century a narrow gauge line ran over this pass, carrying people and freight between the mining camps of the Blue River and the high basin of South Park on the far side of the Continental Divide. The rails were taken up long ago. The grade is still there, and it is the road.
The pace of another century
Drive it slowly, or better, walk a stretch of it, and you are moving at the pace the land was once crossed: a steady, reasonable climb, the valley falling away below you a little more with every curve. Along the way you pass an old wooden water tank standing beside the road, where the engines once stopped to drink. It is the kind of object that seems forgotten by everyone but the people who restored it, and it is all the more moving for that.
Higher up, the trees thin. The lodgepole gives way to spruce and fir, then to wind-bent stragglers, then to the open tundra of the pass itself. At the top, more than eleven thousand feet up, the Continental Divide runs underfoot. Rain that falls on one side of you will end in the Pacific. Rain that falls on the other will end in the Gulf of Mexico. Stand there long enough and you feel the strangeness of it: a line on the earth you cannot see, deciding everything.
Autumn on the grade
Late September is when people come for the aspens, and they are right to. The groves along the lower road turn all at once, a gold so bright it seems to give off its own light, and on a still afternoon the leaves come down one at a time and land on the road with a small dry tick. By early October much of the gold is on the ground, and the white trunks stand out against the dark conifers like strokes of chalk.
The road closes to cars when the snow comes in earnest, and then it belongs to skiers and snowshoers, to the wind, and to whatever crosses it at night. Check before you go. Mountains keep their own calendar.
A road built for trains does not argue with the mountain. It asks.
What it leaves you with
I go up Boreas for the same reason I go down to the lake at dawn: to stand somewhere that was here long before me and will be here long after, and to be reminded that the best made things are made patiently. The railroad builders could not force the mountain, so they negotiated with it, curve by curve. The result is a road that still feels like courtesy.
That is what I want from a book, too. Not a straight line up the face of a thing, but a grade a reader can climb without noticing, until they look up and find themselves somewhere high and quiet, with the whole valley below.
My novel Still, by Design. is at averylanemaxwell.com. More essays on these mountains are in the Journal, and the press that publishes them, Galena House Publishing, takes its letters by post.