Landslide closes highway over Colorado mountain pass
Mud and rock an estimated 15 to 20 feet deep buried both lanes of travel across U.S. 6 near Loveland Pass before sunrise Saturday. There is no indication when road crews will be able to clear the debris and re-open the road.
No vehicles or cyclists are known to have been caught in the slide, according to state and county authorities. No actual time that the slide occurred has been released, either, although the first notification of the highway's closure came from the Colorado Department of Transportation at 4:25 a.m.
"The area is still actively moving so we can't safely begin cleanup efforts yet," CDOT spokesperson Austyn Dineen told CBS Colorado.
The agency is tentatively planning to have the road closed for a lengthy though undetermined amount of time.
The Clear Creek County Sheriff's Office stated in a social media post that the landslide crossed the highway at mile marker 226. That location is three miles above U.S. 6's interchange with Interstate 70 near the Loveland Ski Area and one mile below the summit of Loveland Pass.
The Keystone and Arapahoe Basin ski areas are open but only accessible from the western side of Loveland Pass in Silverthorne. A-Basin extended its winter ski season earlier this month after planning to close on June 4; today is the ski area's last day. Keystone's ski season ended in early April. That resort planned to open its gates for summer recreation Thursday. There are no limitations to reaching Loveland Ski Area which ended its winter ski season May 4.
Th slide was caused by the material above the roadway becoming saturated by melting snow, CDOT's Dineed said. She added that CDOT records show this area partially slid in 2003 but "it stabilized on its own shortly afterward, with no history of movement over the past 22 years."
Loveland Pass crests the Continental Divide just shy of 12,000 feet in elevation. The road is used as an alternative to the Eisenhower-Johnson Tunnels on I-70, particularly for trucks carrying hazardous cargo. With that Loveland Pass route unavailable, highway officials will normally close the tunnels to regular traffic at regular intervals to allow such hazardous cargo to travel through them alone. CDOT has made no announcements about those periodic closures at this time.
